galapagos

what do you think about when you hear the word galapagos? isolated pacific islands, giant tortoises, charles darwin? perhaps your mind wanders and you ask yourself why we're still battling with the infectious stupidity of organised religion over 150 years after the publication of 'on the origin of species'? i know i am. but let's get back to the islands.

like many people, i thought that the galapagos islands were a remote natural paradise, devoid of any non-tourist human activity (past or present) and bursting with countless animal and plant species, all competing for tourist dollars.

the truth is that the islands are pretty barren, with surprisingly few species of animals and even less species of plants than i had expected. the other truth is that many of the islands are inhabited - the capital puerto ayora has a population of almost 20,000 inhabitants, and before the ecuadorian government sent a group of people over to the islands in 1832 to claim it once and for all, they were temporarily inhabited by whalers and pirates, all of whom left their mark (graffiti, rats, treasure, etc).

one of the more interesting human stories is that of german dentist freidrich ritter and his lover dora strauch, who left their respective spouses to come and live in the islands in 1929 seeking a natural life. where it gets weird is that they removed all of their teeth before leaving germany, and took only a single set of steel dentures to share between the two of them to munch the food that they grew outside the lava tunnel they lived in. after a few years of regularly being beaten to a pulp by freidrich, dora eventually killed him by poisoning his food and headed back to germany, where she got back with her husband and wrote a book about her adventures, the proceeds of which presumably went towards buying a new set of teeth.

what about the animals? yes: they were amazing, of course they were! because most larger animals on the islands have evolved without any predators whatsoever, they haven't learnt to fear humans, and you can just walk right up to them and they don't give a shit. (the honey badger would feel right at home there). you can - and we did - come face to face with giant tortoises, blue-footed boobies, sea lions, green sea turtles, iguanas, penguins and many other animals and they just sit there totally unperturbed while you're having a cameragasm.

the islands are volcanic, and some are covered with huge lava fields, frozen in various states of ripple or kink that make you feel like you're on another planet.

so what did we actually do? there are various ways to explore the galapagos - some tours are land-based, where you stay in a hostel and cruise out to various places during the day, and others are boat-based, where you sleep on the boat and thus are able to go to islands that would otherwise be too far away. g and i went on an (expensive) 7-night cruise on a catamaran with 6 staff (including our guide who to my initial distress was also called diego), and 8 other tourists. there were 3 lovely swiss germans, a honeymooning swedish couple, two burnt-out and teched-up middle-aged canadian hippies and an older french woman called coco. coco pushed everyone right to the edge, so much so that on the penultimate day of the tour, when she dropped her camera into shallow water during a beach landing, the entire boatload of staff and tourists exploded in a collective ecstasy of schadenfreude.

we were served three meals a day plus snacks - it was like a high class restaurant - and had a little cabin with a little bathroom and a double bed set above it. it was cool, but i can't deny that i was a bit scared during one night's choppy ocean crossing where g forced me to sleep on the fall-out-of-bed-and-smash-your-face-on-the-floor side of the bed and when we ploughed into some of those big waves we got airborne.

our guide was professional and really knew his shit, and that's exactly what we wanted. the other staff were good, but i have to say that it's difficult to have a relaxed affinity with most ecuadorian men when they know you're gay, because the culture is super-macho, misogynistic and homophobic like a mofo. misunderstanding? fear? i think most of these guys just don't know how to react in the presence of known faggots (we will turn on them. we will turn on them and force them to become part of our pink shirt-wearing, kylie minogue-listening, cock-loving army). on one occasion the boat's engineer walked into our room while g and i were spooning, and though he apologised (why the fuck was he coming into our room anyway?!), he treated us with suspicion for the rest of the cruise, and would regard us with a condescending facial expression that i was tempted to treat with a swift kick to the nuts.

the cruise was a bit like a boot-camp. a bell would ring for breakfast at 07:30, another bell an hour later when it was time to head to one of the islands in the dingy, another for lunch etc, and by the end of it we felt a bit like pavlov's dogs. once we got over the fear of missing something and living in regret for the rest of our lives, we stopped going out to all of the islands and allowed ourselves to just lie back and relax on the boat, and that was as amazing an experience as seeing the wildlife.

so, final thoughts on the galapagos islands? go there. this is something you must do before you die. but my advice: do it just before you die. because at the end of the day, it's a week of watching, rather than doing. though it's some of the most spectacular watching you'll ever do, those islands and their animals aren't going anywhere. while you're still young and beautiful, spend your time riding, hiking, swimming, dancing, leaping, lunging, and all the other things that you won't be able to do when you're old and decrepit (but still able to go on a galapagos tour). or you could just go now and have the time of your life! two thumbs up for those wonderful islands.