LEGAL!!!

First off, it was so wonderful to hear from everyone over the last couple days. There are way too many of you to write back individually, but I know the majority of you check in here every so often– so thank so much for all of the birthday wishes!! I had a wonderful weekend, but we’ll get to that later.

There are a lot of little things that are different here. They’re the type of “details” that took a little while to notice, coming gradually to my attention after I got over the shock of sea lions more common than squirrels, hammerheads, iguanas, eagle rays and breathing underwater among the fishies and sharks. In the interest of shortening this novel, I will focus on two. The first was the stars. In Quito, there were no stars– too much light pollution. When the clouds cleared in Tiputini, Orion and the Pleiades shone into the clearing where our huts were located. On San Cristóbal, we still see Orion and the Pleiades every night. The big dipper is visible, as well as Cassiopeia. However, later into the night, the sky is dominated by the southern cross and Scorpio, which sprawls overhead (as opposed to the small portion visible on the horizon from the beach during Oregon summers). I am familiar with only half the sky– I can’t find the little dipper, the north star, the other familiar sparks of light that have guided me through the past 21 years. The other half of the sky is alien. There is no easy fix to this– I can find star charts of the Southern Hemisphere (which are 50% irrelevant) and of the Northern Hemisphere (which I don’t need anyway) but some genius along the way decided there was no reason why anyone would ever want to search Google Images for a chart of the Equatorial view. Because, you know, it’s not like anyone would EVER get the urge to travel to any of hundreds of spits of land in the middle of any ocean away from light pollution and actually feel a compulsion to know what they were LOOKING at all night long.

Number two on the list of Unfamiliar, Peculiar, and/or Outlandish is the houses. No, not just the houses– the buildings in general. I understand that cinderblocks are easy to produce and easy to stack on top of one another. But seriously, guys. You live on the EQUATOR. Your house is a constant, stagnant 90 ºF. EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT. You can’t sleep. I know you get headaches from the heat– you regale me with tales about them every morning. I walk in at 7:30 pm and start pouring sweat two seconds through the door. You’re unwilling to leave the door open to get a bit of a breeze during the evening due to the (nonexistent this far off the ground, hadn’t you noticed?) mosquitoes. You took away my fan and put it in your room: now you have two fans and a giant window and I sleep in a cinderblock cell. Plastered with magazine cuttings of Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus, Vanessa Hudgens, Avril Lavigne, and Taylor Swift. Speaking of which. If I hear another straight hour of Avril Lavigne and Brittany Spears during dinner, I WILL blow a fuse. You are a 30-something mother and her 12-year-old daughter: please please PLEASE stop discussing the exceptional quality of songs of which you understand neither the lyrics nor the insinuations. And, while we’re on the subject of food, I am perfectly capable of cooking my own eggs. If I have an 8:00 am dive on a Saturday morning, I do not expect you to get up and spend a half hour cooking food I could make and eat in five minutes. 1: You were sleeping. 2: You’re probably hungover. 3: I’m not incapable, and your waiting on me is awkward. 4: I know a lot better than you do how much salt I want on my eggs (none) and how much chocolate to dump into hot milk (a lot less). 5 (And I never, EVER thought I’d hear myself say this): I like cooking for myself. Moving on.

The rest of break was uneventful, as was the majority of last week. It was, however, a good week. On Monday I went snorkeling and found $20 wafting through the rocks. I’m taking an interesting class, looking at marine fauna of the Galápagos (except for my presentation on a marine species, which instead focused on the somewhat alien, sinister, penguin-devouring Leopard seal, which harbors an exclusive preference for Antarctic pack ice). We finally determined that diesel will not explode upon being touched by a lighter, is about 1/36 the price of kerosene (which is entirely unavailable on the island in the first place) and has a burn time at least twice as long, making it (despite the fumes) an entirely viable fuel for fire poi. So, several nights of fire spinning on the beach and the waterfront ensued. Thursday I went snorkeling and found an octopus. Friday a few of us swam over to the pier next to the university to practice free diving. Along with puffer fish, lobos and schools of surgeonfish, the school of baby golden cow rays decided to make an appearance. Thanks to a lack of 7mm neoprene swathing our bodies we were able to spend an hour diving among them, surrounded by circling and coalescing masses of baby rays.

Saturday was an even better day. Saturday was March 27th. Saturday I woke up late, courtesy of a few free tequila shots at right about midnight the night before, to go ambling through town (grabbing some cheese-covered fried plantains and fruit salad along the way), stopping to chat with several acquaintances, and eventually find myself at the university. A few friends and I went for a nice, long swim throughout the bay, weaving through boats and under catamarans and floating under the sun before returning to search out a late pizza dinner. We spent some time spinning fire before wandering up toward the bar to pass the night dancing, chatting up the weekend’s tourists, and downing a larger quantity of tequila than the previous night before heading home to crash… for an entire four hours.

Yesterday the class treated ourselves to a dive and snorkel at León Dormido, courtesy of three birthdays between the 27th and 29th. After the first group to dive took off, the rest of us jumped into the water to make our way into the channel. A few of us wore weight belts to facilitate free diving– although returning to the surface took a little more time, we were able to swim further down among the sharks and turtles and parrotfish and the occasional ray with less effort. Highlight: hammerhead. The dive was relatively uneventful: a few smaller sharks, some turtles, an octopus wedged into a crevice along the wall and a moray eel hiding among some larger rocks at the bottom of the channel. However, there were three of us left after the rest of the group had expended their air, so we got an extra 15 minutes to play among the schools of fish and the occasional turtle before making our way back up to the boat. After snorkeling once again in Manglesito, we fell asleep on top of the boat and headed home to finish up one of the Best Birthday Weekends Ever with a belated slice of chocolate cake.

Homework. Diving. Take Your Pick.

This was a relatively uneventful week. Actually, I take that back. As a result of having engaged in absolutely zero homework for two weeks straight, this week I got to partake in a small amount of catch up in order to turn in three papers, give two presentations, and take a final.

I did, however, manage to squeeze in some fun. After making the aquaintence of a dive shop owner at three in the morning outside a karaoke bar on Saturday night and proceeding to converse halfway intelligently throughout the following hour, I was invited to join the his current open water class on their dives to Tijeretas and Karahua on Monday afternoon. So, after putting a presentation together while my professor lectured tonelessly throughout the morning, I headed out once again to explore ecosystems thriving on submerged basalt and steel. At Tijeretas, upon summersaulting off the boat, we found ourselves directly above a massive marble ray dosing in the sand in a break among the boulders. We went on to swim with turtles, scare up a zebra moray, discover giant green and yellow sea cucumbers wedged under rocks, and encounter an octopus who initially managed to squeeze the whole of himself into a hole bored in his resident boulder by a long-dead sea urchin. After waiting a few seconds and determining that humans in actuality posed no threat to its earthly existence, it oozed out of its hideaway to the top of the rock, keeping a watchful eye on us as it perched, all eight legs curled under, body swaying slightly in the mild current.

Upon arriving in the middle of the bay, approximately 150 meters from each of two buoys and directly between León Dormido (far in the distance) and the cemetery (adjacent to the bay), we discovered that the air-filled plastic gallon jugs connected to the line to Karahua had managed to fill themselves instead with water, failing to uphold the line and leaving us with (having forgotten the GPS) no way to find the wreck. So, following our brave and fearless leader’s dead reckoning, we dropped down to the bottom along our anchor line and began swimming. Sure enough, after five or ten minutes, the wreckage loomed through the murk up out of the ocean floor once again. We encountered the seahorse again, wafting back and forth as it curled up asleep around a branch of coral growing horizontally from a steel beam. We again explored engines, propellers, anchors, and the boat’s skeleton before heading back up to the surface and reattaching a previously cut buoy to the line. My invitation was then extended to join the group on Wednesday to repeat the dives in the group’s advanced open water course.

Wednesday turned out to be Friday. This time at Tijeretas we dropped down to the seafloor, situated at about 31 meters, to where a colony of sand-colored garden eels extended out of sight. Each individual snaked its head and the front half of its body out of a hole in the sand, camouflaged nearly to invisiblity, snapping at microscopic prey passing by with the current. As we passed over before setting down, the eerily serpent-like eels retracted, leaving nothing to show for their presence except a vast, sandy seabed riddled with tiny holes, heads hidden out of sight around curves.

Nothing new, brilliant, exciting, and heretofore unmentioned occurred at Karahua. Upon returning to the dock to unload, however, we spotted a school of at least two hundred baby golden rays passing under the boat as adults hovered over and around them. After popping on snorkels and hopping in, we realized that our 7mm wetsuits (wonderful for diving to 30 m with full gear and extra weights) had the exact same effect as the dead sea (which, in fact, is technically a solution due to the low water/other ratio). We therefore floated above the rays, entirely unable to dip below the surface of the water as we lazily paddled after them as twilight descended around us.

Also, this week is break. Not much going on: a lot of snorkeling to turn up moray eels, sea cucumbers, turtles, and countless species of fish. Also relaxing on the beach, reading, and sleeping in. So, this week and next week may be combined into one post.

Keys, Jews, and Seahorses

I hate keys. I hate little things that abandon you again and again just to give you grief and piss you off, and keys, for some reason, entertain an unparalleled enmity toward me. There is not a single combination lock available on this little speck of land in the middle of nowhere. There are, however, about twenty types of padlocks requiring keys. I am now on my fourth, having cut my third off my locker today, after my third spare key decided to vacate the locker of a friend it was was housed in for safekeeping. Hence, the post is a day late. Sorry about that.

I’ve explained some things about Judaism to people before, but not ever to the extent that I have to here. I’ve never felt, in some cases, like such an alien. I’m fairly sure there’s an entire one other Jew on the island. He’s one of my dive instructors, who moved here from Israel when he married an Ecuadorian woman.

Monday I told a couple guys that my name is Hebrew, not Spanish. “Why?” “Because I’m Jewish.” “Oh, you’re from Israel? I thought you were from the states.” “I am. My mother’s family were Russian Jews (sorry if I got that wrong, mom).” “But how can you be Jewish and not be from Israel?” “There are Jewish populations all over Europe.” “Oh, they immigrated to Europe from Israel.” “No, most people immigrate from Europe to Israel, not the other way around. Israel is our homeland, but that doesn’t mean that we all come from there.” “But you cannot be Jewish if you aren’t from Israel. I see! You are Jewish because you like the religion and you changed.” “No, I’m jewish because my mother’s family is Jewish.” “But Jews do not come from Russia.” Yeah, actually, they do.

Conversations about Passover go a little something like this: “Oh, Passover’s coming up in April. Gonna miss my birthday by two days!” “What’s Passover?” “It’s a Jewish holiday. It celebrates the story of Moses.” “Who?” “Moses. Pharoah. When the Jews were freed from slavery in Egypt. Ring a bell?” “I’m Catholic. I only know the New Testament.” “Ok, whatever. Anyway, we don’t eat beans, rice, bread, pasta, or cereal.” “That’s a celebration? How is that a celebration?” “It’s also recognition, because the jews didn’t have time to let their bread rise when they left.” “But that sounds like punishment, not celebration.” Ok, whatever. Moving on.

My host parents asked me, “Do you have Jesus?” “Nope.” “Who do you have?” “Just God.” “Only God?” (At this point I’m on the receiving end of incredulous, blank stares.) “Yep.” (Mouth stays closed shut in reference to possibilities of agnosticism and atheism; no reason to imply I’m Satan’s disciple as well). “How do Jews pray? Sitting or standing. Three times a day, if you’re orthodox.” “Where do you pray?” “At home or in a synagogue.” “What’s a synagogue?” “Like a church, except for Jews.” After I tell them that some synagogues have benches, just like churches, they seem a little happier about the whole deal.

Tuesday evening the dive class met up around 6:30, headed back to the pier near the university, and jumped into the water for our night dive. Apparently the cromwell current had decided to make its presence known, because the water was freezing (relatively speaking). After flipping on flashlights, we sank down and began swimming along the rocks, passing over thousands of sea urchins through tiny crimson fish that flashed through the beams from our lights. A huge, bright turquoise and white trumpetfish hovered just above the seafloor. Bright red, orange, and blue lobsters, over a foot in length, tucked themselves between rocks lining the shore. At one point we all circled up, kneeling on the sand between urchins. One by one, we switched our lights off until we were left in pitch back, with a nearly indiscernable hint of light seeping down from above… until we started waving our hands in front of our faces like idiots. Tiny neon green lights blinked on for the space of a couple seconds in front of us, bobbing up and down currents in our hands’ wakes. I felt like a kitten chasing after a feather duster, attempting to surround myself with bioluminescent specks in the otherwise inky water. On the way back, we managed to scare a stingray into the gloom after it decided swimming straight at our lights might not be the best option. We found giant pufferfish, half a meter in length. And we found the largest hermit crab I have ever seen, spilling out of a shell over a foot across, complete with anemones growing on it.

On Wednesday afternoon, the class headed up to go camping in the highlands for a couple nights and experience the (not so) glorious flora of this tiny little speck of land in the middle of the ocean. (Sidenote: “highlands refers to almost anything not sea level; San Cristóbal’s elevation is an entire 2,400’.) Our first little jaunt took us to Jatun Sacha, an NGO working to restore endemic plants either in danger of extinction or to areas that have been overtaken by invasive species. Predictably, almost all their volunteers are foreign. They don’t really seem to have done much except plant some scalesias (an endemic genus) to attempt reforestation in a small area. No one really knew what was going on and the place was swarming with more (introduced, thank you dear Carmen and your damn bananas) mosquitoes than I had ever imagined possible. So, we took our leave and moved on to pitch tents on a soft, cushy soccer field for the night. Thursday morning we headed to El Junco to take up machetes and attack the blackberries (or, according to our professor, the “FUCKING mora”) for a little “character-building taste of what it takes to eradicate the damn things.” Except it isn’t actually eradication: they just grow back after three or four months. You can’t burn them out because fires aren’t allowed on NP property, and you can’t use herbicide because it’ll run into the lake and the berries are consumed by the all-holy endemic Darwin’s finches. So, option #3: fruitless, thankless, endless attempts at control. Friday we visited a sector of private property where the owner has preserved a tract of endemic miconia “forest” (all 2-3 m. of it). After walking through a muddy lane, down through a couple more-defined trails and through a colony of nesting cattle egrets, we reached two tiny reservoirs that provide the entirety of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno’s unpotable fresh water supply. We then found ourselves in a maze of muddy ditches worn in by cattle, winding through the shrubby miconia in a directionless attempt to find our way back to the road before driving up to eat lunch under the only wind farm in Ecuador, comprised of three white windmills on a hill in the middle of nowhere looking down over León Dormido.

Saturday we headed back to Karahua for our wreck dive. This time a few lobos decided to join us, twisting and looping around us with ease and blowing bubbles in our faces as we made our way around the wreck through the current. After finding the engine room, a couple of massive anchors and some portholes, I spotted a huge, mottled-brown and white seahorse grazing along the deck beneath the remneants of the walls rising up around us. He remained surprisingly unperturbed by the seven giant faces suddenly staring down at him through masks from a foot away, progressing lazily along the algae-covered wreckage before zooming off into a cranny under the jagged metal.

For Sunday’s dives we stayed in the bay once again just off the pier to practice underwater navigation. During the “search and recovery” portion, a contest to see who could find the bottle of tequila on the sea floor in the least amount of time turned somewhat moot when we realized that we were actually all searching for a long-empty sixpack. I did, however, finally manage to find the perfect boyancy while waiting around on the seafloor for my turn to search. I subsequently spent an hour bouncing around and floating inverted and suspended in mid-water, giddily coming to the epiphany that this was most likely the closest I will ever come to being an astronaut, before heading back to the shop to clean up gear and receive a pretty little temporary Advanced Open Water card.

Apocalypse Fast Approaching

This week we started our second class on the islands, Native and Introduced Plants of the Galápagos. Our Chilean professor thinks animals are too cute and fuzzy and is so excited about botany that when he sees an endemic plant, he jumps up and down, yells “BINGO!!!” and appears for all intents and purposes to be a five-year old who’s just been told he won the biggest stuffed animal at the carnival.

Tuesday I woke up with the intention of eating and heading to school for a field trip to the highlands. Apparently it had rained the night before, because I stepped out of bed into a quarter inch of water. Everywhere. Not only had it seeped into the apartment from the walkway outside, the wind had blown water through my tiny screened-in window, soaking everything within a meter of the wall. Including, among other things, a novel and my ipod. Never again will I leave my computer on the floor while I sleep. After awkwardly waiting as my host parents mopped up my floor, refusing to let me help them, I ate breakfast and made my way down streets flooded with several inches of rainwater and sewage overflow to the vastly altered Malicon. Where a tiny stream had trickled for the past three weeks a small river now surged toward the sea, having cut away an entire beach where lobos had sprawled at night and soccer games had been played during the day, leaving no separation between the bay and the small, placid inlet into which seawater had previously leaked during high tide. Wide, jagged troughs were carved into the adjacent beach where the rest of the lobo colony usually slept. At the other end of the Malicon a river ran between houses, washing away the beach’s sand and rushing through a vast bed of exposed pipes and jagged black rocks. In front of the university, Playa Mann had been decisively slashed into thirds by deep dry channels left by street runoff. Welcome, my dear friends, to El Niño in the Galápagos.

Instead of sitting in a classroom Tuesday morning the class piled into taxis loaded with bikes and drove up to the highlands with the objective of riding back down to Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, stopping periodically to talk about plants. However, our luck from the previous night held over: we exited our vehicles into wind and rain, selected bicycles and helmets, and began our descent for the most part in tank tops and gym shorts. While I was aware that my helmet was most likely meant to be worn my a much larger man, I also soon discovered that my brakes had ceased working sometime in the age of the dinosaurs. I spent the next two hours riding my brakes as hard as possible, attempting not to keel over head on into my classmates as we stopped to talk about various endemic, native, and introduced species.

We’re taking salsa lessons. Our teacher is candid: it takes a good fifteen minutes at the beginning of each class before he’s satisfied that we aren’t incompetent, rhythmless idiots and may after all possess the ability to attempt the next turn. However, spinning around the dance floor for an hour in the evening after a morning swim, three hours of class and an afternoon spent snorkeling with some soccer thrown in is a pretty sweet way to (almost) wrap up the day.

Saturday morning at 5:30, after an entire three hours of sleep, I was woken by a frantic host mom with news of a tsunami alert: Get up and put some clothes on; we’re going to the highlands. After pulling myself out of bed and getting dressed I pulled together a bag including deet, benedryl, my camera, some money, and my ipod. And then I waited. I watched pickups full of families and people on foot carrying dogs, babies, and suitcases make their way up the hill past our apartment for an hour, while my family decided breakfast was more pressing than evacuation. Finally, around 6:30, they decided to heed the calls of angry cops and pile the family into the back of a pickup gathering everyone in its path. Upon reaching El Progresso, a pueblo a few miles up the road, the twelve of us and a dog clambered out of the pickup bed and into the rain. The tiny, cobbled streets swarmed with people: They piled out of dump trucks and buses, buying out shops and crowding under every existing shelter. Except for the children– while adults crammed themselves in the church, by the school and under bus stops, the kids thoroughly enjoyed everything the local playground had to offer. We walked up to a friends’ house, where I promptly sacked out on a chair while everyone else crowded around the radio, listening to reporters babble about the quake and the coming 20 m waves (not that they could tell us when to expect them). Around 8:00 we walked back down to the main road, where cops drove through the street telling everyone to stay put: they would let us know what to do at 10:00. I found my way through the pouring rain to the school’s covered playground and sat down with a friend among the masses where we broke out ipods and speakers, sat back, and passed the next hour and a half in the company of the Beatles, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Bob Marley. At 9:30, apparently in response to some unspoken cue, the town emptied; cars jammed the street, and the school was vacated. We wandered into the street and caught a ride back down to town in a dump truck; apparently the wave had come and gone. All 2 cm of it. Go us.

Thanks to the “tsunami,” we were unable to begin dives for Advanced Open Water on Saturday. Yesterday, however, despite entirely unheeded warnings to stay out of the water, we hopped on a boat and headed back out to Isla Lobos for a quick dive check and then on to León Dormido for our deep dive. We geared up, rolled back off the boat into the water (¡uno, dos, tres, vaya!), met up next to the wall, and descended down into the depths, passing walls covered in bright red, purple, white, gray, blue, orange green and yellow algae, sponges, sea stars, nudibranchs, fish, urchins, and anemones before arriving at our destination of 140 ft. Here we remained for an entire two minutes as cold water rushing in on a thermocline washed over us, turning over rocks to discover tiny neon blue nudibranchs before starting to make our way back up and into the channel, passing over giant sea cucumbers, feeding eagle rays, and the occasional shark. Almost the entire group found themselves in the clutches of nitrogen narcosis: one member of the group began waving hello in the faces of all the angel fish passing by. Another girl laughed and cried in happiness, swimming around imitating eagle rays. For some reason my body decided I was to be excluded from the unique experience of finding myself narced; I managed to retain the entirety of my sanity. After making our way to the boat and consuming a copious number of bananas we passed our surface interval by snorkeling through the channel once again, free diving with puffer fish, eagle rays and turtles.

For our second dive, we headed around back to drop into the water next to the lion’s tail under huge colonies of frigatebirds and boobies. As we made our way along the wall we found ourselves face-to-face with that which we had all most anticipated: three giant hammerheads loomed out of the gray abyss, passing a few times just below us before continuing along their way around the lion. After reaching the corner, where the current pulled us up over a rocky ledge among vast, flashing schools of fish, we began making our way back toward our entry point. Above us, schools of fish pulsated and surged just below the surface. Turtles swam amongst the fish, entertaining the possibility of mating before making the decision that being surrounded by bubbles coming from a group of strange-looking creatures may not constitute the ideal situation. Three enormous manta rays swooped past from below before disappearing into the blue-gray void. And finally, another group of hammerheads slipped past us, no more than a couple meters away. There were four, just as massive as the last group: almost three meters long; bulky, solid and powerful, sleek and ghostly. Swimming next to the second was a baby, less than a meter in length. We returned to the boat, exhilarated and high on happiness. After heading to a nearby beach to eat lunch and snorkel with baby sharks and sting rays we turned back to town, lazing back half-asleep on top of the boat under the sun, singing our way through the entirety of the Beatles’ discography. Upon disembarking we searched out the best 50¢ chocolate-cinnamon-nutmeg ice cream in the history of mankind and headed to the university to make and consume homemade guac with banana chips, corn chips, apples and salsa/bean salad before piling into a classroom and falling asleep to Blue Planet on the big screen.

Also, I love my camera. Best Chanukah present ever.