I spent my first three weeks here wondering why, while the island is swarming with teenage and 20-something guys, I had met one girl my age– who happens to be the host sister of a friend. Turns out, as a result of the nonexistent state of condoms here, the young adult female population is either pregnant, married, or being kept in by their respective parental units with the objective of avoiding aforementioned situations.
Because our dear professor decided to have class all day for the first two weeks of the module, we got class off last week. A few of us decided to take the opportunity introduce ourselves to the grand old world down under. So, at 9 am on Tuesday, we showed up at Wreck Bay Diving Center to spend five hours attempting to stay awake in the sweltering heat while watching one of the most monotonous instructional DVDs known to mankind and getting fitted for wetsuits and booties. Wednesday afternoon we donned our wetsuits, loaded all of our gear in the back of a pickup and drove to the smallest, shallowest, murkiest swimming pool known to mankind to practice variations of breathing underwater, clearing masks, and breathing from a buddy’s tank. Thursday afternoon we finished watching our DVD. Not that we actually payed attention– we found ourselves distracted by a couple of locals across the street stringing up and gutting a pair of 10-ft marlins they had caught that morning. We then learned how to assemble our gear for our practice dive the next morning. Friday we showed up bright and early at 7 am to the dive shop for our second “confined water” skills dive. We strapped BCDs to oxygen tanks, screwed on regulators, connected hoses to our BCDs, gathered fins, masks, snorkels, and weight belts and arrived at the pier in less than a minute’s drive. After suiting up, inflating our BCDs and making sure the water was clear of lobos, we took a giant leap and found ourselves floating in the ocean with a good 40 lbs of gear on our backs. The next hour and a half was spent practicing more skills as fish swam around us in circles before returning to the dive center to disassemble and clean our gear. Late that evening, to the amusement of my classmates, I had the fortune to discover that diving, on occasion, has the peculiar aftereffect of making a person feel, appear, and act extremely stoned. Saturday the nine of us and our instructors finally got on a boat and headed back to Isla Lobos for our first open water dive. For some reason everything other than marine iguanas and a few parrotfish had decided to vacate the area for the day, but we still spent time exploring the rocky shoreline before practicing taking off and putting on BCDs and weight belts under water. After surfacing, eating, and changing tanks, we took another dive just off the shore of a nearby beach. Yesterday we again met early, this time heading out to a bay under a breeding colony of frigatebirds. Our first dive was supposed to be to 60 ft, working our way up and into the bay. However, due to a group member’s difficulties equalizing and a somewhat nauseous guide, we only made it down to 25 ft, where instead of encountering octopi, we found ourselves in the middle of a giant, surging school of fish that by all rights belonged in Planet Earth. After lunch, we made our final dive: After descending 35 ft we arrived at a wreck waiting for us on the bottom of the bay just outside Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. We swam over and around the metal and wood, every new surface we encountered teeming with parrotfish, seahorses, coral, urchins, lobsters, surgeonfish, and other giant, ugly, small, pretty, camoflagued and gaudy denizens of the skeleton in the deep blue sea. Today, we found ourselves once again at Wreck Bay, this time taking a final and receiving pretty little temprary paper cards that declared us certified Open Water Divers.
Last Thursday marked the beginning of the Galapagos High Holidays (for lack of a better term). Festivities last from the night before February 12th, the day San Cristóbal became a political entity in the Galápagos, to February 18th (the day the Galápagos became a province). So, for a solid week, drinking, music and parties abounded. Carnival also managed to fall smack in the center of the festivities, from the 14th to the 16th. The three days were filled with beauty pagents, more beauty pagents, and dodging every boy aged 16 and younger in sight, bound to be armed with paint, eggs, oil, flour, water baloons, and squirt guns (the three-year-olds), all targeting every unsuspecting gringo within range. Thursday culminated with a party in the main square where we danced through the night under pouring rain to a local band playing covers of every overplayed reggetón song imaginable until 3am, when I left to crash for three hours before dragging myself out of bed at 6 for our 7:AM skills practice dive– after which I spent the next three hours waiting for the restaurant that was supposed to serve us lunch to frantically call our coordinator demanding to know why there were 16 of us instead of 10, bolting down ceviche and banana chips, skimming 60 pages of redundant data on Darwin’s finches, reviewing a week of material, catnapping, running across the street to the beach to buy an ice cream bar, getting through the final exam on a sugar rush, making a valiant attempt to crash for an hour in the sweltering heat, and finally dually finishing and submitting a research paper on kleptoparasitism in frigatebirds while watching Planet Earth with the English students as they struggled to understand dear David Attenborough’s narration. Also, some other interesting tidbits: Marine iguanas are crazy awesome. The feed on algae in the ocean and have organisms in their stomach that help them digest it. In the stressful rainy season, when their food sources are scarce due to decreased sunlight, the iguanas’ bodies shrink. They don’t just get skinnier– they reabsorb calcium from their bones and shorten by up to several inches, still retaining their original proportions. They also have glands on their noses from which they squirt salt previously ingested while swimming. Iguanas on different islands also differ in size up to ten times different; on the islands where sexual selection is stronger than natural selection, the iguanas are larger and on the islands where naturas selection plays a stronger role than sexual selection they’re smaller.
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