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.