(no subject)
After a rather sleepless night, I headed to the airport (in a taxi the hotel booked for me the night before). Driving (well, riding in a taxi) to the airport in daylight showed the less shiny end of town- but still, only the building style, rather than the standard or state of repair, would have looked out of place in some parts of south London. In the departure lounge I had time for breakfast from the coffee kiosk, so I tried some chifres, banana chips that were really more like crisps- salted, which was unexpected but nice.
Then onto the flight. Far from the wood-and-string prop I had half-expected, it was an A-320 full of people- probably more so because it was going to Baltra (from where we must get a boat) as the San Cristobal airport is currently closed.
Take off provided amazing views of the mountains around Quito, as the town faded out to villages, farms, and finally rugged snow-capped peaks that joined us above the clouds. It was only once we got over the foothill farms that the wide made-up roads gave out to dirt tracks and the cars faded out, and the brick houses (albeit with flat tin roofs in the city outskirt and outlying villages, in contrast to the few big white houses with their red tiled roofs) gave way to anything more haphazard-looking.
Out beyond the mountains, we were above the clouds, only descending just before the coastal resort town of Guayaquil where the plane was to stop over for half an hour, coming in on a side of town with tall, white houses, of which only the slightly Hispanic architecture would have looked out of place in Miami.
As I wrote that passage, I went on to say that I was not really sure where I was going with it: except to say that from what I had seen so far, it would have been all too easy for a tourist, going only to the tourist areas, to see only what is provided for tourist dollars, and miss the rest of the country and its people. I then went on to say that even in my hotel, a wonderfully-run place with pretty good facilities, the owners seemed to sleep in two rooms downstairs, one with bunk-beds and one with a sofa-bed, all within earshot of the front door- so in those places where there is not such obvious deprivation as children selling cigarettes on street corners, people work extremely hard for everything they do have.
Leaving Guayaquil, the sunny dusty airstrip was interspersed with grass strips- in one, a ditch in which little white ?egrets were wading. The cityscape was very scattered, with high-rise buildings dispersed among the rest rather than clumped in particular districts, edged by rugged hills that would be big by English standards but dwarfed by the mountains around Quito.
There was the real town- brightly-coloured boxlike houses, laid out in squares on the plains to one side of the river, dotted haphazardly around the hillsides on the other.
Further out were larger hills, the hilltops still covered in dense forests, but some sides being cleared for the city to grow. From beyond the mountains, the sections of city make the valleys twinkle with tin roofs; here, the town has stopped, but still tracks cut into the forest and bare earth spreads ominously around them.
Then the whole landscape is crumpled. Earth tracks connect tiny pockets of houses, some with their twinkling tin roofs, others lending into the trees from which they were made. Suspended over them are cotton-ball-tufts of cloud, but beneath the clouds the dark green expanses of forested hills can still be seen.
A few flatter plateaux have fields cleared on top, and suddenly we have reached the coast. Houses fill the coves leading up to the yellow sands; between them, cliffs, green to the very edge as the plants cling to every inch of this biologically-rich land. Some beaches are longer than others, but all are curved around between the rugged headlands… and then we are over the sea, mainland Ecuador vanishes behind us and we are on our way to the Galapagos.
On the flight in, very little was visible except isolated rocks until we approached Baltra itself. It was a dry and windswept place; a flat landscape (hence the choice as a military base and then an airport) dotted with Opuntia cactus trees.
Then the place landed, stopping short of the red barriers at the end of the runway (rather reminiscent of the “Unfinished Road” blockades in cartoon chases) then turning and parking up at what looked like a few giant sheds. At the entrance to the airport, the Opuntia cacti were fruiting and flowering.
The airport buildings were wooden huts- no homogeneous airport lounges here. In the first hut, we bought our park entry tickets; in the second, we waited for our cases to be taken from the wooden hand carts and lined up for us to take.
Everyone then piled onto a row of buses to go to their boats (even those going to Santa Cruz would have a short ferry crossing to make), with people holding Jatun Sacha signs guiding Janina and I to the right bus.
When the bus reached the wooden landing, the two benches were covered with sea lions, and pelicans were diving just off the shore, while gulls followed to scavenge anything they could snatch from the pelicans’ oversized beaks.
After some waiting- a common feature there- about twenty of us piled into the back of a small motor-boat, and set off across the water to San Cristobal. The sea crossing was rather choppy- I quite enjoyed the ride, but another passenger (who later turned out to be another volunteer) did not fare so well.
When we reached San Cristobal, arriving at a wooden jetty leading onto a seafront street of huts and shops, we then got into our taxis- Chevrolet 4-door pick-up trucks, and it soon became apparent why this was we left the town, up the hill, and the made roads stopped. We made our way up winding tracks, four inside each truck and the rest sat in the back. It turned out that half the people on the boat were Jatun Sacha volunteers.
As we drove along, I kept having to remind myself where I was: when we drove through an orchard, it hardly registered in my mind, accustomed as I am to orchards in Kent, until I realised that the trees were laden with oranges!
The site is surrounded by different trees- oranges, bananas, papayas… in the middle is a collection of huts, built from wood and bamboo, with open side, balconies, and mosquito-netting for windows, all perfectly fine in a place with no cold wind or draughts to consider. The station dogs- Negro (sounds bad in English but just the Spanish equivalent of calling an animal “Blackie”) and Linda- rushed to meet us, and we were shown to the bedrooms. I was downstairs in the ‘old house’. My room had a bed with a four-poster mosquito net, reassuringly tucked in around the edges, and a set of shelves where I put some bottles and random bits, leaving my clothes in the closed case to keep insects out. There was a mouse by a hole between the wall and the floor, but it ran away before I could take a photograph.
We were surrounded by birds, too- just while moving in I saw a couple of different finches. The toilets were proper water-closets, albeit in separate sheds down a muddy paths, which was a relief. On the other side of the sheds were washbasins, and up the path were a couple of ‘shower’ cubicles- effectively a raised cold tap, so showering would have to happen straight after work when hot enough for a cold shower to seem a reasonable prospect. Upstairs in the old house is a balcony with hammocks, where the other volunteers were sitting between the end of work and dinner.
The kitchen/ dining room building has pillars and fences around the dining area, with long tables and benches, and the far end has the kitchen, closed in with a big serving window surrounded by notice boards and pictures.
Then we had an introductory meeting with César, the manager, just to explain domesticities and timetable- we’d hear about the reserve and the work in the morning.
Then it was dinner time, and all the other volunteer started arriving. The food was good, with vegetables and juice from fruit grown on site. Afterwards, some people played with guitars, others with poi, and a neighbour rode up on a donkey. After talking for a while, a few people decided to head to the ‘pub’- a neighbour’s house, who used to sell timber but now is supported by volunteers buying drinks there- this seemed like a worthy cause to support, so for that reason (of course just for that reason!) I went along. It was only a couple of fields away, and again I was unexpectedly impressed: the ‘neighbour’s house’ had a whole separate bar building, a large open-sided wooden building, with electric lights and stereo, pool tables, tables and benches around the edge. The bar itself seemed rather frantic, with people looking in a notebook and calculating costs, actually keeping bar tabs. We talked, shared a bottle of rum and bottles of coke, other people were playing cards or pool, and then the landlady made popcorn (served salted there).
When we got back, the generator at the station had long finished, and the old house had no power anyway, so we were using torches and candles. An early night was in order, ready for work the next day.
Then onto the flight. Far from the wood-and-string prop I had half-expected, it was an A-320 full of people- probably more so because it was going to Baltra (from where we must get a boat) as the San Cristobal airport is currently closed.
Take off provided amazing views of the mountains around Quito, as the town faded out to villages, farms, and finally rugged snow-capped peaks that joined us above the clouds. It was only once we got over the foothill farms that the wide made-up roads gave out to dirt tracks and the cars faded out, and the brick houses (albeit with flat tin roofs in the city outskirt and outlying villages, in contrast to the few big white houses with their red tiled roofs) gave way to anything more haphazard-looking.
Out beyond the mountains, we were above the clouds, only descending just before the coastal resort town of Guayaquil where the plane was to stop over for half an hour, coming in on a side of town with tall, white houses, of which only the slightly Hispanic architecture would have looked out of place in Miami.
As I wrote that passage, I went on to say that I was not really sure where I was going with it: except to say that from what I had seen so far, it would have been all too easy for a tourist, going only to the tourist areas, to see only what is provided for tourist dollars, and miss the rest of the country and its people. I then went on to say that even in my hotel, a wonderfully-run place with pretty good facilities, the owners seemed to sleep in two rooms downstairs, one with bunk-beds and one with a sofa-bed, all within earshot of the front door- so in those places where there is not such obvious deprivation as children selling cigarettes on street corners, people work extremely hard for everything they do have.
Leaving Guayaquil, the sunny dusty airstrip was interspersed with grass strips- in one, a ditch in which little white ?egrets were wading. The cityscape was very scattered, with high-rise buildings dispersed among the rest rather than clumped in particular districts, edged by rugged hills that would be big by English standards but dwarfed by the mountains around Quito.
There was the real town- brightly-coloured boxlike houses, laid out in squares on the plains to one side of the river, dotted haphazardly around the hillsides on the other.
Further out were larger hills, the hilltops still covered in dense forests, but some sides being cleared for the city to grow. From beyond the mountains, the sections of city make the valleys twinkle with tin roofs; here, the town has stopped, but still tracks cut into the forest and bare earth spreads ominously around them.
Then the whole landscape is crumpled. Earth tracks connect tiny pockets of houses, some with their twinkling tin roofs, others lending into the trees from which they were made. Suspended over them are cotton-ball-tufts of cloud, but beneath the clouds the dark green expanses of forested hills can still be seen.
A few flatter plateaux have fields cleared on top, and suddenly we have reached the coast. Houses fill the coves leading up to the yellow sands; between them, cliffs, green to the very edge as the plants cling to every inch of this biologically-rich land. Some beaches are longer than others, but all are curved around between the rugged headlands… and then we are over the sea, mainland Ecuador vanishes behind us and we are on our way to the Galapagos.
On the flight in, very little was visible except isolated rocks until we approached Baltra itself. It was a dry and windswept place; a flat landscape (hence the choice as a military base and then an airport) dotted with Opuntia cactus trees.
Then the place landed, stopping short of the red barriers at the end of the runway (rather reminiscent of the “Unfinished Road” blockades in cartoon chases) then turning and parking up at what looked like a few giant sheds. At the entrance to the airport, the Opuntia cacti were fruiting and flowering.
The airport buildings were wooden huts- no homogeneous airport lounges here. In the first hut, we bought our park entry tickets; in the second, we waited for our cases to be taken from the wooden hand carts and lined up for us to take.
Everyone then piled onto a row of buses to go to their boats (even those going to Santa Cruz would have a short ferry crossing to make), with people holding Jatun Sacha signs guiding Janina and I to the right bus.
When the bus reached the wooden landing, the two benches were covered with sea lions, and pelicans were diving just off the shore, while gulls followed to scavenge anything they could snatch from the pelicans’ oversized beaks.
After some waiting- a common feature there- about twenty of us piled into the back of a small motor-boat, and set off across the water to San Cristobal. The sea crossing was rather choppy- I quite enjoyed the ride, but another passenger (who later turned out to be another volunteer) did not fare so well.
When we reached San Cristobal, arriving at a wooden jetty leading onto a seafront street of huts and shops, we then got into our taxis- Chevrolet 4-door pick-up trucks, and it soon became apparent why this was we left the town, up the hill, and the made roads stopped. We made our way up winding tracks, four inside each truck and the rest sat in the back. It turned out that half the people on the boat were Jatun Sacha volunteers.
As we drove along, I kept having to remind myself where I was: when we drove through an orchard, it hardly registered in my mind, accustomed as I am to orchards in Kent, until I realised that the trees were laden with oranges!
The site is surrounded by different trees- oranges, bananas, papayas… in the middle is a collection of huts, built from wood and bamboo, with open side, balconies, and mosquito-netting for windows, all perfectly fine in a place with no cold wind or draughts to consider. The station dogs- Negro (sounds bad in English but just the Spanish equivalent of calling an animal “Blackie”) and Linda- rushed to meet us, and we were shown to the bedrooms. I was downstairs in the ‘old house’. My room had a bed with a four-poster mosquito net, reassuringly tucked in around the edges, and a set of shelves where I put some bottles and random bits, leaving my clothes in the closed case to keep insects out. There was a mouse by a hole between the wall and the floor, but it ran away before I could take a photograph.
We were surrounded by birds, too- just while moving in I saw a couple of different finches. The toilets were proper water-closets, albeit in separate sheds down a muddy paths, which was a relief. On the other side of the sheds were washbasins, and up the path were a couple of ‘shower’ cubicles- effectively a raised cold tap, so showering would have to happen straight after work when hot enough for a cold shower to seem a reasonable prospect. Upstairs in the old house is a balcony with hammocks, where the other volunteers were sitting between the end of work and dinner.
The kitchen/ dining room building has pillars and fences around the dining area, with long tables and benches, and the far end has the kitchen, closed in with a big serving window surrounded by notice boards and pictures.
Then we had an introductory meeting with César, the manager, just to explain domesticities and timetable- we’d hear about the reserve and the work in the morning.
Then it was dinner time, and all the other volunteer started arriving. The food was good, with vegetables and juice from fruit grown on site. Afterwards, some people played with guitars, others with poi, and a neighbour rode up on a donkey. After talking for a while, a few people decided to head to the ‘pub’- a neighbour’s house, who used to sell timber but now is supported by volunteers buying drinks there- this seemed like a worthy cause to support, so for that reason (of course just for that reason!) I went along. It was only a couple of fields away, and again I was unexpectedly impressed: the ‘neighbour’s house’ had a whole separate bar building, a large open-sided wooden building, with electric lights and stereo, pool tables, tables and benches around the edge. The bar itself seemed rather frantic, with people looking in a notebook and calculating costs, actually keeping bar tabs. We talked, shared a bottle of rum and bottles of coke, other people were playing cards or pool, and then the landlady made popcorn (served salted there).
When we got back, the generator at the station had long finished, and the old house had no power anyway, so we were using torches and candles. An early night was in order, ready for work the next day.