Wave of Mutilation

Saturday 27 February
Quito – Guayanquil – Baltra – Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands

The running joke – if you can call it that – is that I leave places shortly before something bad happens. I left Mumbai a day and a half before the terrorist attacks on 27 November, 2008. There are other examples, though they slip my mind right now. The “joke” is that I leave a trail of destruction in my wake.

I had left Chile about a month ago. Puerto Varas is about 200-250 miles south of Concepción, which in Chilean terms is about next door. I was in the airport at Quito waiting for my flight and I checked for wifi. There was. I checked my mail and I had an email from Mum telling me there was a tsunami expected in the Pacific from an earthquake in Chile. Well I wasn’t worried as right now I was in Quito and at nearly 3000 metres high and who knows how many miles inland, I didn’t think it was a risk for me.

The flight was delayed nonetheless and a fair bit of confusion reigned as various flights were called in tandem. I just sat and continued to surf until the time felt right to join a queue. Eventually we get to Guayaquil (disturbingly pronounced Why-I-Kill in Spanish). There are some annoying Americans who are ordering sandwiches from a stall as though it were a deli. In English. They hold the queue up for 20 mins when they could have just ordered off the menu like everyone else. I felt sorry for the girl behind them who just wanted a water.

There are more delays to the flight. I realise now that this most likely was due to the tsunami alert, but no one told us anything. Eventually we land in Baltra – a shitty little island off the north of Santa Cruz, with nothing but cacti and a strange grey, wispy vegetation, which is presumably why they built the airport there.

I meet my guy and he takes us to my hotel. The tsunami alert has meant that no one was allowed to leave Puerto Ayora, so my itinerary was out the window and I had the afternoon to myself. It turns out that in the morning everyone was evacuated to the highlands and there was a few thousand people hanging around there waiting for something to happen. I met a former Norwegian TV reporter who filed a report to her station over Skype from the island. I also meet some people who were left behind and saw it hit – it was only a couple of feet high and hit at low tide so all that happened was a bit of a splash on to the main road – you could see the flotsam left behind when I arrived. That was all.

At lunch I met an American couple and we joined up to go to the Charles Darwin Station in the afternoon, where they breed turtles and iguanas. Pleasingly, the main road is also called Charles Darwin Road.

So I see the first of literally too many turtles and iguanas. Although this is the only time I see land iguanas, which are coloured bright orange compared to the black marine iguanas. I also see “El solitario Jorge” or Lonesome George to you and me – the last surviving turtle of his species at an estimated 150 years and survivor of two world wars amongst other travails.

We also pass the fishing dock where the fishermen bring their catches for sale. The local pelicans and, surprisingly, sea lions have caught on to this and wait for the off cuts with great enthusiasm. Given that the pelicans are pretty big – wingspan about a metre and a half and beaks at about 40 cm – and that they are not afraid of humans, a crazy chaos reigns over the whole area. One pelican even tried to land on my head!

But that was trumped when a sea lion jumped a good three feet out the water and landed on the dock, waddled over to the counter and stood there, head hooked over the top, patiently waiting for some fish scraps to be sent its way. They act so like dogs – even their barks – that they should be called sea dogs in my opinion, if that phrase didn’t already have a different meaning. They were quicker than the pelicans at catching the scraps too, interestingly.

What my cousin Nicola had said was true – there was so much natural wildlife around you could barely miss it.

After that I have dinner on my own but meet up with two American guys who are in the room next to me at my hotel and eventually the American couple from the day join us as well. We all have a few drinks and a chat and eventually I turn in relatively early as I have an early start the next day.