Our first day in the Galapagos! Even after being here for so little time I can already tell that it is a unique place that seems to have more in common with both Haiti and Yellowstone National Park than most of Ecuador that I have seen.
The flights here were very normal, they had those fancy individual TV screens and I watched 2/3 of "Easy A" which was hilarious, like Mean Girls but with more social commentary. We got there within five hours; it was all very well organized. We re-united with the bio kids at a restaurant where they complained vigorously about the food. We would soon find out why. After lunch, we went on a very long walk that they told us would be a short walk. We walked on long stone paths, raised and made of volcanic rock. First we walked to a nature-center sort of place and then continued to several viewpoints around San Cristobal. The plant life and ground there is so different from Quito. It reminds me of Texas, actually. Jamie and I had this long discussion about how it looked like Port Aransas or something, Latino people walking to the beach in wife beaters with the same type of vegetation.
We climbed endless steps to a beautiful view over a cove and then to a giant paper maché statue of Charles Darwin. We descended to Playa Mann, a small beach that faces the front of the USFQ campus. The school looks like how people imagine college in California, a single stucco building. Cross the road and there's a beautiful beach. So we went snorkeling there and I began my snorkeling-meditation-cognitive-behavioral-therapy routine that I would develop over the next several days. I'll describe that later. We saw lots of beautiful blue fish, the occasional shadow of a sea lion, algae and anemones waving in the breeze of the waves. It was fun to swim and play around with your friends. Also, it was comforting and a good place to go for our first time snorkeling because it got deep very fast so you could see lots of life but still be very near the shore.
We had to get out after about an hour. I had a really hard time coming in because I sort of got stuck on some rocks. It didn't hurt or anything but I had to scramble and while I was doing that everyone started yelling and pointing at me. I had a sea lion like two feet behind me and I got so scared. Abstractly, and in the future, I have and would consider sea lions interesting and un scary. In the water, different story. I just stuck my head underwater and kicked really hard until I got to shore.
After that experience, I breathed deeply for a while and then we went to another snorkel spot, a cove we had seen from our walk. It was very different water, much deeper and clearer. I started to do little underwater dives that were fun if very salty. I could swim right by whole schools of fish, get close looks at the floor and generally have a much more three dimensional experience. It reminded me of that moment in The Sword in the Stone where Merlin and Arthur are fish and Merlin says, "You are now living in a world that exists between the ceiling and the floor."
Highlight of the day: Seeing a puffer fish!
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