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Well hello there people....
I´ve had an exciting last week or so...I left the cloudy, damp weather of lima(it reminded me too much of home!) ...next stop Ecuador!
After successfully entering Ecuador through what Lonely planet describes as the "worst(most corrupt) border crossing in South America"...i headed to the second city of Ecuador, Guayquil....The city itself is not the best, indeed it is hard to find a good restaurant anywhere, hence I ended up having dinner at KFC two days running!.... About the only good thing I seen in Guayaquil was this small park, only the size of a block, in the middle of the city. Its like any average city park, filled with flowers and trees and a little pond......and many Iguanas,some up to a metre long!...they just walk around all day and the park is full of little kids playing with them and getting their parents to take pictures of them face to face with the little prehistoric looking creatures!....you would think the Iguanas would turn around and eat the face off the pesky little kids, but they don´t, they just lie there oblivious to all that is going on around them....
From guayaquil i managed to arrange
a last minute flight and tour of the Galapagos islands, which for those of you who don´t know were totally untouched by man until the 1500s. The plants and animals on the islands and in the surrounding waters are totally different to anywhere else in the world and have evolved according to the environmental conditions at the islands, Mr Charles Darwin himself visited the islands in the 1800s and they gave him much to think about in his evolution theory....
So I flew there for 8 days, spent half of it on my own and half with a tour....The place is amazing,the whole place is alive, everywhere you look there is something running, swimming, flying, scurrying or hopping in front of you...lots of little lava lizards, about 15cm long everywhere you walk.. The did some snorkelling at a place called "Sleeping Lion(Leon Dormida)" or "Kicker Rock", which has to be one of the highlights of my trip so far.. we got a boat to the rock, which in the distance you can just see a huge rock growing out of the flat ocean(a bit like Ayers Rock, if it were in the sea)...when we got there I jumped into the
lovely warm water with my snorkel and flippers to see what was down there. The rocky walls of the island plummeted straight down into the darkness leaving a steep rock face. The rock face was like a living Jackson Pollock painting, so many bright and assorted colors of fish, starfish, moray eels, marine plants, seaweed. I took some photos but unfortunately there were with a disposable camera so you´ll have to wait till i get home to get them developed. There were also seaturtles, penguins,white tipped sharks and sealions swimming about. The sealions are great because they come up behind you and scare the bejaysus out of you as they swim passed, then they turn around and swim really fast towards your face and just dodge you at the last second....but there only playing so its nothing to worry about!
I also went to see a 180yr old turtle called Lonesome George, he is called that because he is the last of his species, all the other turtles were killed for their meat in the 1800s...The animal carers have tried to get him to mate with some nice females from a closely related species, in order to maintain his
species....but the poor fella doesn´t want anything to do with it(which i suppose is understandable at his age!)
There are many interesting bird species on the island too,
Frigatebirds-the male has a big red breast which he inflates to the size of a rugby ball for three days, in the hope that a female will find that kind of thing attractive and disappear off into the bushes with him!
Bluefooted(and Redfooted) boobies- I can spot these by there brightly colored feet(really Paul?). The male booby meets a female, together they have a few kids, and then he leaves her for another female after 6months...and then 6months later he leaves that one and moves in with another female for 6months...and so on!, looks like the birds over here possess some of that Latin American charm too.
Lots of iguanas too, which according to our guide, told us that the males have twice the power up front compared to what us humans(if you know what i mean)..duty/standby capacity.
The black marine iguanas swim down to the bottom of the sea, to eat some seaweed, and then spend the rest of the day lounging about on the rocks....nice!
I also
met a Canadian couple one evening who were 1 year into a 4 year sailing trip around the world!...beat that!.... They didn´t have any prior sailing experience either, just decided to sell their house and buy a boat and headed off... Their stories from sailing were so interesting that we stayed in the pub till all hours, even though we all had to get up for a 6am boat to get to another island 2hours away(where I had to meet the tour guide later that morning to start the 4day cruise)...Needless to say I slept it, missed the boat(which had cost me $30 for the ticket)....Luckily though there was one space left on a 9passenger plane that was leaving immediately....so I had to leg it to catch the plane(which cost me another $130).....so it was an expensive morning!....
After the cruise, I left the islands and headed on to I nice little colonial town called Cuenca..Only stayed there for a day so didn´t get to do much but went to a museum about Ecuadorian history and culture....the most interesting bit were the shrunken heads on display, which used to be made during Shamamic rituals(until the government banned it)....After a
battle, the Shuar tribe would take the heads of their dead enemy and shrink them(why, or how, exactly I don´t know, something to do with some spiritual ritual, during which the Shaman himself would get off his head on hallucinogens in order to connect with the spiritual world)....The whole thing is pretty bizarre i think!....Although the heads themselves seemed to resemble an old looking James Brown, in my opinion!
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