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Family and Friends
Letters 2012.
May
2012
Dear Friends and Family,
Sun. May 6 5:30 AM Angel Villa, age
53, wiped the left side of his face
with his open left hand, fingers
against his forehead and brow, palm
across his chin and cheek and then
shook/snapped his hand at his side
to flick off the sweat his hand had
gathered. He wore a fleece jacket to
protect him from the pre dawn cold
over which he wiped his palm. He did
the same with his right hand. He
could not in the pre dawn darkness
find the correct spot to place the
sign on which was printed, “K 6”
(kilometer 6). This was the test
marathon. His responsibility was to
position all direction arrows,
distance signs and aid stations
within his sector before 5:45. He
could not spend much more time
looking for the “K 6” location if he
were to accomplish the majority of
his task on time.
Sun. May 13
5:15 AM Marathon Race Day. Manuel
Ortega was given the task of calling
the race director who was in the
highlands and informing him that the
Commandant of the Navy had decided
not send the tables to the aid
stations because he did not
understand why they were needed and
it was too much trouble in any case.
The race director’s reply was, “Why
does that not surprise me?” to which
Manuel had no answer. The race
director’s next sentences were
fairly clear. “We’ll be okay in the
highlands without tables, but we’ll
need five in town. You need to find
five tables and located them at…”
Manuel remembered the five points,
found the tables in a restaurant he
knew to be abandoned, the owners
having had to skip town because of
tax evasion issues. He properly
located these tables and then
worried about them. He called the
race director to inform him there
was no one at the tables and then
when there were people he called
again because there was no water. He
was not willing to let it go until
he knew the aid stations were manned
and stocked. There was another man
from the Galapagos National Park who
was doing this job according to a
time schedule which was a little
late for the comfort of Manuel.
Sun. May 13 6:05 AM Marathon
Race Day: Mercy Villa was at aid
station 2, about a kilometer from
the Control station where the
marathon runners were to be recorded
as they rounded a pylon and returned
on the same road from which they had
arrived. The Civil Defense man who
was suppose to be there had not
shown up yet and if no one were
there soon the marathon runners
would likely keep running down that
road, trotting beyond the course to
the far side of the island. She sent
her son Angel David with a clip
board running for the point in the
road where the civil defense should
have been with instructions that the
marathon runners were on their way
and he had to get there before the
first one arrived. The civil defense
passed him in their car on their way
to their appointed position.
Sun. May 13 7:35 AM Marathon Race
Day: Pedro Arguello had lent the use
of his freezers to store small bags
of ice and frozen towels for the
marathon runners. The weather was
ten degree warmer than was usual for
this time of year and the race
director had spoken to him about the
importance of having that ice and
those towels ready. He had not heard
from the race director yet that
morning. No one had arrived to pick
up the ice or towels, so he arranged
the boxes of these items in a neat
pile at the street edge with the
idea to facilitate their
distribution and was relieved to see
Oscar from the National Park pull up
before he had finished.
 Unlike
most marathons run throughout the
world, no one gets paid for their
work here. It is all purely
volunteer. The pueblo has come to
embrace that this marathon truly is
THEIR marathon, a marathon put on by
the community, for the community. It
is a healthy, eco-friendly, unifying
event that injects more than
$150,000 directly into the local
economy each year, promotes health
and the image of San Cristobal.
ESPN Latin America was here this
year. They had written maybe ten
days before the marathon saying they
were coming, that they were paying
their own way and that all they
wanted was some access/help with the
National Park. This is the letter I
wrote my mother late that Mother’s
day after the marathon.
Happy
Mother's Day!
Just a note,
marathon went really well. ESPN
Latin America (based in Brazil
broadcasts from Mexico to Tierra del
Fuego) is doing a 30 minute program
only on the Come To Galapagos
Marathon as part of their series on
“the best marathons in the world”.
The camera guys who have been to
many marathons throughout the world
were really enthusiastic about all
that they saw. They called this an
"eccentric marathon". Eccentric
translates somewhat differently in
Spanish, leans toward an air of
style, uniqueness and intelligence
rather than just goofy. Bere didn't
collapse this year and I’m still
standing too. Runners and sponsors
really happy.
Again, Happy
Mother's day!
Siempre Amor
It was an unseasonably hot and
humid May 13 this year, so we
boosted the medical team staff,
began storing ice a week before as
the temperature hadn’t yet dropped
as it normally does. We had no
emergencies worse than a runner
falling and getting scrapped up and
another inexperienced runner,
running the 10K collapse of
dehydration, due to inexperience
with running distances as long as
10K while combating an intestinal
bug.
The marathon was won by
a woman from Amsterdam. Holland
being a flat country, she had signed
up for the “training” package we
offered which allowed her two weeks
to acclimate to the climate and the
mostly downhill nature of the
course. She was benefitted by the
lead runners of the navy and police
setting an unsustainable pace. They
were both the fastest runners either
institution had, had been flown in
to win and they beat each other up
(metaphorically) on the first half
of the course. She finished four
minutes ahead of the second place
navy runner who had won the marathon
the previous two years.
We’re
moving the date of next year’s
marathon to June 9 to give us a
little more margin of error with
the temperature. You may wonder why
not just have the marathon in the
coldest month? The reason for this
is most people not only come here to
run, but to enjoy the Galapagos and
May (while it is a transition month)
normally offers a cool enough
climate, vistas from the highlands
for the runners and water warm
enough to swim in comfortably. I’ve
tried to balance the pluses and
minuses for the overall experience
of our runners. After nine years of
personal experience living here, May
would be the month I would want to
come here on vacation and run that
course in a marathon. Those dates
also help international runners with
kids, flight costs, etc. to have the
marathon be over before Memorial
Day.
That’s all I got for
now. I’ll write when I know how you
can access the ESPN show which they
say will broadcast in the coming
weeks. Attached photos of first
place finisher, couple finishing and
marathon start.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and
Roley
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Family and Friends
Letters 2012.
April
2012
Dear Friends and Family,
We very rarely ever get to see our
guests again after they leave here,
much of our waking lives are spent
with
people who we will only know for a
short while, serial friendships.
That’s probably true for the vast
majority of mankind these days.
However living on an island brings
that into specific relief.
Volunteers, friends of friends,
scientists and our guests, even the
police and navy personnel all come
and go with a revolving door
frequency. We’re lucky in that the
majority of our guests, the majority
of the people that are attracted to
traveling with Come To Galapagos and
the majority of the volunteers and
scientists are really wonderful
people, practically the cream of
humanity. Serial friendships with
the cream of humanity… I could
imagine worse circumstances.
Still, we’ve grown accustomed to
putting up emotional boundaries, not
allowing ourselves to get attached,
become consciously un-invested in
anything more than that we do our
best by them while they are here.
(Re-reading, the above doesn’t sound
like it is coming from a much too
generous heart.)
Less and
less over the years I allow myself
down the path of “I will never see
you again in my life” as I am
sending someone away, less and less
I fore go having to fight back a
tear.
I had a heart breaker
the other day. I sent Frank and
Doreen on a small airplane to
Isabela and out of our lives
forever. Sometimes people show up
who I believe I would really like to
have as neighbors or family members.
This is surely romantic; I simply
hadn’t had enough time to spend with
them to wish they were living
somewhere else.
Looking at
Frank and Doreen, I became suddenly,
overly aware that the gods had
granted me the enormous gift of the
few hours I had been able to spend
with them and that is all I was
going to get in this life and that
it was over as of this moment. All
that was left was a kiss on the
cheek and a farewell hug or
handshake.
This year it has
rained more than any of the
eight/nine years I’ve been here,
including the mild El Niño year we
had. This is not an El Niño year.
What did happen was we received a
“Kelvin Wave” see
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2002/05mar_kelvinwave/
this is a pool of warmer water only
a couple of inches deep and a couple
hundred miles across and a few
hundred in length that floats on the
surface of relatively cooler water
and migrates across the pacific
ocean’s equator west to east.
We receive no storm fronts, rain
doesn’t come from anywhere except
changes in temperature and dew point
of air masses migrating over the
islands. Generally a couple times a
year in late February or March
during which, unlike rains of other
months we’ll get these falls at a
rate of three or four inches an hour
for a couple of hours all over the
island, it is not heavy rain, it is
the air simply turning into
falling/cascading water, falling
fast enough to soak you completely
in less than thirty seconds, turn
dry gullies into raging rivers,
beaches wash out, the ocean turns
brown near the island within less
than two hours time. This is warm
rain. You get wet, but not cold. And
because of the humidity, you really
don’t even have to be in the rain to
get wet. These generally happen in
Feb. or early mid March at the
latest. This year, late March into
the first days of April we were
still getting deluged.
 April
10, the weather shifted, the wind
backed around to its normal
direction and it appeared likely we
were done with the rain for the
year. As insurance I bought a new
umbrella, reverse Murphy’s Law (if
you want someone to call you, get in
the shower), only to have minor
rains return at night typically 12
to two AM when I wouldn’t need my
new umbrella anyway. These rains
lasted for a week or so. I thought
the gods were just having fun with
me.
Then the down pours began
again, almost daily, usually around
1 PM, some days stronger than
others. Not only have I been able to
use that umbrella, but bought two
others and then three more for our
guests. The winds shifted again a
few days ago to their normal
direction and I’m tempted to buy
another umbrella.
We’re
pretty crazy these days as the
marathon is coming up in two weeks,
the test marathon in five days. Just
last week we received a call from
ESPN and they want to cover the
Marathon this year. They said the
same last year and didn’t show, but
this year they want to pay their way
entirely, have all kinds of ideas
about who they want to interview
etc. Why they didn’t call or write
months ago I don’t know. It would
have been a lot easier on us, but
such are these last weeks of April
and first of May’s every year.
I don’t normally save photos of
our guests unless they are with
animals or something and so I’ve
attached the two I found, passing
some time with local fisherman.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and
Roley
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Family and Friends
Letters 2012.
March
2012
Dear Friends and Family,
This is not so much a Friends and Family
letter as a state of tourism in
Galapagos diatribe. I was asked to write
a short personalized assessment, turned
into the following, stop reading if
you’re waiting for pretty pictures or
cute stories. I’m saving a couple for
next month’s Friends and Family epistle.
In 2004 70 thousand tourists arrived
in the Galapagos. An unprecedented
number up to that point, nearly a 20%
rise from the year before and less than
5% of the revenue generated by tourism
to the Galapagos that year touched the
hands of the local population. The
amount of tourists arriving to the
Galapagos as land based tourists was so
negligible no one measured it. Today
more than 140 thousand tourists arrive
here annually; 37% are land based, 38%
cruise ship (the remaining are students,
scientists, business men, etc.) and it
is estimated that still less than 12% of
the revenue generated by tourism to the
Galapagos touches the hands of the local
population.
We conceptualized
our business in 2004 with the idea that
tourism could be generated locally via
the internet, tourism that could support
environmentally and economically
sustainable businesses within the
populace, as opposed to the fishing
industry which had decimated fisheries
or farming which as a viable means to
make a living had been destroyed by mass
importation of agricultural goods from
the mainland. Or even tourism as the
majority of people working in that
industry were doing it for the profits
of foreign companies, being paid a
discounted rate for the value of their
services. Again, this was 2004. The idea
was that our company would have two main
functions, bring the tourists in small
private customized community based tour
groups (as opposed to “packaged”/mass
tourism) and coordinate their tours here
using existing amenities and services
rather than creating a vertical company
by building our own hotel, opening our
own restaurant, buying our own boat,
etc. In this manner not only any profits
we made, but actually the majority of
the revenue generated through our
company would end up directly in the
hands of the people that live here and
that would increase their awareness of
the need to protect the resource that
was funding their livelihood, an
awareness that was and still is to a
somewhat lesser extent lacking. For us,
involving the community in what we were
attempting to do was one of, if not the
key difference between making a living
and making a life in the Galapagos. Most
of you are familiar with the many other
differences we are wrestling to make.
Here we are eight years later. Our
business has been only marginally
successful in this regard. Our business
is growing, but not at a rate that will
likely ever have a significant impact.
Our positive economic impact on the
sustainable businesses in the community
has been limited by our volume of
clients. Soon after the inception of our
business large international travel
companies (Gap, Row, REI, Disneyland et
al) began mass marketing budget land
based tours to the Galapagos and several
wealthy investors from the mainland
arrived and built vertical travel
companies as described above, neither
support local businesses anymore than
they absolutely have to and neither is
here to do anything but make a buck. Add
to that at least twenty other new travel
companies have emerged in the Galapagos
since 2004 competing for a market that
cannot possibly support them all.
Annually our business puts $300,000
into the local economy, plus another
$100,000 from the marathon we organize
each year. We support only one
fishermen’s family and only augment
local agriculture by about $10,000
annually. That doesn’t rate even half a
feather in our cap for seven years work.
One of our aspirations at the outset
in 2004 was that other locals would
imitate us. Five have copied our
business model and web page practically
verbatim, but none of them copied the
ethic, developing sustainable economies
outside their own. Many people associate
eco-friendly with “eco-nomical” which
can be true, but seldom is, particularly
here in the Galapagos. In order to
compete in the market place it takes a
lot of extra work to “sell” the value of
programs such as “pesca viencial”
(fishing with locals) or providing
locally grown food (costs more than
imported), more extra work to provide
those and it often means losing business
to companies that do not provide such.
So the trend has been instead to simply
state somewhere on the company’s website
that they are a leader in eco-friendly
tourism and at the cutting edge of
efforts to preserve the Galapagos.
Developing a business relying on the
internet to generate customers in the
Galapagos is a tough nut to crack. It is
one thing to have a web page it is
another to have it prominent in search
engine results where people can find it.
Of the five companies that have copied
us… and I don’t know for a fact that
they copied us, what was needed was
obvious and not something you would want
to patent, but of those five, three have
been creative in solving the problem of
a web/internet/search engine results
presence. They have falsified reviews on
trip adviser and trip adviser’s
competitors, labeling themselves an
“attraction” rather than a tour company.
(Trip advisor doesn’t review tour
companies), basically they piggy-backed
a web presence. Trip adviser and its
competitors don’t/can’t do anything
about falsified reviews. It is too
expensive/outside their business model
to adequately police reviews. They are
basically just software programs and the
guys that keep them running.
We
have been in business for seven years.
Not everyone, but practically everyone
who travels with us leaves here so over
the top happy, I sometimes imagine them
practically willing to give me their
first born son. The first born
thankfully usually returns home with
them. In those seven years, almost
everyone has written us a nice thank you
letter, but only two people have gone to
all the trouble to write trip adviser.
It is time consuming and since trip
adviser doesn’t review tour operators,
they had to post their reviews in trip
adviser’s “forum” section. These other
local companies have more positive
reviews than they’ve had clients. I’m
really not knocking them. Imagine being
born here, trying to make a business in
tourism, facing all the practically
insurmountable marketing challenges.
Falsifying reviews on trip adviser is
not so egregious in that light. It
happens everywhere else in the world
too. Opening a restaurant? The first
step is falsifying reviews on the
internet. I understand all too well the
challenges these other local companies
face trying to get themselves where
people can find them when searching for
a vacation to the Galapagos.
What we did to get where we are on the
internet was difficult, time consuming
and expensive. Now we are the first
result in a Google search for “land
based tours Galapagos”, “customized
tours Galapagos” and on the first or
second page of results for many other
search criteria. We receive more than
six hundred new visitors to our site a
month.
Our aspiration that other
local companies would be able to or want
to imitate us was naive and short
sighted. We didn’t understand the market
forces that were coming to bare.
About trip adviser, pay most attention
to the negative reviews while keeping an
open mind that a competitor for a
particular business can also write a
falsified negative review (it happens)
and that trip adviser doesn’t care
anymore about falsified negative reviews
than they do about falsified positive
reviews.
On a related subject, I
don’t have any proof of this, my only
evidence is the changes in the
percentages of types of people that
write us, but here is my hypothesis.
Most or at least a good percentage of
the people with the where withal to
travel internationally have already been
here to the Galapagos. Galapagos is
difficult and expensive to get to,
unlike say Hawaii where many people are
likely to go several times in their
lives. For most people Galapagos is a
one time deal. This leaves an available
market for the Galapagos of the people
with the where withal who haven’t been
here or are discovering they might want
to come, the people that have recently
come into the where withal and the
people without the where withal/economy
budget travelers.
Over the past
year or so there has been a dramatic
increase in the number of “budget” and
twenty/thirty-something traveler’s
writing us. I don’t think in the first
five years of our business that we even
had one organizing guest of a tour under
forty, well maybe a couple in their late
thirties. Anyway, this new younger set,
tend to write as if we were in Puerto
Vallarta, Mexico or Bali, Indonesia, “Do
you rent mopeds?” They seem to have no
consideration that they are traveling to
the last somewhat intact biological
refuge on the planet. They want to go
“multi-sporting”, want things on a
budget and they want me to know they are
“shopping around”.
Contributing to or perhaps precipitating
this trend are: the large international
travel companies who market land based
tours with names like “Galapagos on a
Shoestring” or “multi-sport Galapagos”,
guide books and internet travel
websites, blogs, etc. which promote the
idea of traveling to the Galapagos as if
it is no different than traveling to
Costa Rica. The traveling part isn’t any
different really. The planning part is
quickly becoming similar. What is
different of course is the fragility of
the ecosystems at the destination’s end.
Perhaps the recent development
that has had the greatest immediate
impact has been the introduction of yet
a third airline servicing the Galapagos,
Lan. They opened their marketing of the
Galapagos by offering incredibly cheap
airfares and land based package deals
(marketed mostly in South America). See
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/lan-to-launch-galapagos-flights-in-september-339598
though this article is way off in
reporting the number of flights to the
Galapagos.
For the first time
people can now book their own flights to
the Galapagos over the internet and not
only that, but can use frequent flyer
miles through Lan’s affiliated airlines.
You can be sure the other two airlines
flying to the Galapagos will also soon
be providing this “service”. We often
receive letters now, “I have my flights,
I’m arriving this date, leaving this
date, what do you have for me?” Usually
what I have for them is bad news.
They’ve booked a round trip flight to
Baltra and so will likely be spending
the majority of their time in the
tourist capital of the Galapagos, a
place we send only about half our guests
and rarely for more than a night, mostly
just to show them the impact of what is
happening and an example of how to ruin
a perfectly good island.
The
solution to the above is in the hands of
the Ecuadorean government, but since
they aren’t doing nearly enough, it
falls to travelers to make educated
choices about where, how and with which
companies they travel. Most of you have
already done just that and you have our
unceasing gratitude.
I/we bring
tourists here. That is our business (how
we feed and clothe ourselves), albeit
that we designed our business within a
sustainable model as opposed to the non
sustainable model which is the Galapagos
today. Still, we are bringing tourists,
actually more than we ever have,
annually more than a hundred a year (not
counting the marathon we organize,
sustainable, leave only footprints, $
directly to the hands of the
inhabitants), 0.075 % of all tourists
arriving in the Galapagos, less than one
tenth of one percent.
I’ve been
asked, I don’t know how many times,
“What would you do if you could do
anything to save/preserve the
Galapagos?”
I don’t have to
hesitate. No informed, sensible person
would have a different answer.
“Forbid tourism. Shut it all down”.
That’s how you preserve a delicate and
unique ecosystem as opposed to “cashing
in” while it still exists which appears
to be the current plan. My plan B for
ourselves, I suspect would be moving to
a ski resort in Argentina, affluent
residents, good schools and recreational
opportunities and not too far from my
wife’s family who she cannot live
without, plus we would live in a place
with four distinct seasons, my wife and
son would get to know what snow and cold
are, spring and fall. Of course we’d be
starting from scratch, lose our farm and
the business we created. We’d be okay.
This reminds me of the loggers of
redwoods or salmon fishermen in north
western US a few years ago being forced
to stop logging and fishing, to find
other ways to make a living. I
understood. I understand. I don’t think
we have to worry about that though. It
appears we’ll be allowed to witness what
the loggers and salmon fishermen were
spared had they been allowed to
continue. I’ll do it with my wife and
son while continuing to wrestle to make
a difference.
Short of
forbidding tourism?
Up the park
entry fee to $500.
Create a national
web site through which all tours to the
Galapagos must be booked through
Ecuadorian companies.
Require that
all payments for Galapagos tours flow
through national banks.
Require that
any tour of the Galapagos must be at
least ten days.
Eliminate all
commercial and sport fishing in the
Galapagos. All fish caught in the
Galapagos must be eaten in the
Galapagos.
Tariff all incoming
produce to the Galapagos that can be
produced here.
Stop subsidizing the
cost of energy (electricity and
gasoline).
Tax all incoming sporting
equipment at $100 per, bicycles, kayak,
surfboard etc. for visitors, companies
and locals.
These suggestions
would be an economic death sentence to
most of our friends and many local
businesses, depopulate the islands, end
political careers. They would increase
our business exponentially, actually
have a net positive effect on the
Ecuadorean economy overall within three
years (obviously not on the economy of
the Galapagos as it exists today),
increase revenues for the Ecuadorean
government and the Galapagos National
park immediately, save the Galapagos
from the downward spiral of ever
increasing tourism and it will never
happen. I can send you the economic
analysis of the above on request. It is
rather startling.
What is far
more likely to happen is that some
strain of avian flu, distemper, dengue,
lime disease will cause the extinction
or near extinction of some form or forms
of fauna that everyone comes here to
see. These animals are endemic to
islands that up until recently have been
isolated from all of the world’s various
diseases and so have little or no
immunity. After the unique species of
the Galapagos start dying, these islands
will just be a bunch of hard to get to
islands on the equator with barely
enough water for swimming pools and
certainly not for golf courses, though
nobody comes to Ecuador to golf anyway.
Aside from a few scientists, a
few economists and the Charles Darwin
Foundation (see
http://www.darwinfoundation.org/english/pages/interna.php?txtCodiInfo=33),
who doesn’t think this is hyperbole?
What gets celebrated in the
international press are minimally
consequential victories (some would
disagree) like the eradication of goats
on Santiago (they still run wild on
practically every other large island),
Lonesome George (the last of his species
of giant tortoise) successfully
inseminated a giant tortoise of another
species, the capture of one or two
illegal shark fin fishing boats a year
(as opposed to who knows how many others
that operate daily), etc.
No one
talks much about what has already
occurred here. Extinction of many
species of giant tortoise’, birds and
plants, endemic species that exist here
that are on the endangered species list,
the decimation of fisheries, no one
seems to pay attention to the fact that
97% of the plant mass on the inhabited
islands of the Galapagos is invasive
introduced species. No one talks about
feral cats eating marine iguanas etc.
No one talks about introduced
insects perhaps the biggest threat
(carmelitas didn’t exist here only 15
years ago, I’ve seen a new aphid
introduced in the last three years that
is currently denuding the trees that
surround our house, not the end of the
world as they are introduced species,
but the fact that this bug wasn’t here
four years ago could be). The amount of
domestic animals being allowed to enter
the islands is greater than it ever has
been. Now you can find hybrid dogs of
all varieties in households here, status
symbols, Pit Bulls to Pekinese and this
is exacerbated by the lack of
education/ethical practices with regard
to the care and training of domestic
animals (they often run freely on the
beaches, mate freely in the streets and
for the most part are fed poorly) and
lack of enforcement of state or
municipal ordinances. There is
practically no end to the things I could
site and I likely missed the most
important ones here.
It is true
nature adapts, however this is the one
place in the world where you REALLY
don’t want it to have to. Conversations
with officials, business men,
politicians et al about all of the
above… if the conversation goes on for
any length of time, it generally ends
(after accessing political and economic
“realities”) in discussions about the
Gaia theory. Basically man is a bacteria
and the planet will take care of itself
in the end so what’s the big woo?
My big woo is that this is my son’s
and his buddy’s planet. I believe the
following, “We do not inherit the world
from our fathers. We borrow it from our
sons.” And so we continue to slug it out
here, continue to offer up the Galapagos
with a vision that looks back and
forward, but most importantly is about
today, with no punches pulled.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and
Roley
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Family and Friends
Letters 2012.
February
2012
Dear Friends and Family,
When people write us for the first time
they often say that they “…want to see
as many animals as possible, as
many things, as many islands, as many…”
They don’t want to miss anything.
Completely understandable. Rarely do
people travel all the way here twice in
their lives, unlike, for example Hawaii.
Not often, but occasionally we
receive visitors who take this to an
extreme. Just as an example, we take
them to the scheduled visit to the giant
tortoise reserve, show them giant
tortoises battling. If you haven’t seen
it (it takes some luck and good timing
by us), try to imagine how giant
tortoises battle, the sounds of the
shells colliding, etc. Our/these guests
take a picture, turn away from the
tortoises and ask, “What’s next?”
Instantly the guide or if it is me are
sad, disappointed. The tour is going to
be tough for us and unsatisfactory for
these visitors. You can work as hard as
we do to take a horse to water (get them
to the right water at the right time),
but... These guys tend to blow through
stuff pretty fast because they don’t
want to “miss anything”. Of course
they’re missing what’s in front of their
faces because they’re so anxious to move
on and in the end they tend to feel as
if they have been in some way taken
advantage of, either by us or the hype
over the Galapagos.
Mostly we
receive the opposite. You can take them
to water, but can’t stop their curiosity
or passion for photos or stop them from
drinking.
You can’t possibly see
everything, do everything there is to do
in the Galapagos in one week or five.
I’ve been here eight years, am
constantly in the water and it was only
last week I saw three things I hadn’t
even known I’d “missed” or conceived I
wanted to see. One was small enough, the
Sally Lightfoot crabs shed their shells
when they grow out them, simply back out
the ass end leaving an entire shell,
legs, claws, clear eye globes included.
I’d spoken about this hundreds of times
because their bright red discarded
shells are everywhere near the water
line, people take them for dead crabs,
but I had never seen one actually doing
it until last week. Our son helped this
crab out of the last little bit.
Another was swimming with manta rays.
I’d seen them plenty from boats leaping
far into the air and from surfboards,
the tips of their wings cutting through
the water like shark fins and the only
way you know they are not shark fins is
that they are in pairs, but I had never
snorkeled among them. These are big
animals/fish. I’ve seen ‘em with wing
spans of better than two meters. The
ones we snorkeled with were smaller, but
big enough. The family that was with me
just assumed this was a normal every day
experience. I can’t however, put that on
an itinerary, “Tues. PM, swimming with
manta rays”.
 And
the third was watching blue footed
boobies fish. This you can see almost
any hour of any day in near coastal
waters. They dive into the water like
pelicans do except that they can hit the
water at up to 70 miles an hour and
spear down through thirty feet of water.
Years ago I’d witnessed this deep diving
of boobies one day from a cliff
overlooking a deep water cove. Generally
they are fishing in less than ten feet
of water. There were maybe a hundred
birds working that day, that hour, that
cove, plummeting through the air and
then after the splash/penetration
thirty-forty feet through the water,
their bubble trails looked like swerving
torpedoes. After diving for food Boobies
surface like a submerged volley ball,
practically taking air as they hit the
surface. I watched this group of birds
working, some plummeting through the
air, others torpedoing in the water,
others popping up and still others
taking wing to plummet again and I
remember thinking they were piercing
dimensions, water and air.
I’d
been in shallow water, in a school of
bait fish so thick you could feel them
passing your ankles and chest, couldn’t
see through them underwater with your
mask while a group of boobies worked the
bait fish all around us, but never had I
been snorkeling in deeper water and been
able to watch through my mask the
boobies break the surface of the water,
sometimes within feet of me, torpedo
down, swerving to catch a fish thirty
feet below me and then almost as fun as
watching them come torpedoing down
through the water near and farther away,
the way they much more calmly, in a
vertical line return to the surface,
also sometimes within feet of my
horizontal body on the surface, the
water shedding off their wings as they
took flight afterwards peppering my
back, the feel of a breeze from their
flapping wings.
Blue footed
boobies are called “lancers” (piqueros)
here for the way they spear into the
water. A National Park guide had
explained this to me once, but I had a
never witnessed it. You would think
these birds would torpedo down and
snatch their fish on the way down. They
don’t. They spear down through the water
and scoop the small fish on the return
journey. They dive below the fish, open
their mouths, close on the fish. When
they surface they raise their chin high,
swallow the fish and then take to the
air again. “Fri. AM, study of blue
footed boobies deep water fishing
technique.”
The older couple who
were with me that day didn’t ask,
“What’s next?”
February weather report: Ocean temp.
87 degrees, Air temp. 87 degrees,
Humidity 87%. Partial clouds, mostly sun
on the coast. The sun feels like it’s
arriving through a magnifying glass. The
ocean doesn’t cool you off, particularly
if you are doing any aerobic activities,
swimming, surfing, etc. You either want
to be in the water floating, in front of
a fan or in some air conditioned room.
The bank is actually one of the nicest,
68 degrees, very low humidity.
Photos this month: My son directing
traffic during a giant tortoise
stampede, just another day swimming with
sea lions and my son lecturing the
pelicans.
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and
Roley
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Family and Friends
Letters 2012.
January
2012
Dear Friends and Family,
In 2008 I had the opportunity to meet a
man, Leonardo Wild, Christen's (my 32
year old brother in law and famous TV
personality here in Ecuador) second
father/confidant. Christen’s biological
father died here on San Cristobal of a
heart attack in 1986 when Christen was
ten. His father likely would have
survived the heart attack if there had
been even the most rudimentary medical
supplies (oxygen), qualified doctors
etc. He died in the arms of my sister in
law on the side walk while my wife, then
twelve years old raced around to the
clinic, such as it was (still is), the
navy base, pharmacies… There are these
various "new age" type schools (actually
pre date the idiom "new age");
Montessori is one of them, Pelosi
another which don't "teach" in the
traditional sense at all. They simply
provide opportunities for exploration.
When I met Christen’s second father, one
of the first things he said to me was,
"Christen doesn't show up here as much
as he used to. Now when he does he
arrives with a bottle of wine and a lot
of questions. We'll drink the wine and
then give our good-bye hugs and all I
will have done is ask more questions."
This man speaks four languages,
built his own boat, sailed around the
 world,
somehow made landfall in the mountains
outside of Quito, built the two story
bioclimatic house where Christen met him
years before I did, makes his living
giving lectures around the world and
writing books in various languages
fiction and non-fiction, all very
“radical” in their premise that our
current world culture is pretty mixed up
and it began with the western world
embracing Voltaire's philosophy “reason
is king/rationality” and what to do/can
be done about it, “…alternative
education that doesn’t pop out
automatons as traditional education
does.”, is according to him one and
perhaps the most important of them.
Don’t get wound up in this. If you’re
interested there’s a book by a man, John
Ralston Saul, “Voltaire’s Bastards”. It
contextualizes history in this vein or
just google Leonardo or rationality.
I was directed to Christen’s second
father while researching education for
our son by a professor, Lucy's (my
sister in-law) favorite at the
University of San Francisco, Quito. She
graduated with duel master's degrees. I
didn't understand there was a family
connection before our arrival at
Christen’s second father’s house. Lucy's
professor didn't know there was a family
connection either.
Anyway, this
guy has three kids. His oldest daughter
(at that time fifteen years old) had
never been "taught" a letter or word. At
age 9, she decided she wanted to learn
how to read. He took me into her bedroom
where I was presented with a large book
shelf full of books lined on their ends
and the spaces between the books and the
shelf above, crammed with books on their
sides. She'd read them all.
Maybe
there were two hundred books there.
I took some time perusing the titles
and what struck me first was that they
were in four languages, second how
completely “unorganized” they were.
There were Harry Potter books in
different languages peppered throughout
the book shelves, Hanna Montana in
French was next to Camus, which was next
to a biography of Meryl Streep in
Spanish, next to a Dashil Hammit, next
to Faulkner both in English, next to
"Etiquette Guide to Japan" in Spanish,
next to a volume of “Lord of the Rings”,
the other two volumes also peppered
throughout the shelves and all three
were in different languages and there
were two bibles, neither in English and
neither on the same shelf. The bibles
made me doubt she had read them all
cover to cover. There was Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Grey, a Thoreu,
Noam Chomsky, Isabel Allende. Hard to
imagine a more eclectic group of books.
I asked the daughter if these
books were in any way organized.
"Absolutely" was the reply. "They're
where they belong".
I asked,
"You mean they all belong on the book
shelves?"
She rolled her eyes
and head as if this was “all just too
much”. "Dad..." she looked at her
father. He looked down at the floor.
"I reorganize my book shelves every
so often for fun. Sometimes I like Billy
Budd (Melville character, from the novel
of the same name) next to Japan
etiquette because in those days sailing
ships did arrive to Japan, but he was
never going to get there. It is like a
puzzle, making them all fit, related and
it is fun. I not only get to play with
what’s in the books, but also with the
meanings and sounds of the languages
too. The bibles are the easiest and
sometimes the most confusing. I have to
remember why I put them where I did and
with the bibles, because I never use the
obvious, sometimes I have to think
twice.”
Why did you read about
Japanese etiquette in Spanish?
“My dad gave me that book before our
trip to see…” she rolled her eyes again
but, this time raised her hands shoulder
high, took a step back in a slight
crouch, looked me in the eye and
dramatically, apparently mimicking her
father emoted, “The Lights of Tokyo!”.
She wiggled her finger tips as if
directing some message at me.
Do
you ever organize your books as a
library would, by language, fiction,
non-fiction organized alphabetically or
by topic?
“That’s pretty boring,
don’t you think?”
It makes it
easier to find what you’re looking for.
“Not for me, really. They’re my
books. I always know where they are,
except when my younger brothers have
been messing with them.”
She gave
me a side eyed glance, looked at her
father who’d kept his eyes away from
mine. He frowned a smile at her, for her
patience, I suspect.
Given her
father's genes and her mother's (long
story about her, but also a pretty
unique woman) you might be thinking this
is a family of geniuses.
I asked
her dad.
You'd not be surprised
that he had issues with the word genius
and the IQ tests which
“validate/qualify” it. “IQ tests do not
measure intelligence, but rather a
specific skill set valued by those who
create IQ tests. My daughter, according
to a Stanford University’s children’s IQ
test is an idiot or was a few years ago.
She’s neither an idiot nor genius, just
a kid as we all are in our best suits.”
My mom had written me a note,
apparently afraid I would withhold
bathroom or eating privileges from our
four year old son. She’d sent us this
really cool set of educational books for
Christmas and a few weeks later a
letter. “They are too advanced for his
age! Don’t try to force him,” etc. etc.
Please accept my apology, this
“Friends and Family” letter doesn’t have
anything to do with the Galapagos,
excepting that it speaks to my doofy
idea of how to handle raising a son on
an island of three quarters “infidels”
(people who can’t/haven’t yet been able
to understand education is the key to
their son’s future, the preservation of
these islands and the ability of their
family to continue to survive here).
This was my reply to my mom’s letter:
Hey Mom,
Thanks for the note
about the edu. books.
I'm not
real big on forcing our son to do much
besides mind his manners and eat his
vegetables. I leave combing
his hair and brushing his teeth to his
mom, none of which is very difficult
with him. He gets naturally interested
in the things he does and so those I
help him with, climbing trees, swimming,
catching lizards, reading if you can
believe. He wants to do many things we
don’t do, but also what we do do. He has
become naturally interested in computers
from watching us work on them. I down
loaded “Jump Start for first grade”
which enthralls him. I help him with
that while he unconsciously learns about
using a computer, phonetics, addition,
particles of speech, etc. etc. He
can/has no problem sitting for hours
with this.
We had a delightful
Xmas. The family is still here (sister
in law with husband and three kids
sharing our 600 sq. ft. one bath house
for weeks). The saying about house
guests and fish.... kind of gets thrown
out the window when its family, also I
find that it helps to cook them properly
upon arrival to preserve their
freshness.
Thank you again for
researching and sending the books for
Roley (our son). I'm looking forward to
having some time to spend with him and
those books. I've looked ‘em over pretty
good and there's nothing sinister about
‘em, nothing he won't be catching or
wanting to catch at the right time and
with the right application, i.e. you
show 'em to him, goof around with them a
little and if he's not interested, he's
not interested. He is interested in
spending time with his dad and so
sometimes makes a little extra effort
which often gets over the initial
hump/skepticism that there isn’t likely
other more fun stuff to do. If it
catches, then he's off and running, self
motivated. If it doesn’t we go to the
beach.
How many four year olds do
you know in Palo Alto, California (where
my mom lives), blessed with all the
wealth, technology, super pre-school
schools etc., can swim, ride a bike,
catch a lizard, find a program on a
computer from the “start” button,
speak/are nearly fluent in two languages
and can understand a third? Your
grandkid does and I/we haven’t done any
“educating”. Also and not for nothing,
his parents aren’t really all that
exceptionally bright and we all live on
an island 600 miles off the coast of a
third world nation most famous for
bananas and defaulting on international
loans.
Sure, I’m proud of my son,
however every day I see more and more
that he is not really of our “making”,
who he seems to be growing into appears
to have more to do with what we haven’t
done than with what we have. I suppose
we could take credit for that…”
Siempre Amor,
Rick, Bere and
Roley
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