A WHOLE WEEK IN THE GALAPAGOS.
San Cristobal Island, The Galapagos, Ecuador, Wednesday, April 26, 2006
After a whole week here in this remote archipelago, we have already had time to rest from our 17-day, 1200-mile voyage, to start looking around the area and to begin to repair some of the damage that was incurred on the trip here.
Vilisar is anchored in this well-sheltered harbour. Soon after we arrived we were approached by Fernando who came out in a taxi-panga with his two henchmen. They offered to arrange a tour of the island for us, to replenish our now-depleted diesel-fuel and drinking-water supplies and to help us find our way around the island. At first we felt a little rushed. But eventually we decided to spend a day on a tour to several sites. More on that later.
Almost nobody launches their dinghy here. The sea lions are really fun to watch in the exceptionally clear water; they seem actually to be frolicking. They will come up to you while you are swimming and check you out. The water here, by the way, although very clear, is much cooler than anything in Mexico. But it is tolerable for a swim off the boat. For longer dives or snorkelling adventures one probably needs a wetsuit. Haven’t seen any jelly fish or “perlas”.
The other side of the coin is that the sea lions are acrobats. They will leap up onto or into unattended boats and dinghies. On our first afternoon in port, for example, I am lying on the starboard settee having a nap when I heard a commotion on deck. Suddenly I find myself staring up through the skylight at a female sea lion. I shoo her away, but wonder how we can keep the little cuties off (and out of the boat). Since there is very little by way of beach in this port, the locals moor their pangas off and lay barbed wire around the gunwhales to discourage the sea mammals. Our experimental solution is to hang plastic bags to blow from the lifelines; so far this has worked though we get some wry comments from other, more pukka boaters.
So, as mentioned, nobody uses their dinghy. because of the sea lions getting into them and damaging them, but also because there is really no place to land the dinghies. Instead, there is a good and relatively cheap system of pangas that act as “yellow cabs” (they really are yellow, and have a sunshade; most of them have little “taxi” lights on the sunshade like Manhattan cabs). You can call them on Channel 16 VHF or simply wave at them as they cruise around for custom. For 50¢ per person per ride you can get to the main wharf in town. Even if you want to use your own dinghy there is no place near the centre of town where you can leave it.
Our first call is to Bolivar Pesantes, the agent to whom we had emailed our documents and application for a cruising permit. That was two months ago. Somehow we are not surprised to learn that he has never heard of us. But, nothing daunted, he says in Spanish that we should not go immediately to the Port Captain or to Migración. He will send our application to Quito (Ministry of Defence, the department that administers these islands), and tell them we are arriving on 05 May. “Come back on 03 May and the permiso will be here.” He does not think it will complicate matters if we want to go to the mainland afterwards, or even to get a six-month visa to do the choir and conductor workshops.
Yeah, well, we shall see. Meanwhile, he tells us, just hang around San Cristobal and enjoy ourselves.
We book one of Fernando’s day-tours of the island. He picks us up along with two Norwegian couples (Rune and Idunn and their twin, straw-blond, six-year-old twin girls, Hedda and Marita, off S/V Blue Marlin, as well as Henrietta and Ben from S/V Uterus [sic]). Off we go, most of the group in the back of the pickup. The driver is a young fellow who speaks no English (or Norwegian), nor even much Spanish it seems. So this turns out to be a chauffeured but not a guided tour. He tends to drive rather fast, which makes me nervous in view of the people in the open back. But he delivers us safely first to the giant-tortoise breeding centre (“Galapaguero”; the word Galapagos means giant tortoise) at one end of the island. There they are: standing under thin scrub trees in the dry hills, munching on leaves and generally doing what giant tortoises do (pretty much standing around and munching leaves under scrub trees in the dry highlands). They are a threatened species so these guys have been brought here to propagate. They even have numbers stencilled on the aft end of their carapaces so they won’t forget who they are or who is sleeping these days with whom (tortoises live to be two hundred years old; they might just get absentminded about whom they owe child support these days. Maybe thy even get senior moments and forget themselves. With a decent mirror they can just check the licence number at the back of their shells).
After the tortoise farm we drive to El Junco. This is the crater of the largest volcano (now extinct) on San Cristobal Island. It is filled with rain water, and we take an hour-long walk around the edge of the crater. At that time of the morning we are essentially socked in by clouds moving in from the south. We can see across the crater but cannot see either down into the valley or out to the coast except, near the end, when the clouds began to dissipate under the tropical sun and the breeze.
After another stage in the pickup truck heading for the southeastern tip of the island, we arrive at a volcanic-rock beach to take a look at the marine iguanas. Darwin called them “imps of darkness”, and it is difficult not to be revolted somewhat by their appearance. But they are admirably adapted to their environment here in The Galapagos. They grow to about a foot or eighteen inches long with a tail in addition, and will stand stock still to blend into the black lava boulders. If you come too close they spit a gob of something at you, and then scurry off. We see about a dozen of them in a variety of sizes. They stay right at the water’s edge but live off underwater vegetation. After scavenging for food, they come back to the black rocks to get warmed up after their time in the chilly water. Being black and lying on black rocks this can go fairly quickly; but if it gets too much, they tend to brace themselves up on their forelegs to let the breezes get under their bellies to help cool them down a bit without having to go back into the water.
The final stage of the tour is lunch at Fernando’s house. His wife used to have a restaurant near the Malecon. Now she just does lunches for tour members. She has stacks of scrapbooks going back over years into which cruisers have been writing comments and leaving photos. We add our own bit as well.
Baquerizo Moreno (he was a previous president of Equator, I think) is a small and easily viewed little town. We get to know it in the classic cruiser way, i.e. by running errands, and looking for parts and materials. There are some cruising-boat services here. We arrange with Fernando, for example, to bring out 60 (Ecuadorian) gallons of diesel to the Vilisar at anchor. Other boaters simply take their deck jugs ashore, and then take a taxi to the gas station, fill up the jugs while they are in the boot of the taxi, and then head back down to the dock. They use a panga-taxi each way so that the total transport costs them a dollar for the water taxi and two dollars for the land taxi. On the other hand, they pay $1.02 at the pump (N.B. Ecuadorians use the US dollar as their currency. A “gallon” in Latin America represents, not a US gallon of four quarts, but four litres, i.e. a US gallon = 3.8 litres. So you get a bit more for your gallon. Fuel sales at the pump are in litres. The price of fuel is by law the same everywhere in Ecuador, we are told. Ecuador has lots of oil; it’s the second biggest oil exporter in Latin America after Venezuela.) If you have enough jugs it is worthwhile doing the diesel-jug cha-cha. You could stretch the operation over several days if you only have a few jugs, as in our case. But of course, you incur more taxi charges.
We decide to hire Fernando. Here it pays to negotiate with him: his asking price for diesel fuel delivered to the boat in 30-gallon plastic jugs and siphoned into your tanks is currently $1.50 per gallon. I get him down to $1.40 without much haggling. Drinking-water is very expensive on the island: it costs $2 for a 5-gallon jug for agua purifacada. Fernando bids $3 a jug (delivered) but we settle at $2.80. He also brings me ten quarts (i.e. 928 ml.) of Esso-brand, heavy-duty diesel-motor oil and asks $5 a quart (it has been imported from the U.S.A.!). The price at the pump is about $3.50. I didn’t negotiate with him on this.
Everything is quite cheap here by US, Canadian and even by Mexican standards. And this is even allowing for the fact that locals say everything costs 2 to 3 times as much here in the islands as it does on the mainland. During out ten days in Baquerizo Moreno, we see one small oil tanker and about three or four different small freighters come in and unload. Everything is unloaded by the ships deck cranes and taken ashore in lighters. One ship seemed to deal only in bottled drinks (beer and soft drinks); the lighters took empties back out to the ship. Just like a beer or Coke truck back home. Another ship seem to bear only building materials and furniture, the bags of cement and piles of lumber on the dock attest to the prosperity of this place thanks to the tourism.
The economic development of these islands is directly related to tourism and it has bred a controversy. The locals want jobs and prosperity. Many outsiders want the archipelago to remain a wilderness. Of course, many from the outside would like to visit the islands. The Master Plan for The Galapagos ten years ago foresaw fewer than 10,000 inhabitants and a maximum of 25,000 visitors annually. Already in the late 1990’s the locals, all immigrants from the mainland, had reached over 20,000 in number and the tourists were in excess of 85,000.
A panga shows up one morning with an English-speaking man named Tony. He is dressed in white shorts and a clean shirt. He lived and worked in the U.S.A. at some point, but was from these islands. His compadre is Miguel, an electrician. Miguel is not wearing whites so I assume he is the one doing the work and that Tony is just the interlocutor. We have been having trouble with our engine-driven Bolmar alternator, which does not seem to be delivering power at all to the batteries. Small and as sprite as a monkey, Miguel dives into the engine room, and tests everything with his voltmeter: the voltage regulator is defective. He goes ashore, finds a new one for $22, returns and installs it. He also cleans up all the electrical contacts, and we can see an immediate improvement in the amps going into the engine. We agree on a price of $100 (about $20 an hour, which is probably about five times what he would get in Bahia de Caráquez, where he comes from. But we are happy that we are able to generate power with the engine.) Unfortunately, when we run the engine after we finally get enough oil and fuel to start it, we do not seem any more to be getting power at all. Will have to get him back.
I mentioned earlier that our mainsail was severely ripped on the voyage here from Acapulco. We also found a tear along the luff of the red drifter. Andrew and I took the sails ashore with all our kit, went up to the band shell in the park near the elementary school and city park, spread everything out on the stage in the shade and patched everything with sailcloth and 3M 5200. This took nearly till dark. While things were curing, I sewed on new bronze slides wherever the ties holding the slides to the sail had rotted through. In the end I replaced eighteen of the some thirty slides. I might have replaced them all but I think this mainsail will only have to get us to mainland Ecuador and then we shall have to buy a new one.
A few days later I am visiting Rune on S/V Blue Marlin out of Norway. Bret, a dentist and very experienced and skilled voyager, was also there helping Rune with his torn spinnaker. Bret recommends using contact cement: spread it on the two surfaces with a brush, wait 15 minutes for it to get tacky, and then press it together. It seems to be just as good as 3M 5200 but it costs only 95 cents a small can instead of much more for 5200. Contact cement is available in every hardware store in Latin America and is much easier to avoid making a big mess to be cleaned up. 5200 will start to cure once you open the tube: not so cemento contacto (really, that’s what it’s called!)
Andrew and I did other jobs on the boat between near-daily trips to town to visit the internet, eat set lunches for $1.50 or $2.00 per person, do a little shopping, etc. For example, I pulled Andrew up the mast using our double-purchase. He painted the spreaders with white enamel paint, and checked everything for soundness. He also put in a new fairlead for a flag halyard on the starboard side; the old one had broken. Your courtesy flag in each country is flown from the starboard side; so far we have been flying it from the port spreader and no one has complained. But if you are up there anyway… Unfortunately, he could not reach the masthead tri-light, which seems to have burned out.
SAILING TO ISLA ISABELA; SWIMMING WITH THE SEA LIONS
Puerto Villamil, Isla Isabela, Galapagos, Ecuador. Monday, 01 May 2006
We begin to think that ten days in San Cristobal is quite enough. We are rested after our long voyage, we have got to know the town and have now re-watered and refuelled. There is nothing to keep us except the bureaucracy. We have been waiting since our arrival for our permiso, our cruising permit, which is due on 05 May. You need one to cruise in these islands. You apply personally to the ministry of Defence in Quito or through an agent. “Our” agent had never heard of us when we arrived. But he filled out the forms and sent them to Quito promising that it would be approved by 05 May and would run for 45 days.
Other cruisers had applied from Panama or their home country only to find when they arrived in The Galapagos that the agent had mixed up names, dates and destinations. It seems the man is incompetent. His advantage is that he is married to the “gobernadora” of the city. Many boats decided just to leave without a permit, to stop at Isla Isabela and then depart for the Marquesas. Puerto Villamil on Isla Isabela is apparently miffed that everyone has to check into Puerta Ayora on Santa Cruz of Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristobal, i.e. that Puerto Villamil is missing out on the tourist dollars, that they are happy to receive cruising visitors and no questions asked.
We are under a certain time pressure as well since Andrew’s flight to New Orleans via Guayaquil and Miami leaves from Baltra Island on 08 May. In other words he has only about ten days left to take in more of the islands. In a family conference we decide simply to up anchor on Saturday or Sunday and sail the 82 Nm overnight west to Isla Isabela. Isabela is the biggest island in the archipelago and has quite a number of things we can take in: an active volcano (Sierra Negra), lava tunnels, unusual fauna like the blue-footed boobies, Galapagos penquins, etc.
Swimming with the sea lions
We finally reach Fernando and arrange the re-fuelling and re-watering effort for mid-morning on Saturday. Once that is completed, we prepare the boat for departure that evening and then gather up our snorkelling gear and hail a panga-taxi to drop us ashore where the path to the bay starts where we can swim with the sea lions.
The air is not particularly hot but it is humid and the equatorial sun beats straight down on us as we pick our way along the groomed path through the black and broken lava rocks with sparse “birch”(?) trees and some raspberry bushes growing up between them. Eventually we come to a wooden platform set overlooking a small and steeply-rocky bay. The statue is a triple-sized bronze statue of an older and bewhiskered Charles Darwin standing with his back to the sea, a paintbrush and notebook in his hands, a finch upon his left shoulder, and bronze sea lion, a marine iguana and some other animal at his feet. It is a pretty bad statute. But the platform looks down on the rocky bay where we intend to snorkel.
Down we climb, our legs like jelly after so long aboard a boat. The first thing we see are two sea lions, a larger one stretched out and sleeping on a nearby rocky ledge, its coat dry and therefore a yellowy white. Directly next to where the steps down from the platform end is a much smaller sea lion, a youngster perhaps, also sleeping. It has been there a while since its coat is also dry. Clearly it has been attacked by something, for it has huge slash wounds from one eye down across its mouth and one of its eyes is badly swollen. We cannot imagine how it has received these wounds: a fight perhaps; and attack by an orca; an attack by a human or a chance meeting with a boat propeller?
We change into our bathing suits and snorkel gear on a rock where swells rush up to slap your fanny while you pull on your flippers. Once in the cold water we see lots of herring and other small fish but, at first, no sea lions. Suddenly they are all around us, taking a good look at us and flying off and returning. Kathleen meets one that clearly wants to play: it brings her a sea urchin, and acts like it would like Kathleen to throw it to her. We recall hearing from others that you can take a ball or an orange with you and the sea lions will play with you. We spend about half an hour swimming around in the swells until we become chilled and crawl up on the rocks to dry off. What an exciting experience. Kathleen rates it as one of the great experiences of her life and we babble about it as we trudge back to the dock where we can catch a panga-taxi back out to Vilisar.
Departing for Isla Isabela
By now the day has nearly ended. We decide we are too tired to leave today and postpone it until Sunday midday. This gives us time to complete stowing and getting everything ready again after having so much stuff out to work on the boat. While there were about twenty boats here when we arrived, now there are only about half a dozen. Many of them have left only today: Kathy and Kyle, the American Bible-translators from Papua-New Guinea aboard S/V Stap-Isi; Rune and Idunn and their girls aboard the Norwegian S/V Blue Marlin; Ben and Henrietta aboard S/V Uterus out of Norway; Bret and his wife aboard the Australian sailboat Interlude III and Alaskans Tom, Kathy and their three kids aboard S/V Nueva Vida. There has been a big cruise ship anchored outside the harbour and a constant flow of tourists into town. On Sunday morning I meet German-Americans Peter and Monika Ohrnberger, he a Stuttgarter and she from Hamlin but living in the U.S.A. near Detroit. They are avid Great-Lakes cruisers. I also meet New Zealanders Jill and Steven, who invite us to contact them when we finally reach Auckland. We are leaving behind Karen and Chris aboard the Australian world-cruising catamaran Magic Carpet. They have been waiting for three weeks for a common or garden variety of oil lip-seal for their outboard engine. Chris ordered it from a Yamaha dealer (Yamaha won’t deal with customers directly). They have followed it on the internet as Fedex have taken it from Japan to several wrong countries before eventually getting it to Guayaquil. It arrived on Isla San Cristobal on Saturday but it is completely the wrong seal. Chris does not want to start across 6,000 miles of the South Pacific without any engine. Maybe they will still be there when we get back to the harbour.
Back out at the boat we finally turn on the engine at 1300 and finish rigging our newly-patched sails. They actually look pretty good: on the one side we used sail tape to hold the cloth in place and the tape looks quite white, but the actual sailcloth patches are on the other side and you have to look closely to see them. Unfortunately the morning SE winds have now died completely. It looks like another night of motor-sailing. At least the sea is calm. I talked with Bret of S/V Interlude III from Australia, who says, “We have done 100,000 miles in this boat and about the same in the earlier boat, and we have probably motored about one-third of the time.” I guess you learn to expect it.
Andrew has decided to get started without using the engine to break out the anchor. Even using the anchor windlass, however, he cannot get it up. I drive the boat then forward on the engine, but to no avail. The bow only takes a dive and the boat comes to a shuddering halt. The anchor is wedged solidly into something. Andrew goes overboard with a mask and snorkel, but cannot see far enough down into the thirty feet of water to ascertain what has happened. We circle the anchor using the engine, let out chain, take it back in, then try to break it out again from another angle. Finally, we gentle up to the anchor until the chain is perpendicular and give it a pull. Up she comes. This all has cost us an hour. We motorsail out of the harbour, the Lister chugging pleasantly with a Harley-Davison sound coming from her straight-pipe inboard muffler.
Outside and away from the island a mile or so there seems to be a light breeze and we hoist all sail. But after an hour we are back down to zero and are only being carried forward by currents swirling around the island. At this rate it will take us three days to get to Villamil. Back on goes the engine and we motorsail with only the main up.
The two-hour watches are divided up and we sit around and discuss Gott und die Welt until late afternoon. I take on the cooking and prepare corn chowder, which even Andrew, not exactly an experimental eater, declares to be great. By the time we have eaten it is already dark: sunrise to sunset is nearly exactly twelve hours here on the equator and the sun rise directly in the east and sets directly in the west. In this case we are sailing nearly exactly west to Isabela, a voyage of about 82 Nm. The night sky contains the sliver of a waxing moon that sets a few hours later. The stars are bright and the night sky blue-black. Kathleen stays with me for an hour of my watch and we have a chance to talk. Watch-keeping usually means the offgoing watch simply hands over with a few comments and heads below to sleep so it is nice to have company for a while. We talk about how great it has been to have Andrew with us for this voyage, how he seems to be enjoying it and how much he loves sailboats. Andrew is a terrific guy.
After a few hours the usual night broken clouds drift in and begin to obscure the constellations. We are thrown back on our compass. Since the red compass light still has not been connected, we take to setting up one of the solar panel-operated, LED anchor-lights next to the compass. It takes no power from the battery and, indeed, it uses so little power that it has little influence on the compass itself. We tie the tiller using bungee cords and, because there are no wind or swells, Vilisar stays pretty much on course.
On the remainder of my watch I look at the stars. On my 0100 watch the next morning I read a German Krimi by flashlight to pass the time. When I wake at 0600 the sun is up and we are passing Tortuga Island and aimed right at Villamil some five miles away. The entrance would not be clear to someone without some guidance and we are happy to have the waypoints provided by earlier cruisers like S/V Our Tern. We swing out around the point and the huge swells rolling over them, pass over a clearly visible bottom at thirty feet for a little bit and then find the entrance channel and the marker buoys. By 0830 we have the anchor down amongst some seven other sailboats, many of whom we have just said goodbye to in San Cristobal.
Once we are settled, the sail covers on, the awning up and the dinghy launched, I row over to Blue Marlin to borrow some contact cement to repair another seam that is coming unravelled on our mainsail. I spotted it while studying it from the cockpit. By the time we finally junk it this mainsail will be only patches, and probably therefore stronger than it was when it was new! While waiting for Andrew to wake up, I take down the port running light: it was not wanting to work last night and I was afraid the welder who soldered it last week might have damaged the electrical. But, with a little fiddling and some WD 40 on the contacts, it is working again.
About 1000 we row over to the volcanic-stone reef where there is a nature path. For about two hours we walk around looking at dozens of marine iguanas, pelicans, blue-footed boobies, yellow warblers, frigate birds, and sea lions. While I was tending to the dinghy, Andrew and Kathleen walked a bit farther and saw a tidal pool full of white-tipped sharks, each about six feet long. Cool!
This afternoon, while I am writing this, Kathleen and Andrew row the half mile ashore to check out the tour possibilities on the island before Andrew has to leave. While there they meet Rune and Idunn from Blue Marlin. They have caught a huge tuna, far more than they can eat. Do we want some for our supper? Silly question!
GIANT TORTOISES, FLAMINGOS, PENQUINS; MEETING ECUADORIANS
Villamil, Isla Isabela, The Galapagos, Ecuador, Wednesday, 03 May 2006
Refreshed by our delicious tuna dinner, a good night’s sleep and breakfast, we stuck to our resolve to avoid sightseeing in the intense midday sun. Consequently, we struck off for the far beach in the dinghy around 0800 ready to visit The Galapagos breeding station. There are two beaches: one near the centre of town. There is a high stone pier which does in fact protect the actual landing place on the beach. But you have to cross a reef-strewn stretch of more-or-less open water where the surfs can roll in from the sea. About the same distance away is another beach at some distance from the actual town close to the sheltering reefs at the sheltered eastern end of this anchorage. Down at this end of the anchorage the local boats are moored off. There are plenty of dark-stone reefs here too, but while some of them are submerged, they are easily spotted in the crystal clear waters against the white sandy bottoms. Most cruisers used inflatable dinghies powered by large or small outboard motors. They scoot at speed around the reefs in a big arc. In any anchorage, it seems, we are the only ones who actually row a hard-shell dinghy. We don’t draw much water even loaded with three adults and we don’t have an outboard propeller and shaft sticking down either. So we strike straight out across the bay, pick our way carefully around any reefs we see underwater, land at the beach and pull the dinghy up above the high-water mark.
Visiting The Galapagos is an expensive undertaking. Leaving aside whatever means of transportation you use to get here, you will immediately be levied a $100 Park Fee. Visitors coming by air will have to pay it at the airport or as part of their flight ticket. It’s not so well organised for boaters and there is no clear place or person to pay it to. I suppose you are meant to report to the park authorities voluntarily and pay it there.
The problem it is that it is not entirely clear what the park fees are for: one hotel-keeper here, for example, told us in excellent English that you have to pay the fee if you come anywhere within 25 miles of The Galapagos Islands, i.e. the whole of the archipelago is considered to be a “national park”. Some of our guidebooks, on the other hand, say that only certain portions of the islands are “park” and require therefore a permit. However, if you want to view the sights you have to hire an official guide. Back in Baquerizo Moreno, San Cristobal, we did a tour of some sights on the islands that were not in a specified National Park area and there was no official guide; another party did exactly the same tour a few days later and Ingala (Instituto Nacionale Galápagos, i.e. the park administration) officials spot-checked to see that each one had paid the fee. Finding that nobody indeed had, they turned the whole party back.
If you are budget cruisers and/or if you have family with you, it all mounts up to a quite sizeable packet of money. In our case we should have to pay $300 park fees. During a lot of this time we have had to sit around and wait for someone to crank out a cruising permit. And it is still not here. The cruising permit, by the way, is free, about the only thing in this region that is. But, while you can travel to Quito to get it yourself, you are much more likely to use the agent in either Puerto Ayora (Santa Cruz Island) or Baquerizo Moreno (San Cristobal Island), the only two official entry ports (and agents) for The Galapagos. The agent will cost you $50 to $150 for anything straightforward, and he will expect a “big tip” (his expression, spoken whilst rubbing his hands and exhibiting a shit-house grin) if you need anything special. The one in Baquerizo Moreno is fairly incompetent and has the reputation amongst cruisers of screwing things up fairly thoroughly. But he is married to the mayor, we have been told.
Then there is the old issue of Port-Captain fees. Port Captaincies are handled by the Ecuadorian Navy. The entry and exit charges are levied basically at any harbour where there is settlement and therefore a port captain. The charges vary from port to port: the larger your boat’s gross tonnage, and/or the bigger the settlement, the more you pay in port captain fees. We are 8.5 tonnes gross and would probably pay about $100 here in Puerto Villamil, more in Baquerizo Moreno and Puerto Ayora. Theoretically, you are also supposed to pay to anchor in the harbour too but I am not sure what these fees are.
Of course, to take any tours you will usually also have to hire a guide or join a guided party. Sometimes, like our pickup-truck tour on Isla Cristobal, you will just be chauffeured around by a driver. In other cases, you will have an officially-approved (and, I suppose, properly-trained park guide). Most day tours seem to cost $25 per person. For example, we are taking part in a tour to the Sierra-Negra volcano tomorrow. Andrew, Kathleen and I will each pay $25 for the pickup-truck ride to the base station, saddle horses to the next level and then by foot to the rim. We bring our own food and drink. This costs $25 per head. A panga-tour to Cabo Rosa costs $25 each, always provided you can get up or join a party of about ten.
So all of this is pretty dear. Add to it that everything in the islands is expensive anyway, - i.e. food, fuel, etc., two to three times so compared to mainland Ecuador – and you will find that a tour to The Galapagos is expensive.
One of the problems is that the rules keep changing. Cruising permits, port-captain fees, park permits – it is almost beyond knowing what is expected. Certainly it causes a lot of discussion amongst cruisers, not to mention frustration as well. Some people go into the port captain only to be given a 72-hour/one stop permiso. Others get 20 days and can visit anywhere they like. Sometimes the port captains will march you over to the agent.
Then there is the bigger issue of just what is “The Galapagos”, and how should it be treated. At one point, as it became apparent to naturalist and environmentalist that some of the unique tortoises, birds, reptiles, etc, were being threatened with extinction, protection of the wilderness was the primary focus. As more and more tourists began to arrive, however, and there were competing commercial claims from, for example, tourism, fisheries, farming, etc., the Ecuadorian authorities were pushed to develop a master plan for the archipelago that was supposed to blend all the various goals. According to the naturalist, Pierre Constant, whose comprehensive and excellent guide to The Galapagos is clearly prejudiced towards wilderness protection, the early-1990’s master plan was supposed to restrict the permanent population to about 6,000 and visitors to 25,000 annually. By the time his book came out in the mid-1990’s the population had grown through immigration for economic reasons from the mainland (which has severe unemployment and poverty) to over 20,000, and 85,000 visitors were arriving here each year by plane, cruise ship or sailboat for their unique individual wilderness experience. It is not as bad as Alaska where, one day while we were there, there were about 7,000 cruiseship passengers let loose on the town of Juneau between 1000 and 1600 hours.
Clearly the tug-of-war between tourism-related economic development and protection of the wild is being won by the tour operators, souvenir-shop owners and restaurant operators. For cruising boats, the whole issue of wildly excessive fees to enter a port (they are even greater than in Mexico – back then about $35 in and out- before they abandoned the whole port captain fees in favour of a one-time cruising-permit fee for yachts) is annoying since basically the port captains do nothing for you except collect your fees. You could make a case perhaps for the park fees. But, even here, $100 a head seems over the top; it’s well above the fees, for example, at Yellowstone or Glacier National Parks and labour rates for park employees are surely lower here than for park rangers in the USA. Beyond breeding turtles, outside financing for which also comes from such institutions as the Smithsonian Institute and the Frankfurt (Germany) Zoo, what exactly does the park do? At local labour rates, how expensive can it be to groom a few paths and build a few wooden viewing platforms, many of which have anyway been funded by, say, the Spanish government? But The Galapagos are now top-of-the-pops amongst leading-edge tourists and, when you see how the anticipated arrival of one UK-owned Discovery-tours ship electrified the town of Baquerizo Moreno while we were there, you know that there will be more cruiseships coming here in the future and the infrastructure will be expanded to deal with them.
Clearly, eyes have lit up at the rosy economic prospects. I, for one, feel more than a little ripped off, and do what I can to thwart the outstretched palms. We were told by the agent not to report to the port captain of immigration until he had the cruising permit back from Quito. After ten days of waiting at anchor (though he said we could move around and take in the sights) this had not occurred. We therefore just left and came here overnight to Puerto Villamil on Isabela Island, some 83 miles away. Some of the up to a dozen boats have already checked out for the South Pacific in San Cristobal or Santa Cruz. But only one boat has actually checked in with the port captain here so far. They certainly have not paid port-captains fees.
Were it not for the fact that Andrew will need a T3 entry permit in order to exit through immigración at Guayaquil Airport, we could probably have arrived and simply left here for the mainland to check in (much more cheaply) there, having flown under the radar in The Galapagos the whole time and all the while waiting for the agent to get the permiso.
But as it is, we shall likely leave here on Friday to sail to Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz (40 miles to the east), check in with migración and Andrew can check out the Darwin Centre, catch his domestic flight on Sunday from Baltra Island to Guayaquil and connect to the U.S.A. Then Kathleen and I shall leave after a day or two for the mainland, stopping briefly at Baquerizo Moreno to have the electrician rectify the voltage-regulator problem.
San Cristobal Island, The Galapagos, Ecuador, Wednesday, April 26, 2006
After a whole week here in this remote archipelago, we have already had time to rest from our 17-day, 1200-mile voyage, to start looking around the area and to begin to repair some of the damage that was incurred on the trip here.
Vilisar is anchored in this well-sheltered harbour. Soon after we arrived we were approached by Fernando who came out in a taxi-panga with his two henchmen. They offered to arrange a tour of the island for us, to replenish our now-depleted diesel-fuel and drinking-water supplies and to help us find our way around the island. At first we felt a little rushed. But eventually we decided to spend a day on a tour to several sites. More on that later.
Almost nobody launches their dinghy here. The sea lions are really fun to watch in the exceptionally clear water; they seem actually to be frolicking. They will come up to you while you are swimming and check you out. The water here, by the way, although very clear, is much cooler than anything in Mexico. But it is tolerable for a swim off the boat. For longer dives or snorkelling adventures one probably needs a wetsuit. Haven’t seen any jelly fish or “perlas”.
The other side of the coin is that the sea lions are acrobats. They will leap up onto or into unattended boats and dinghies. On our first afternoon in port, for example, I am lying on the starboard settee having a nap when I heard a commotion on deck. Suddenly I find myself staring up through the skylight at a female sea lion. I shoo her away, but wonder how we can keep the little cuties off (and out of the boat). Since there is very little by way of beach in this port, the locals moor their pangas off and lay barbed wire around the gunwhales to discourage the sea mammals. Our experimental solution is to hang plastic bags to blow from the lifelines; so far this has worked though we get some wry comments from other, more pukka boaters.
So, as mentioned, nobody uses their dinghy. because of the sea lions getting into them and damaging them, but also because there is really no place to land the dinghies. Instead, there is a good and relatively cheap system of pangas that act as “yellow cabs” (they really are yellow, and have a sunshade; most of them have little “taxi” lights on the sunshade like Manhattan cabs). You can call them on Channel 16 VHF or simply wave at them as they cruise around for custom. For 50¢ per person per ride you can get to the main wharf in town. Even if you want to use your own dinghy there is no place near the centre of town where you can leave it.
Our first call is to Bolivar Pesantes, the agent to whom we had emailed our documents and application for a cruising permit. That was two months ago. Somehow we are not surprised to learn that he has never heard of us. But, nothing daunted, he says in Spanish that we should not go immediately to the Port Captain or to Migración. He will send our application to Quito (Ministry of Defence, the department that administers these islands), and tell them we are arriving on 05 May. “Come back on 03 May and the permiso will be here.” He does not think it will complicate matters if we want to go to the mainland afterwards, or even to get a six-month visa to do the choir and conductor workshops.
Yeah, well, we shall see. Meanwhile, he tells us, just hang around San Cristobal and enjoy ourselves.
We book one of Fernando’s day-tours of the island. He picks us up along with two Norwegian couples (Rune and Idunn and their twin, straw-blond, six-year-old twin girls, Hedda and Marita, off S/V Blue Marlin, as well as Henrietta and Ben from S/V Uterus [sic]). Off we go, most of the group in the back of the pickup. The driver is a young fellow who speaks no English (or Norwegian), nor even much Spanish it seems. So this turns out to be a chauffeured but not a guided tour. He tends to drive rather fast, which makes me nervous in view of the people in the open back. But he delivers us safely first to the giant-tortoise breeding centre (“Galapaguero”; the word Galapagos means giant tortoise) at one end of the island. There they are: standing under thin scrub trees in the dry hills, munching on leaves and generally doing what giant tortoises do (pretty much standing around and munching leaves under scrub trees in the dry highlands). They are a threatened species so these guys have been brought here to propagate. They even have numbers stencilled on the aft end of their carapaces so they won’t forget who they are or who is sleeping these days with whom (tortoises live to be two hundred years old; they might just get absentminded about whom they owe child support these days. Maybe thy even get senior moments and forget themselves. With a decent mirror they can just check the licence number at the back of their shells).
After the tortoise farm we drive to El Junco. This is the crater of the largest volcano (now extinct) on San Cristobal Island. It is filled with rain water, and we take an hour-long walk around the edge of the crater. At that time of the morning we are essentially socked in by clouds moving in from the south. We can see across the crater but cannot see either down into the valley or out to the coast except, near the end, when the clouds began to dissipate under the tropical sun and the breeze.
After another stage in the pickup truck heading for the southeastern tip of the island, we arrive at a volcanic-rock beach to take a look at the marine iguanas. Darwin called them “imps of darkness”, and it is difficult not to be revolted somewhat by their appearance. But they are admirably adapted to their environment here in The Galapagos. They grow to about a foot or eighteen inches long with a tail in addition, and will stand stock still to blend into the black lava boulders. If you come too close they spit a gob of something at you, and then scurry off. We see about a dozen of them in a variety of sizes. They stay right at the water’s edge but live off underwater vegetation. After scavenging for food, they come back to the black rocks to get warmed up after their time in the chilly water. Being black and lying on black rocks this can go fairly quickly; but if it gets too much, they tend to brace themselves up on their forelegs to let the breezes get under their bellies to help cool them down a bit without having to go back into the water.
The final stage of the tour is lunch at Fernando’s house. His wife used to have a restaurant near the Malecon. Now she just does lunches for tour members. She has stacks of scrapbooks going back over years into which cruisers have been writing comments and leaving photos. We add our own bit as well.
Baquerizo Moreno (he was a previous president of Equator, I think) is a small and easily viewed little town. We get to know it in the classic cruiser way, i.e. by running errands, and looking for parts and materials. There are some cruising-boat services here. We arrange with Fernando, for example, to bring out 60 (Ecuadorian) gallons of diesel to the Vilisar at anchor. Other boaters simply take their deck jugs ashore, and then take a taxi to the gas station, fill up the jugs while they are in the boot of the taxi, and then head back down to the dock. They use a panga-taxi each way so that the total transport costs them a dollar for the water taxi and two dollars for the land taxi. On the other hand, they pay $1.02 at the pump (N.B. Ecuadorians use the US dollar as their currency. A “gallon” in Latin America represents, not a US gallon of four quarts, but four litres, i.e. a US gallon = 3.8 litres. So you get a bit more for your gallon. Fuel sales at the pump are in litres. The price of fuel is by law the same everywhere in Ecuador, we are told. Ecuador has lots of oil; it’s the second biggest oil exporter in Latin America after Venezuela.) If you have enough jugs it is worthwhile doing the diesel-jug cha-cha. You could stretch the operation over several days if you only have a few jugs, as in our case. But of course, you incur more taxi charges.
We decide to hire Fernando. Here it pays to negotiate with him: his asking price for diesel fuel delivered to the boat in 30-gallon plastic jugs and siphoned into your tanks is currently $1.50 per gallon. I get him down to $1.40 without much haggling. Drinking-water is very expensive on the island: it costs $2 for a 5-gallon jug for agua purifacada. Fernando bids $3 a jug (delivered) but we settle at $2.80. He also brings me ten quarts (i.e. 928 ml.) of Esso-brand, heavy-duty diesel-motor oil and asks $5 a quart (it has been imported from the U.S.A.!). The price at the pump is about $3.50. I didn’t negotiate with him on this.
Everything is quite cheap here by US, Canadian and even by Mexican standards. And this is even allowing for the fact that locals say everything costs 2 to 3 times as much here in the islands as it does on the mainland. During out ten days in Baquerizo Moreno, we see one small oil tanker and about three or four different small freighters come in and unload. Everything is unloaded by the ships deck cranes and taken ashore in lighters. One ship seemed to deal only in bottled drinks (beer and soft drinks); the lighters took empties back out to the ship. Just like a beer or Coke truck back home. Another ship seem to bear only building materials and furniture, the bags of cement and piles of lumber on the dock attest to the prosperity of this place thanks to the tourism.
The economic development of these islands is directly related to tourism and it has bred a controversy. The locals want jobs and prosperity. Many outsiders want the archipelago to remain a wilderness. Of course, many from the outside would like to visit the islands. The Master Plan for The Galapagos ten years ago foresaw fewer than 10,000 inhabitants and a maximum of 25,000 visitors annually. Already in the late 1990’s the locals, all immigrants from the mainland, had reached over 20,000 in number and the tourists were in excess of 85,000.
A panga shows up one morning with an English-speaking man named Tony. He is dressed in white shorts and a clean shirt. He lived and worked in the U.S.A. at some point, but was from these islands. His compadre is Miguel, an electrician. Miguel is not wearing whites so I assume he is the one doing the work and that Tony is just the interlocutor. We have been having trouble with our engine-driven Bolmar alternator, which does not seem to be delivering power at all to the batteries. Small and as sprite as a monkey, Miguel dives into the engine room, and tests everything with his voltmeter: the voltage regulator is defective. He goes ashore, finds a new one for $22, returns and installs it. He also cleans up all the electrical contacts, and we can see an immediate improvement in the amps going into the engine. We agree on a price of $100 (about $20 an hour, which is probably about five times what he would get in Bahia de Caráquez, where he comes from. But we are happy that we are able to generate power with the engine.) Unfortunately, when we run the engine after we finally get enough oil and fuel to start it, we do not seem any more to be getting power at all. Will have to get him back.
I mentioned earlier that our mainsail was severely ripped on the voyage here from Acapulco. We also found a tear along the luff of the red drifter. Andrew and I took the sails ashore with all our kit, went up to the band shell in the park near the elementary school and city park, spread everything out on the stage in the shade and patched everything with sailcloth and 3M 5200. This took nearly till dark. While things were curing, I sewed on new bronze slides wherever the ties holding the slides to the sail had rotted through. In the end I replaced eighteen of the some thirty slides. I might have replaced them all but I think this mainsail will only have to get us to mainland Ecuador and then we shall have to buy a new one.
A few days later I am visiting Rune on S/V Blue Marlin out of Norway. Bret, a dentist and very experienced and skilled voyager, was also there helping Rune with his torn spinnaker. Bret recommends using contact cement: spread it on the two surfaces with a brush, wait 15 minutes for it to get tacky, and then press it together. It seems to be just as good as 3M 5200 but it costs only 95 cents a small can instead of much more for 5200. Contact cement is available in every hardware store in Latin America and is much easier to avoid making a big mess to be cleaned up. 5200 will start to cure once you open the tube: not so cemento contacto (really, that’s what it’s called!)
Andrew and I did other jobs on the boat between near-daily trips to town to visit the internet, eat set lunches for $1.50 or $2.00 per person, do a little shopping, etc. For example, I pulled Andrew up the mast using our double-purchase. He painted the spreaders with white enamel paint, and checked everything for soundness. He also put in a new fairlead for a flag halyard on the starboard side; the old one had broken. Your courtesy flag in each country is flown from the starboard side; so far we have been flying it from the port spreader and no one has complained. But if you are up there anyway… Unfortunately, he could not reach the masthead tri-light, which seems to have burned out.
SAILING TO ISLA ISABELA; SWIMMING WITH THE SEA LIONS
Puerto Villamil, Isla Isabela, Galapagos, Ecuador. Monday, 01 May 2006
We begin to think that ten days in San Cristobal is quite enough. We are rested after our long voyage, we have got to know the town and have now re-watered and refuelled. There is nothing to keep us except the bureaucracy. We have been waiting since our arrival for our permiso, our cruising permit, which is due on 05 May. You need one to cruise in these islands. You apply personally to the ministry of Defence in Quito or through an agent. “Our” agent had never heard of us when we arrived. But he filled out the forms and sent them to Quito promising that it would be approved by 05 May and would run for 45 days.
Other cruisers had applied from Panama or their home country only to find when they arrived in The Galapagos that the agent had mixed up names, dates and destinations. It seems the man is incompetent. His advantage is that he is married to the “gobernadora” of the city. Many boats decided just to leave without a permit, to stop at Isla Isabela and then depart for the Marquesas. Puerto Villamil on Isla Isabela is apparently miffed that everyone has to check into Puerta Ayora on Santa Cruz of Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristobal, i.e. that Puerto Villamil is missing out on the tourist dollars, that they are happy to receive cruising visitors and no questions asked.
We are under a certain time pressure as well since Andrew’s flight to New Orleans via Guayaquil and Miami leaves from Baltra Island on 08 May. In other words he has only about ten days left to take in more of the islands. In a family conference we decide simply to up anchor on Saturday or Sunday and sail the 82 Nm overnight west to Isla Isabela. Isabela is the biggest island in the archipelago and has quite a number of things we can take in: an active volcano (Sierra Negra), lava tunnels, unusual fauna like the blue-footed boobies, Galapagos penquins, etc.
Swimming with the sea lions
We finally reach Fernando and arrange the re-fuelling and re-watering effort for mid-morning on Saturday. Once that is completed, we prepare the boat for departure that evening and then gather up our snorkelling gear and hail a panga-taxi to drop us ashore where the path to the bay starts where we can swim with the sea lions.
The air is not particularly hot but it is humid and the equatorial sun beats straight down on us as we pick our way along the groomed path through the black and broken lava rocks with sparse “birch”(?) trees and some raspberry bushes growing up between them. Eventually we come to a wooden platform set overlooking a small and steeply-rocky bay. The statue is a triple-sized bronze statue of an older and bewhiskered Charles Darwin standing with his back to the sea, a paintbrush and notebook in his hands, a finch upon his left shoulder, and bronze sea lion, a marine iguana and some other animal at his feet. It is a pretty bad statute. But the platform looks down on the rocky bay where we intend to snorkel.
Down we climb, our legs like jelly after so long aboard a boat. The first thing we see are two sea lions, a larger one stretched out and sleeping on a nearby rocky ledge, its coat dry and therefore a yellowy white. Directly next to where the steps down from the platform end is a much smaller sea lion, a youngster perhaps, also sleeping. It has been there a while since its coat is also dry. Clearly it has been attacked by something, for it has huge slash wounds from one eye down across its mouth and one of its eyes is badly swollen. We cannot imagine how it has received these wounds: a fight perhaps; and attack by an orca; an attack by a human or a chance meeting with a boat propeller?
We change into our bathing suits and snorkel gear on a rock where swells rush up to slap your fanny while you pull on your flippers. Once in the cold water we see lots of herring and other small fish but, at first, no sea lions. Suddenly they are all around us, taking a good look at us and flying off and returning. Kathleen meets one that clearly wants to play: it brings her a sea urchin, and acts like it would like Kathleen to throw it to her. We recall hearing from others that you can take a ball or an orange with you and the sea lions will play with you. We spend about half an hour swimming around in the swells until we become chilled and crawl up on the rocks to dry off. What an exciting experience. Kathleen rates it as one of the great experiences of her life and we babble about it as we trudge back to the dock where we can catch a panga-taxi back out to Vilisar.
Departing for Isla Isabela
By now the day has nearly ended. We decide we are too tired to leave today and postpone it until Sunday midday. This gives us time to complete stowing and getting everything ready again after having so much stuff out to work on the boat. While there were about twenty boats here when we arrived, now there are only about half a dozen. Many of them have left only today: Kathy and Kyle, the American Bible-translators from Papua-New Guinea aboard S/V Stap-Isi; Rune and Idunn and their girls aboard the Norwegian S/V Blue Marlin; Ben and Henrietta aboard S/V Uterus out of Norway; Bret and his wife aboard the Australian sailboat Interlude III and Alaskans Tom, Kathy and their three kids aboard S/V Nueva Vida. There has been a big cruise ship anchored outside the harbour and a constant flow of tourists into town. On Sunday morning I meet German-Americans Peter and Monika Ohrnberger, he a Stuttgarter and she from Hamlin but living in the U.S.A. near Detroit. They are avid Great-Lakes cruisers. I also meet New Zealanders Jill and Steven, who invite us to contact them when we finally reach Auckland. We are leaving behind Karen and Chris aboard the Australian world-cruising catamaran Magic Carpet. They have been waiting for three weeks for a common or garden variety of oil lip-seal for their outboard engine. Chris ordered it from a Yamaha dealer (Yamaha won’t deal with customers directly). They have followed it on the internet as Fedex have taken it from Japan to several wrong countries before eventually getting it to Guayaquil. It arrived on Isla San Cristobal on Saturday but it is completely the wrong seal. Chris does not want to start across 6,000 miles of the South Pacific without any engine. Maybe they will still be there when we get back to the harbour.
Back out at the boat we finally turn on the engine at 1300 and finish rigging our newly-patched sails. They actually look pretty good: on the one side we used sail tape to hold the cloth in place and the tape looks quite white, but the actual sailcloth patches are on the other side and you have to look closely to see them. Unfortunately the morning SE winds have now died completely. It looks like another night of motor-sailing. At least the sea is calm. I talked with Bret of S/V Interlude III from Australia, who says, “We have done 100,000 miles in this boat and about the same in the earlier boat, and we have probably motored about one-third of the time.” I guess you learn to expect it.
Andrew has decided to get started without using the engine to break out the anchor. Even using the anchor windlass, however, he cannot get it up. I drive the boat then forward on the engine, but to no avail. The bow only takes a dive and the boat comes to a shuddering halt. The anchor is wedged solidly into something. Andrew goes overboard with a mask and snorkel, but cannot see far enough down into the thirty feet of water to ascertain what has happened. We circle the anchor using the engine, let out chain, take it back in, then try to break it out again from another angle. Finally, we gentle up to the anchor until the chain is perpendicular and give it a pull. Up she comes. This all has cost us an hour. We motorsail out of the harbour, the Lister chugging pleasantly with a Harley-Davison sound coming from her straight-pipe inboard muffler.
Outside and away from the island a mile or so there seems to be a light breeze and we hoist all sail. But after an hour we are back down to zero and are only being carried forward by currents swirling around the island. At this rate it will take us three days to get to Villamil. Back on goes the engine and we motorsail with only the main up.
The two-hour watches are divided up and we sit around and discuss Gott und die Welt until late afternoon. I take on the cooking and prepare corn chowder, which even Andrew, not exactly an experimental eater, declares to be great. By the time we have eaten it is already dark: sunrise to sunset is nearly exactly twelve hours here on the equator and the sun rise directly in the east and sets directly in the west. In this case we are sailing nearly exactly west to Isabela, a voyage of about 82 Nm. The night sky contains the sliver of a waxing moon that sets a few hours later. The stars are bright and the night sky blue-black. Kathleen stays with me for an hour of my watch and we have a chance to talk. Watch-keeping usually means the offgoing watch simply hands over with a few comments and heads below to sleep so it is nice to have company for a while. We talk about how great it has been to have Andrew with us for this voyage, how he seems to be enjoying it and how much he loves sailboats. Andrew is a terrific guy.
After a few hours the usual night broken clouds drift in and begin to obscure the constellations. We are thrown back on our compass. Since the red compass light still has not been connected, we take to setting up one of the solar panel-operated, LED anchor-lights next to the compass. It takes no power from the battery and, indeed, it uses so little power that it has little influence on the compass itself. We tie the tiller using bungee cords and, because there are no wind or swells, Vilisar stays pretty much on course.
On the remainder of my watch I look at the stars. On my 0100 watch the next morning I read a German Krimi by flashlight to pass the time. When I wake at 0600 the sun is up and we are passing Tortuga Island and aimed right at Villamil some five miles away. The entrance would not be clear to someone without some guidance and we are happy to have the waypoints provided by earlier cruisers like S/V Our Tern. We swing out around the point and the huge swells rolling over them, pass over a clearly visible bottom at thirty feet for a little bit and then find the entrance channel and the marker buoys. By 0830 we have the anchor down amongst some seven other sailboats, many of whom we have just said goodbye to in San Cristobal.
Once we are settled, the sail covers on, the awning up and the dinghy launched, I row over to Blue Marlin to borrow some contact cement to repair another seam that is coming unravelled on our mainsail. I spotted it while studying it from the cockpit. By the time we finally junk it this mainsail will be only patches, and probably therefore stronger than it was when it was new! While waiting for Andrew to wake up, I take down the port running light: it was not wanting to work last night and I was afraid the welder who soldered it last week might have damaged the electrical. But, with a little fiddling and some WD 40 on the contacts, it is working again.
About 1000 we row over to the volcanic-stone reef where there is a nature path. For about two hours we walk around looking at dozens of marine iguanas, pelicans, blue-footed boobies, yellow warblers, frigate birds, and sea lions. While I was tending to the dinghy, Andrew and Kathleen walked a bit farther and saw a tidal pool full of white-tipped sharks, each about six feet long. Cool!
This afternoon, while I am writing this, Kathleen and Andrew row the half mile ashore to check out the tour possibilities on the island before Andrew has to leave. While there they meet Rune and Idunn from Blue Marlin. They have caught a huge tuna, far more than they can eat. Do we want some for our supper? Silly question!
GIANT TORTOISES, FLAMINGOS, PENQUINS; MEETING ECUADORIANS
Villamil, Isla Isabela, The Galapagos, Ecuador, Wednesday, 03 May 2006
Refreshed by our delicious tuna dinner, a good night’s sleep and breakfast, we stuck to our resolve to avoid sightseeing in the intense midday sun. Consequently, we struck off for the far beach in the dinghy around 0800 ready to visit The Galapagos breeding station. There are two beaches: one near the centre of town. There is a high stone pier which does in fact protect the actual landing place on the beach. But you have to cross a reef-strewn stretch of more-or-less open water where the surfs can roll in from the sea. About the same distance away is another beach at some distance from the actual town close to the sheltering reefs at the sheltered eastern end of this anchorage. Down at this end of the anchorage the local boats are moored off. There are plenty of dark-stone reefs here too, but while some of them are submerged, they are easily spotted in the crystal clear waters against the white sandy bottoms. Most cruisers used inflatable dinghies powered by large or small outboard motors. They scoot at speed around the reefs in a big arc. In any anchorage, it seems, we are the only ones who actually row a hard-shell dinghy. We don’t draw much water even loaded with three adults and we don’t have an outboard propeller and shaft sticking down either. So we strike straight out across the bay, pick our way carefully around any reefs we see underwater, land at the beach and pull the dinghy up above the high-water mark.
Visiting The Galapagos is an expensive undertaking. Leaving aside whatever means of transportation you use to get here, you will immediately be levied a $100 Park Fee. Visitors coming by air will have to pay it at the airport or as part of their flight ticket. It’s not so well organised for boaters and there is no clear place or person to pay it to. I suppose you are meant to report to the park authorities voluntarily and pay it there.
The problem it is that it is not entirely clear what the park fees are for: one hotel-keeper here, for example, told us in excellent English that you have to pay the fee if you come anywhere within 25 miles of The Galapagos Islands, i.e. the whole of the archipelago is considered to be a “national park”. Some of our guidebooks, on the other hand, say that only certain portions of the islands are “park” and require therefore a permit. However, if you want to view the sights you have to hire an official guide. Back in Baquerizo Moreno, San Cristobal, we did a tour of some sights on the islands that were not in a specified National Park area and there was no official guide; another party did exactly the same tour a few days later and Ingala (Instituto Nacionale Galápagos, i.e. the park administration) officials spot-checked to see that each one had paid the fee. Finding that nobody indeed had, they turned the whole party back.
If you are budget cruisers and/or if you have family with you, it all mounts up to a quite sizeable packet of money. In our case we should have to pay $300 park fees. During a lot of this time we have had to sit around and wait for someone to crank out a cruising permit. And it is still not here. The cruising permit, by the way, is free, about the only thing in this region that is. But, while you can travel to Quito to get it yourself, you are much more likely to use the agent in either Puerto Ayora (Santa Cruz Island) or Baquerizo Moreno (San Cristobal Island), the only two official entry ports (and agents) for The Galapagos. The agent will cost you $50 to $150 for anything straightforward, and he will expect a “big tip” (his expression, spoken whilst rubbing his hands and exhibiting a shit-house grin) if you need anything special. The one in Baquerizo Moreno is fairly incompetent and has the reputation amongst cruisers of screwing things up fairly thoroughly. But he is married to the mayor, we have been told.
Then there is the old issue of Port-Captain fees. Port Captaincies are handled by the Ecuadorian Navy. The entry and exit charges are levied basically at any harbour where there is settlement and therefore a port captain. The charges vary from port to port: the larger your boat’s gross tonnage, and/or the bigger the settlement, the more you pay in port captain fees. We are 8.5 tonnes gross and would probably pay about $100 here in Puerto Villamil, more in Baquerizo Moreno and Puerto Ayora. Theoretically, you are also supposed to pay to anchor in the harbour too but I am not sure what these fees are.
Of course, to take any tours you will usually also have to hire a guide or join a guided party. Sometimes, like our pickup-truck tour on Isla Cristobal, you will just be chauffeured around by a driver. In other cases, you will have an officially-approved (and, I suppose, properly-trained park guide). Most day tours seem to cost $25 per person. For example, we are taking part in a tour to the Sierra-Negra volcano tomorrow. Andrew, Kathleen and I will each pay $25 for the pickup-truck ride to the base station, saddle horses to the next level and then by foot to the rim. We bring our own food and drink. This costs $25 per head. A panga-tour to Cabo Rosa costs $25 each, always provided you can get up or join a party of about ten.
So all of this is pretty dear. Add to it that everything in the islands is expensive anyway, - i.e. food, fuel, etc., two to three times so compared to mainland Ecuador – and you will find that a tour to The Galapagos is expensive.
One of the problems is that the rules keep changing. Cruising permits, port-captain fees, park permits – it is almost beyond knowing what is expected. Certainly it causes a lot of discussion amongst cruisers, not to mention frustration as well. Some people go into the port captain only to be given a 72-hour/one stop permiso. Others get 20 days and can visit anywhere they like. Sometimes the port captains will march you over to the agent.
Then there is the bigger issue of just what is “The Galapagos”, and how should it be treated. At one point, as it became apparent to naturalist and environmentalist that some of the unique tortoises, birds, reptiles, etc, were being threatened with extinction, protection of the wilderness was the primary focus. As more and more tourists began to arrive, however, and there were competing commercial claims from, for example, tourism, fisheries, farming, etc., the Ecuadorian authorities were pushed to develop a master plan for the archipelago that was supposed to blend all the various goals. According to the naturalist, Pierre Constant, whose comprehensive and excellent guide to The Galapagos is clearly prejudiced towards wilderness protection, the early-1990’s master plan was supposed to restrict the permanent population to about 6,000 and visitors to 25,000 annually. By the time his book came out in the mid-1990’s the population had grown through immigration for economic reasons from the mainland (which has severe unemployment and poverty) to over 20,000, and 85,000 visitors were arriving here each year by plane, cruise ship or sailboat for their unique individual wilderness experience. It is not as bad as Alaska where, one day while we were there, there were about 7,000 cruiseship passengers let loose on the town of Juneau between 1000 and 1600 hours.
Clearly the tug-of-war between tourism-related economic development and protection of the wild is being won by the tour operators, souvenir-shop owners and restaurant operators. For cruising boats, the whole issue of wildly excessive fees to enter a port (they are even greater than in Mexico – back then about $35 in and out- before they abandoned the whole port captain fees in favour of a one-time cruising-permit fee for yachts) is annoying since basically the port captains do nothing for you except collect your fees. You could make a case perhaps for the park fees. But, even here, $100 a head seems over the top; it’s well above the fees, for example, at Yellowstone or Glacier National Parks and labour rates for park employees are surely lower here than for park rangers in the USA. Beyond breeding turtles, outside financing for which also comes from such institutions as the Smithsonian Institute and the Frankfurt (Germany) Zoo, what exactly does the park do? At local labour rates, how expensive can it be to groom a few paths and build a few wooden viewing platforms, many of which have anyway been funded by, say, the Spanish government? But The Galapagos are now top-of-the-pops amongst leading-edge tourists and, when you see how the anticipated arrival of one UK-owned Discovery-tours ship electrified the town of Baquerizo Moreno while we were there, you know that there will be more cruiseships coming here in the future and the infrastructure will be expanded to deal with them.
Clearly, eyes have lit up at the rosy economic prospects. I, for one, feel more than a little ripped off, and do what I can to thwart the outstretched palms. We were told by the agent not to report to the port captain of immigration until he had the cruising permit back from Quito. After ten days of waiting at anchor (though he said we could move around and take in the sights) this had not occurred. We therefore just left and came here overnight to Puerto Villamil on Isabela Island, some 83 miles away. Some of the up to a dozen boats have already checked out for the South Pacific in San Cristobal or Santa Cruz. But only one boat has actually checked in with the port captain here so far. They certainly have not paid port-captains fees.
Were it not for the fact that Andrew will need a T3 entry permit in order to exit through immigración at Guayaquil Airport, we could probably have arrived and simply left here for the mainland to check in (much more cheaply) there, having flown under the radar in The Galapagos the whole time and all the while waiting for the agent to get the permiso.
But as it is, we shall likely leave here on Friday to sail to Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz (40 miles to the east), check in with migración and Andrew can check out the Darwin Centre, catch his domestic flight on Sunday from Baltra Island to Guayaquil and connect to the U.S.A. Then Kathleen and I shall leave after a day or two for the mainland, stopping briefly at Baquerizo Moreno to have the electrician rectify the voltage-regulator problem.
posted by rjb @ Wednesday, May 03, 2006
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home