Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9302280235
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Stephen Williams
DATELINE: GALAPAGOS ISLANDS, ECUADOR LENGTH: Long
A PREHISTORIC ZOO
Phantoms in grainy shades of deep gray and blue flashed in the surf near the shore-line. The bulky shapes darted through the water, but by concentrating, you could pick out a sharp fin, a curved tail, that familiar rounded snout.We stood on the soft white sand of the isle of Bartolome in the Galapagos Islands. Behind us were mounds of volcanic rock and behind them, 600 miles of empty Pacific Ocean stretching to the mainland of South America. In front of us: sharks.
"We can't swim here," our guide said. "Too many tourists have tried to play with the sharks, and we don't want to spook the fish."
A white-tipped reef shark broke the surface, but in an instant he was under the water, zipping in and out of the shallows.
"You mean we can't swim with sharks to protect the sharks?" someone asked, and the guide said yes, that was why. I recalled a note in my guidebook that the sharks of the Galapagos "have never been known to attack and injure a human swimmer."
Still, I felt more comfortable swimming with the sea lions: A couple of days later, I was snorkeling in the turquoise waters off Devil's Crown on Floreana Island, where sharks rarely swim. Iridescent-blue and neon-yellow fishes floated below me, and all was peaceful, except for an occasional human splashing by. Then this whiskered blob, a burnished golden-brown torpedo spinning and blowing bubbles, bulleted past, his fur grazing me. The sensation? Shock, then terror (shark!), then exhilaration.
Just another afternoon in the Galapagos Islands.
The Galapagos are not quite out of this world. They are only a 90-minute flight from the coast of Ecuador, in fact, but more like the world used to be.
I'm not waxing nostalgic here like reminiscing about Paris in the '20s. The Galapagos are how the world was 4 million years ago. The archipelago is a kind of prehistoric zoo without the cages: The lack of natural predators in this remote setting has left the animals fearless of foreign species, including tourists. It is one of the few places in the world to study living survivals of species arrested at various evolutionary stages.
Ecuador's "Enchanted Isles" and islets so named by Bishop Tomas de Bertanga who discovered them in 1535 have been a wildlife theater fascinating naturalists ever since Charles Darwin visited aboard the HMS Beagle in 1835, charting findings that would become part of his theory of evolution.
My seven-day visit to the islands in December, aboard the cruise ship Galapagos Explorer, was like walking in Darwin's footsteps: a concentrated lesson in natural history and evolution, plus a primer on ecology.
The impressions were indelible: the pink clouds and sun setting over Kicker Rock, near the spectacularly beautiful Cerro Brujo Beach on San Cristobal Island.
The ugly marine iguanas planted on the lava rocks in petrified gray leather, snorting and blowing fine sprays of saltwater out their nostrils like steam pipes.
The frigate birds, elegant, streamlined black beauties with forked tails and magnificent wingspans, and the gooney-looking pelicans that seemed to walk on water.
Sea lions lazed on the beach or preened in the shallows, the males showing off in front of their harem, barking in pride, trumpeting warnings their sunbathing girlfriends were already spoken for.
The white gannet birds called boobies some with blue feet or red, some with masked faces - are popular with picture-taking tourists because of their ridiculous waddle when they walk. During nesting season in December, you can walk right up to a booby's nest for close-up shots of the tiny, fluffy chicks.
Hunting in flight, the adult booby is truly exceptional. The bird, gliding above the water, spots a fish and drops like a stone - at about 50 mph - to its prey. Incredibly, it doesn't grab the fish on the dive down but swims beneath its quarry, makes out the silhouette against the daylight on the surface and captures the fish on the way up.
Latter-day Darwins still come to the sanctuary to study; indeed, the Charles Darwin Research Station has been established on Santa Cruz Island. But most who venture here are tourists from Ecuador, the United States, Europe. Last year 60,000 visitors contributed $200 million to Ecuador's economy.
The human intrusion, however, is very much a mixed blessing. The Galapagos are becoming victims of their own splendor. Settlers, mainly tourist-industry workers who live on the 5 percent of land that is not national park, are taxing the islands' scarce resources and have brought in plants and animals that prey on the "endemic" species that have evolved here for millions of years, unthreatened until recently. Pigs devour bird and reptile eggs; goats on Santiago Island have destroyed much of the vegetation. The guava tree, a common vine brought from the mainland, now threatens to overshadow quite literally the indigenous seedlings. Floreana wasps, probably imported in some visitor's food supply in the late 1980s, now buzz around the entire island.
Tourists need not feel guilty about treading on the islands if they tread lightly, taking nothing, leaving nothing but footprints in the sand. The Eguadorian government, acutely aware conservationists will pounce at the first sign of a high-rise hotel, has taken steps to limit development on the land and the number of vessels cruising the island waters. Certain fragile sites are put off-limits periodically. All visitors pay a $40 park fee for conservation and research and must be supervised by certified guides.
The weather in December, still the "dry" season, was perfect for touring. Although the Galapagos straddle the equator, the air was temperate during the day and cool at night, thanks to the cool ocean Humboldt Current.
Organization was key; the Galapagos Explorer was like summer camp for adults. All 90 passengers were divided into groups: Albatross, Boobies, Cormorants, etc., and for excursions we were packed into small shuttle crafts called pangas. Landings were dry. We stepped onto an outcrop of rocks and watched out for the slippery sea-lion dung. Each night after dinner, naturalists would brief us on the next day's activities, so we knew what to bring - hats, suntan lotion, snorkeling gear and what to expect.
Arnaldo, a biologist from Ecuador who vigilantly kept us from stepping on the island flora, and multilingual Luiz, who had studied environmental biology at the University of Madrid, were the guides for our group, the Flamingos. Among us was an 82-year-old Briton who told us stories of her travels with Sherpas in the Himalayas. She's had two hip operations, but was faster up the hills than I was.
Without a guide, a non-naturalist like myself would have been lost, unable to pick out a vermillion flycatcher from an American oystercatcher, a lava lizard from a marine iguana. It was embarrassing that some of my fellow tourists could identify each of the 13 Darwin finches or point out the differences between the muyoyo and mollugo shrubs.
Aboard ship, meals were at set times (wakeup calls at 6:45 a.m.), and we generally set out on excursions at 8 a.m., or, after a two- or three-hour lunch cruise, at 3:30 p.m. Nightly "entertainment" was confined to stargazing or listening to Spanish guitar music in the ship's lounge.
There is a certain weighty magnificence to the inscrutable giant tortoises that, more than any other species, symbolize the Galapagos. (Galapagos, in fact, is Spanish for tortoises.) At the tortoise reserve, they plow slowly but surely through swampy mud fields, ignoring flies and cooing tourists. They live to be God knows how old (150 years is the popular estimate); they can fast for a long time. This last attribute was, in fact, a liability in the 18th and 19th centuries, when many thousands of Galapagos tortoises were loaded onto whaling ships. Because they survived for months without food or water, the tortoises were a source of fresh meat for sailors on long voyages.
Today the tortoises, which grow up to 4 feet long and can weigh 500 pounds, are endangered on most of the Galapagos isles. We could get close enough to some to tickle a shell here and there with a twig. At the Darwin Research Center on Santa Cruz there's a museum, information center and a poolpen where visitors can get a close-up of the famous faces.