My mental circus, inside and out.

The Galapagos.  It´s funny how a place that you´ve imagined for many years turns out to be quite a different reality.  Of course, you think of turtles, and that´s true.  These islands are full of turtles of all sizes, enormous lumbering creatures with long necks, completely unafraid of predators because they have none.  Their only vulnerability is their eggs.  Emma and her teacher, Zyra, spent a lot of time ambulating around and looking at turtles, whom Zyra called amigas.  She seemed to like las femininas better than los machos.  That was true of all the creatures they saw.  Zyra is 29, Emma almost 50, but they hugely enjoyed each other.

And there are birds, the birds that inspired Darwin to write The Origin of Species.  Zyra pointed out the variation in the beaks of these birds, as they walked in a forest unlike any forest in Emma´s experience because it was full of the giant cacti indigenous to this place, and thorn trees, and a kind of wild spindly tree that has murderously poisonous leaves. 

Emma is on the main island, which has a small population of people, but she visited another island, San Bartolomea, that was a truly wild place with recent volcanic activity and without too many signs of humanity .  Here the sea lions fearlessly swim around with the humans, though she was warned not to get too close to El Macho.  She did, however, float calmly above a green sea turtle, drifting along in the current.

Most people take a cruise from island to island here, and all of the activities are highly planned.  Emma thinks its quite nice to not be on a cruise, but to take a trip now and then, and the rest of the time to enjoy the town and its environs.  Most people do not stay here long enough to really observe the birds in the forests here, the ones that inspired Darwin.

Posted by: EmmaPele at July 29, 2007 00:55 | link | comments