17/10/09 - Rough Seas

I slept well and awoke to more good food. The island Santa Fe was today's destination so we set out to travel there after a look around another part of Santa Cruz. The weather was good (glorious by my standards) so most of us were sprawled or seated somewhere on the deck.

By some unknown logical process, Joe had decided that the best place to lie on a boat moving quickly over rough seas was underneath the massive bunch of bananas. When the first fell and hit him in the crotch I thought he would move but he apparently thought this was a fluke. Ten minutes later when another two fell simultaneously he decided that perhaps he should move and came to sit next to me. I was just finished thinking that clearly there are only so many bananas to the groin one man is willing to take when a frigatebird, a group of which was flying with the boat, crapped all over him. He took this remarkably well despite the fact the rest of us were pissing ourselves with laughter and went off for a shower

I think this is a reasonable enough bridge to tell you about frigatebirds. They are black coloured birds that are unable to land on water because their feathers are not covered in oil, so to survive they steal from other birds by grabbing onto their tails to try and make them regurgitate their food. Delightful. The males have a red pouch on their fronts that they inflate in what I consider an amusing fashion but the female frigatebirds find attractive.

Once we reached Santa Fe we went for a walk along a rocky path and passed many, many more animals, including this baby sea lion.

At this point I'll mention that I'm amazed by how completely unbothered all the species on the Galapagos are by humans. The Galapagos Hawk is the only real predator on the islands so most species have no defence against, well, anything really. This is how the birds the blue footed boobies came to be named. The name indicates stupidity because they wouldn't flee, so people could just walk up and grab them (the name also spawned a large number of fairly obvious merchandising opportunities).

Afterwards we went snorkelling and I'm getting a bit better. The picture below is not actually of me posing, rather I had just shoved my arms up to keep me underwater. Honest.

In the evening once we had eaten we set out on a very rough journey to the next island that took six hours. There was much feeling terrible all around and most of us came to the conclusion that lying down and not moving helped immensely so we were again spread all over the boat. Before going to bed I talked to Amir for a while and learned a bit about Israel. At the age of 18 for three years if you are male and two if you are female everyone has to perform compulsary military service. After this most people go travelling to "clear their heads" as he put it. He also mentioned that the country is very beautiful with many different environments, and that, while not at war, it is one of the safest countries to be in.