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Published: June 20th 2008
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My ginger project!
That's ginger.. highly invasive and is clogging up the waterways! we are down to less than a week in the galapagos! its strange because we feel like we just got here. i finally got to feeling better this week and i´m over whatever bug i managed to catch. this past week at the reserve flew by and we´re already back in port again for the last time. on tuesday night iwan and sarah, a really nice couple from england left the reserve so we all went out to the local bar for the last time with them which was a lot of fun.
workwise, my personal project is finally taking off. ill be looking at environmental conditions of invasive jasmin/ginger.. atleast for a few days next week. hopefully atleast i can get it going and some initial results and turn it over to someone that will be there longer. ryan´s architectural masterpiece is also finally done.. just in time for our departure.
we would post pictures.. but sadly.. that topic brings me to my next point. ryan´s camera left us the first week we got here, but it died a peaceful death overlooking the pacific ocean (aka the battery died mid picture, and in a great design flaw, it
Bert...
This is the last picture taken on my camera before it died... I suspect foul play was involved... or alcohol left the lens extended right before we had to do some rock climbing and got damaged that way). luckily we had my camera to fall back on, until today. when mine also left us for a better place. not exactly sure what caused it, but the lens won´t come out and i get an error message when i turn it on. i think it was more that the camera was reaching its 4th birthday than anything else and a part wore out.. but it lived a good life and managed its way to north, central and south america, as well as europe.. just wish it could have lasted 2 more weeks. we are hoping that all the photos on the memory card are still intact, so we will still have 4 weeks of photos but with our apparent camera luck, who knows. for the rest of the trip i think we´re just going to buy a few disposable cameras and do the best that we can. someone else´s camera also mysteriously died today as well.. perhaps its all the humidity up there?
but as much as the camera situation sucks.. theres not much we can do about it now.
we´re working now on figuring out our plans for our week back on the mainland. we leave the galapagos on wednesday to fly back to quito (we debated very much changing our flight to cuenca, known as being an absolutely stunning city down closer the peruvian border.. but we´re not sure we can squeeze that in with the rest of the things we want to do). so we will spend a night in quito at the same place we were at before, and then head out the next day to cotopaxi national park. if you feel so inclined, a google search on the cotopaxi volcano should bring up lots of great photos of where we will be. our quito hostal just opened up a sister hostal up there, so we booked 3 nights with them (www.secretgardencotopaxi.com). its a bit pricey for ecuadorian backpacking standards.. but for $30each per day we will have a private room, and all of our meals will be included as well.. plus we have access to hiking trails, mountain bikes, etc so it should be a great (and relaxing) time.
that leaves us with 3 more nights of traveling.. there are 2 other towns we´d really like to get to. banos is south of cotopaxi a few hours and is more of a resort town.. it sits at the base of a volcano so there are lots of natural hot springs and is supposed to be a great place. the other idea is to go north of quito about an hour and a half to a town called mindo which is a world famous birding town. both are supposed to have great outdoors stuff too.. hiking, rafting, ziplines. we may even try to do both of them but we´ll see. after that its back to quito for one more night and then we fly back home! but if we didn´t have obligations to keep ( a new job and a thesis) we´d be incredibly tempted to extend our time down here.
so now we´re left with our last weekend in port.. all we´ve got planned is some sea kayaking and a nice dinner at a particular restaraunt.. the rest is up in the air still. so, again, electricity willing, we will update again this weekend with what we did.
adios for now.. see you all soon!
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non-member comment
Thought that medical geographers were about understanding global health problems, not really experiencing them.