Hoing ain´t easy

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Well, it is Sunday afternoon and in about three hours we have to head back to the reserve after a wonderful, dry, relativly bug free, and quite sunny weekend. I mention all those adjectives because none of them apply to the reserve. After I finish here at the Internet cafe Beth and I will head by the panderia to pick up some snacks, go back to the hostel to each take our last hot shower for a week and then we catch the cab back to the reserve. The weekend has been great. On Friday, normally we do a hike from the reserve to some spot on the island but it was raining too hard and the trail were going to be too muddy. Too muddy that is, for even our rubber boots and when I say raining too much you need to keep in mind that it rains a ton everyday. Anyway, so we came into town early. Usually we don´t come in until Friday evening after dinner or Saturday morning. I say usually having done it once before.

Once we get to town almost all of us stay at the same hostel (nine people). There are three rooms, a double, a triple and a quadruple and it doesn´t matter which you stay in because it just cost nine dollars a head. Hostel is really the wrong term to use though. Each room has a relatively large kitchen/hangout room with a four burner camp stove and a mini fridge. Last night Beth and I made pasta with an awesome tomato, vegetable, and bacon sauce. (In case you´re wondering Noah, we didn´t drain any of the bacon grease.) Then we made some absolutly deccadent garlic bread. It was awesome. The bacon was left over from the night before when we made french toast, bacon and eggs for dinner. Health nuts all around.

Yesterday, Saturday, almost all the volunteers we on this snorkling trip out to Kicker Rock. The snorkling was alright but most of the water was too deep to really see the bottom. The cool thing about Kicker Rock though is that apparently there are usually sharks around to be seen. A coulple people went diving and they ended up seeing several six and seven foot hammerheads! I wish I would have been diving. The water was so damn cold though. The guys diving were wearing a total of ten mils while us snorklers got 2 mil spring suits. I was so cold. My fingers went numb. It was a cool though.

I guess I am getting ahead of myself though since this is my first Galapagos entry so back to the beginning. I don´t have the dates on my but we left Ushuaia on a Sunday (something like Oct 1) at around 8pm and flew to BA. We then had an eight hour layover there from midnight until 8am. So that was a miserable night´s sleep but we were excited to get to Ecuador so moral was still high. Things began to fall off however when the torrential down pour complete with thunder and lightning commenced. All the flights got delayed but ours got especially delayed because the airplane couldn´t even leave it´s origninating airport. Eventually it came but well after we had already missed our connection in Lima so they flew us to Lima and told us we would have to pay our own way there for a night and fly the next day. Bummer right? After we got to Lima though LAN Peru had changed their tune and they bussed the fifteen or twenty people that had the same Ecuador connection to the Sheraton and covered our dinner and breakfast, both of which were amazing. Our room, food, and internet connection were the best we have had all trip and we even made a new friend, a guy named Peter from South Africa. We are gonna meet up with him when we get to Cape Town. So that whole ordeal was a blessing in disguise and I thank LAN Peru for taking such good care of us.

So we finally got to Quito Ecuador but we were a day late and we arrive exactly when our volunteer orientation was supposed to begin and we were scheduled to fly out to San Cristobal the next day (that would be Wednesday for those keeping track). We hopped in a cab and with all our stuff, arrived on half an hour late which turned out to be no problem at all. After the meeting they called a hostel for us, got us a cab and we were on our way. After having some laundery done we headed out for dinner in Quito. We did this with a fair amount of trepidation though because we have heard quite a few bad stories of muggings and the like. We didn´t end up having any problems and we got our Indian food but since we have heard many more stories and actually met someone (a girl walking with a guy friend) robbed at knife point just on the street at 7pm. The next day we headed out to the airport and without having to show ID to anyone boarded our flight and we were on our way.

After one stop we arrived on the island and it looked different than pretty much anywhere I have ever been. The first animal I saw was the friggate (sp?) which if you haven´t seen it looks basically like a small teradactle (sp?), very cool. We got our bags and met the volunteer coordinator, Emily (25yr old blond french canadian, speaks english pretty well and spanish great. she´s dating the cook) and two other volunteers, Pablo (25yr old from Barcelona, very cool) and Katie (18 yr old curly blond from minnesota just getting ready to go to college she was only staying for four days). We all hopped in the back of the pickup truck taxi (all taxis are pickups) and headed out to the resevere. When we got there we met a bunch of other volunteers working there. There were several Germans, an english girl, one guy we met later from Chicago who I sware has the exact same (I mean creepily similar) mannerisms as Matt Harnack, and then another guy from California named Chris who lives in Ventura, teaches highschool in Ojai, and went to UCSB! How random is that. Obviously he is really cool and we have become good friends with him. Okay enogh with the introductions. Since we arrived in the afternoon and it was our first day we didn´t have to do any work but looking at the other volunteers we could tell this was not going to be an easy month.

It wasn´t until the next morning when work started though that all my rose tinted fantasies of lazy island work were unmercifully ripped to shreds. We put on our almost knee high rubber boots, some got machettes, some got hoes (garden ones), and some got nothing but gloved hands and then we headed down the muddy path through the jungle in the rain, mosquito nets on, to our first day on the job. After a five to ten minute downhill hike (very dangerous when muddy and carrying machettes) we reached the prosepective tomato field. Our job was basically to clear an area 50 meter by 25 meters of all trees (except for a few endemic ones) and plant life to prepare a hillside tomato patch. Now, there are all sorts of issues with whether or not this is a good idea at all but I´ll get into those later. For that day all I knew was I had to get to hoing and let me tell you, hoing ain´t easy. We worked from 8 to 12 usually but that day since the work was really damn hard we only worked till 11. After only an hour though I was dying. Sweat was pouring off my face because with a mosquito net on you don´t get good air flow but you can´t take the net off because the mosquitos (not actually mosquitos like back home but definitly blood suckers) were swarming all over your face. Somehow they would get in and I manage to eat at least ten of them.

Finally when work was all done we went up for lunch which everyone else loved but I thought was one of the most aweful things I have had. It was this nasty cheese soup that apparently in Ecuador you eat with popcorn. You put handfulls of popcorn in and eat it with a spoon. Gag me. After that unsatisfying meal though is when the real trouble began. That was the first of about ten very unpleasant bathroom trips in the ensuing 12 hours. Yeah, not exaggerating. It was bad. By six pm I was layed up in bed with a 101 degree fever. I had been in bed for hours alreay but that was when the fever started. Right away I started in on the antibiotics we had brought (azithromiacin I believe it´s called) and after an aweful night of no sleep and umm what to call it, we´ll say no water retention my fever broke and I began the recovery process which took through the weekend. Beth was struck down by the same animal the next monday or tuesday. I of course blamed the Indian food. Indian food in Ecuador? Aaron what were you thinking? Right? Wrong. The next wednesday or so we find out that we had been told wrong, probably through mistranslation, but in fact the water for washing vegtables and teeth brushing was not chlorine treated but instead comes straight from the river up the hill. Since that semi-important disclosure I have avoided all the not boiled water and all items washed and my health has been well, solid. Ha, sorry I can´t help it. It´s funny. Now anyway.

That first day or work turned out to be the worst. We have done more of that same stuff but I just don´t work as hard, and we have done planting, trail clearing, bar building which includes cement mixing (yeah this task is controversial to say the least but more on that later), and just some other nature reserve stuff. There is a whole lot of machette work. which in the rain with slippery hands can be quite dangerous. I have more than once sent my huge blade sailing, woo woo woo, through the air and been very relieved when it doesn´t find flesh. Gotta maintain that 5 meters between people. It rains constantly and it is perpetually muddy. The pictures I have posted are misleading because they show it sunny but that is just because I haven´t taken my camera out to work in the marine case with me but I plan on doing that from now on.

I think that is enough for now. I´ll get to the controversies next time. We are having a group meeting tomorrow which should be quite interesting. Overall though things are good. It´s true that often times during the work I am hating life but we only work six hours a day, four in the am and two in the pm so we get´s lots of free time. The other voluteers are awesome. The weekends are great. This weekend was quite because there was no alcohol served anywhere because the national election was today but we still had a blast. Voting here is compulsory. Weird huh? Anyway, until next time, please enjoy hot water, dryness and electricty for Beth and I because we won´t see it until next weekend. Peace.

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Photos

Sea Lions
One of our many close encounters with these creatures while snorkling

The Crew
Well the one´s that didn´t get cut out of the picture but I think that was just Beth

View from the Hangout
This is the second story of the ¨house¨we´re staying in

View from the Kitchen
This is the only time it has been sunny here ever but this is the view from where we eat. The house is up off to the right(not shown)

Slash and burn?
Here was the progress on the controversial tomato field project after three days. I´m thinking it´s not a good plan.

You talkin to me?
Just another day at the office