Anyway, that’s just life – and death – on Española, which is probably why Brian felt marginally relieved when his gang had passed through the colony and when Darwin had assembled them to observe the workings of a refreshingly siblicide-free blowhole. It was situated just below the south coast’s high cliffs – and it blew as advertised, although not spectacularly enough to stop Brian musing on what part of his body he would choose to turn bright blue if he could partially mimic those torpid iguanas. In the end he didn’t choose the obvious part – even though this might have been quite good fun and it might also have been potentially startlingly arousing. No, he settled instead on his right hand, on the basis that with a bright blue right hand and a not so bright pink left hand, he would no longer be prone to confusing his left and his right – which he had been for as long as he could remember. So, pragmatism won out over the theatrical – again – right up until it was suddenly interrupted by a bit of excitement.
Española, apart from being home to marine iguanas, boobies, crabs – and some especially pretty lava lizards – is also home to waved albatrosses. Indeed, Española hosts approximately 12,000 pairs of these birds – which is the overwhelming majority of the world’s population of these wonderful creatures (there are a few more that nest on a place called Isla de la Plata, near the Ecuadorian mainland). However, from a visiting Nature-seeker perspective, the fact that Española was the base for what is essentially the only endemic albatross in the Galápagos was of passing interest only, because their breeding cycle meant that the last waved albatross would have left this island almost two months before, and the albatross colony would be empty. So when what must have been the very last (and a very late) pair of these birds made an appearance in the sky above them, Darwin’s charges were both very surprised and very excited. Their leader assured them that this was a quite unprecedented sight at this time of year, but a most welcome one, in that it had enabled them to witness what was almost certainly the final albatross flight from this island until all those thousands of albatrosses returned here to breed once again.
So, not a bad end to a fascinating visit, and, what’s more, nobody had trodden on an iguana – or on a sea lion. (There was one of these larger creatures occupying the jetty when it was required for use by the Beluga’s panga-taxis, and care had to be taken to avoid a sea lion encounter that could potentially involve teeth and a loss of blood – and not the sea lion’s blood.) Then it was only a matter of preparing to tackle another Pedro-produced feast, surviving an extended listing session after the meal and then hoping for an uneventful voyage overnight back to the island of Santa Cruz. Oh, and before that voyage got underway, there was also the small matter of Brian’s presentation on his next South American country. Tonight he’d chosen Chile.
He started by informing Sandra that for this country he was going to ignore politics and presidents and instead talk about pudús. This did not appear to bring any relief to Sandra but just a sense of confusion. She looked not only slightly irritated now but also somewhat perplexed. However, ‘perplexed’ would soon be replaced by ‘bored’ when Brian proceeded to explain what a pudú was. It was, he announced, the world’s smallest species of deer – at just thirteen to seventeen inches tall and thirty-three inches long – and it lived in the thickets and dense forests of the southern Andes of both Chile and Argentina. (So not even an animal unique to his chosen country!) Anyway, he went on to point out that it should never be confused with a puku or a kudu (which, as Sandra already knew, were two species of antelope that lived on a different continent), and he was just about to pronounce on the pudú’s endangered status – of course – when Sandra asked him whether a lecture on the smallest deer in the world was really the best thing he could assemble in respect of Chile. Wasn’t there something marginally more interesting and possibly less ‘worthy’? Well yes, there was. Which is why Brian changed tack, away from pudús, and instead began to instruct Sandra on the subject of the Casa de Vidrio.
‘You see,’ he started, ‘there was this sort of “artwork” called the Casa de Vidrio, which, as its name suggests, was a glass house. And it was set up in Chile’s capital, Santiago, in 2000, to enable the citizens of that city to observe all the goings-on of a young actress who had agreed to live in it for two weeks. And I mean all her goings-on, all the revealing and intimate bits included…’
‘Why?’ interrupted a suddenly animated Sandra.
‘To lay bare, so to speak, the blatant double standards in Chile and, in particular, to protest against the city’s enthusiastic embrace of café con piernas.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘Chile has a traditionally conservative culture. I mean, divorce there was illegal until recently. Films were heavily censored. And even polling places were segregated by gender. Nevertheless, Santiago had spawned lots of these café con piernas – which literally means ‘coffee with legs’ – and what these places were… well, they were places where the all-female serving staff were “dressed to arouse”. I mean the waitresses wore miniskirts and heels, and in some of the establishments they “graduated” to bikinis and lingerie and they even had raised catwalks and mirrors and things, to… well, to “optimise” the view for the patrons.’
‘Are you making this up, Brian? Or are you just remembering a dream?’
‘No. It’s true! And it’s all to do with why they set up that glass house back in 2000.’
‘Really. And did it work? Did that actress getting her kit off have any effect? Or did it just give all those Santiago voyeurs another cheap thrill?’
‘Well, I don’t really know. But I think these coffee shops still exist…’
‘Mmm,’ murmured Sandra, ‘perhaps you should have stuck to… what were they called…?’
‘Pudend… I mean… pudús,’ spluttered Brian.
Sandra rolled her eyes, and then she brought tonight’s exposition to a conclusion.
‘Jesus. You know, you men are all the same. One-track minds. And we know where that track leads to, don’t we? And it’s not to any sunlit uplands, but to somewhere that’s quite literally the reverse – as so plainly revealed by that little slip of the tongue then. I only hope, Brian, that if I’m going to be subjected to any more lectures over the coming days – which I’m sure I am – that they manage to stay well clear of both the track and its destination and that they include no references whatsoever to naked actresses or to lingerie. Have I made myself clear?’
Sandra had – by the wobble in her voice towards the end of her admonishment. She had just wanted to shut Brian up for the night, not to scold him – really. And Brian knew that. Just as he knew that people in glass houses should never throw stones – and they are ill advised to take their clothes off as well. Especially when it’s chilly…
6.
For Brian, the voyage overnight was not entirely uneventful. It was a fairly long voyage – all the way back to Santa Cruz – and inevitably it was accompanied by the boat’s normal engine noises and by its normal rolling sensation, both of which Brian had learned to ignore. However, not so on this occasion. For some reason he found himself awake around midnight and he then remained awake for the next two hours.
However, this wasn’t a problem. In the first place, he soon realised that the dull throbbing of the boat’s engine and the vessel’s acute side-to-side motion could both be relished. There was something almost womb-like in the sensation they created. But there was more. Because the ambient sound and the regular oscillations, taken together, had the effect of triggering in his brain the repeated refrains of what was one of his favourite recordings of all time. Yes, as he lay on his back in his tiny cabin, rocking gently from side to side, Brian was able to hear Joan Baez singing Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, and so well, that it was as though she was in there in the cabin with him. It was a really memorable experience, and it was only when Joan’s voice was beginning to become hoarse throug
h its overuse that Brian, in an attempt to relieve her, turned his attention from music to a consideration of some of the world’s most intractable problems. He kicked off with overpopulation, which proved as insoluble a problem as ever, before then moving on through resource depletion and the alarming spread of beards until he eventually arrived at phones. Well, not phones as such, but their almost constant use by the youth of the world, where ‘youth’ meant anybody who had been acquainted with the symptoms of puberty but not yet with wrinkles or sags. But, anyway, the reason he’d arrived at this destination was the thought that these youthful sorts, if they found themselves in an awake-in-the-night situation on a small boat in the middle of the Pacific, and couldn’t get a signal for their phone, would certainly not be engaged with Joan Baez, or with their intellect and trying to solve world problems, but instead would be in a state of panic.
Heck, what would they do? Brian gave it some serious thought – without knowing too much about the intricacies of smartphones – and concluded that they might possibly choose to review the thousand or so selfies they’d taken on the trip so far, or they might even try to take a few more, or they might find a couple of mindless computer games to play. This, of course, would go some way to settling their burgeoning sense of panic, in that the simple act of just holding their device would give them a measure of comfort. But the fact remained that they could not use it to talk to anybody, not to any one of all those other people who, like themselves, cannot now exist without the constant exchange of chatter that a modern phone allows. Quite what all these people chatted about, Brian hadn’t a clue – and he didn’t want a clue. If he did have a clue, he suspected he would probably be even more despondent about the future of the human race than he was right now. And he could well do without another load of despondency.
There again, there was his other theory – concerning the constant use of phones for so-called communication – and if he revisited this on this wakeful night he would become unmanageably despondent. Because this theory concerned the identity of whoever it was at the other end of the phone…
You see, Brian found it literally incredible that so many people could have so many ‘friends’ to talk to, and even if they did have an inordinate number of ‘friends’, then they all led such generally uneventful lives, they could not possibly find anything like enough to talk about – to fill in all those thousands of hours of calls they made every year. So… what he’d formulated in his mind was some sort of ‘Cyber Controller’, a sort of virtual organiser/oracle who was constantly available for all smartphone users and whose job it was to tell them how to go about their lives. That’s why, when you see a modern young mum in the street, one hand on the handle of a pushchair and one hand pressing a phone to her ear, she looks so distracted. Because what is happening is that she is receiving information on how to negotiate that nearby zebra crossing, or maybe on how to find her way home – or possibly she is being advised as to whether she should buy some milk for her baby rather than another bottle of Coke. She has somehow lost her ability to make her way through life on her own and, like all the other lost souls of her generation, has capitulated to the phone and become a willing automaton of the digital age.
Brian would have been the first to admit that his theory did have a few holes in it, and it wasn’t by any means clear as to who might be playing the omnipotent Controller – or how he answered all those millions of calls all at the same time. But that, for Brian, was a mere detail, and the empirical evidence was just too strong to dismiss out of hand. How else, he thought, could one explain so much use of a handheld phone – and through this sustained use, the emergence of more and more people who have problems with attention spans, with verbal communication, with normal manners and with… errh, just thinking? And then there was the onset of panic on any occasion when the Cyber Controller could not be reached and instructions not received – on issues such as how to deal with being awake in the middle of the night on a small boat travelling between two islands in the Galápagos archipelago.
Well, he was still thinking about smartphones when he finally dropped off to sleep. And when he awoke again, at about six-thirty in the morning, he was no longer thinking about anything to do with the overthrow of intellect by invasive innovation, but instead about the programme for today. Because today would be all about what the Galápagos is so renowned for: its celebrated and almost incomparable giant tortoises.
It started after another assault course of a breakfast and after an inspection of the contents of Academy Bay. This was where the captain had parked his boat, and he’d parked it here because Academy Bay, on the south coast of Santa Cruz, is the effective parking lot for Puerto Ayora. And Puerto Ayora, as well as being the most populous town in the Galápagos, is also the home of the Charles Darwin Foundation, an institution which is not unconnected with the wellbeing of giant tortoises and which, consequently, was the Nature-seekers’ first destination for today.
Well, there were a lot of contents of Academy Bay. It was just full of boats, and some of these boats were frighteningly large. They made the Beluga look like a toy and, in Brian’s mind, they made the prospect of a visit to Puerto Ayora look like… well, less than a joy. With all these assembled visitors, it was clearly not going to be a quiet and peaceful place, and if its 12,000 inhabitants displayed the same habits as their counterparts in the disgusting Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, back on San Cristóbal, it could be a lot worse than just not quiet and peaceful.
However, that was to prejudge, and Brian decided he should take a more optimistic view of their intended destination and wait until they were ashore to make any proper assessment of this second puerto. This was just as well. Because when his panga made it to Puerto Ayora’s rather substantial jetty, it was busy – and definitely not peaceful – but it was almost pretty. And down below the jetty, in surprisingly clear water, were some reef sharks and even a couple of turtles. Maybe Puerto Ayora would be a lot better than he thought.
Well, yes it was – at least on its seafront. Not quite St Tropez, but where Darwin had corralled his flock for the first briefing of the day, there was some civic tree planting and some decorative paving work and a backdrop of fairly decent-looking cafés and shops. Indeed, this almost-orderly manifestation of Puerto Ayora’s commercialism extended all the way along Avenida Charles Darwin, the route taken by the Nature-seekers to get them to the site of the Charles Darwin Foundation. Nevertheless, one could have successfully argued that its ‘resort’ nature made it almost indistinguishable from somewhere like Tenby (on a sunny day) and one could also have become genuinely concerned that such an overtly holiday-sort-of-place existed in such a uniquely precious environment as the Galápagos. Which is exactly what Brian did. Shit, if he couldn’t get them for despoilment and disfigurement (just yet), then he could still have a go at them for incongruity and maybe insensitivity as well.
What the residents of Puerto Ayora could not be held accountable for, however, was the heat. In the absence of a cliff-top breeze or an open-ocean gale, it was excruciatingly hot. So hot, indeed, that the Nature-seeker ensemble needed very little coaxing to stop at an open-air fish stall on Avenida Charles Darwin, a stall which wasn’t particularly smart, but one which did offer more than a little shade. It also offered a remarkable close-up view of some Galápagos wildlife. This is because its blue concrete counters were just yards from the sea, and with these counters being covered in fish and with the prospect of the odd fish-bit appearing on the floor beneath and around them, two normally sea-based representatives of this wildlife were almost always in attendance. They were on this day. Directly under the counters or loitering right next to the fishmongers were a few hopeful sea lions, and a little further away and closer to the water were half a dozen pelicans, their huge beaks closed but their eyes wide open, no doubt keeping a constant lookout for that next tasty bite. These were brown pelicans, very large birds with improbably large pouches (capable of holding up to thirteen lit
res of water – and hopefully a meal) – and with some improbably close relatives: the frigatebirds. Yes, these clumsy-on-land comics are actually accomplished plunge divers, and they may well have developed their enormous pouches as a defence against the piracy habits of their frigatebird cousins – albeit no such defence was required here. No, all they needed in this waterside fish emporium was a soupçon of good fortune – in the shape of the next bit of fish trimming falling right at their feet.
It all made for a fascinating pause for the Nature-seekers, and despite some commendable blocking tactics adopted by Shane, it provided all those with cameras – and particularly Evan – with some memorable shots of both pelicans and sea lions – and a much needed rest before the unshaded-marathon part of the walk got underway.
By golly, it was hot. And by golly, there was hardly any shade to speak of, and as Darwin’s group left the retail stretch of the avenida and embarked on the approach road to the Foundation, there was no shade whatsoever. Moreover, when they entered the grounds of the Charles Darwin Foundation, there wasn’t much of… well, anything at all…
That might sound a little harsh. But given Brian’s state of almost total saturation, having endured that walk through the oven that was Avenida Charles Darwin, it was almost understandable, particularly when one takes into account that the Foundation exists to protect and support Galápagos wildlife – and its tortoises in particular – and it is not there to provide a five-star ‘visitor experience’. One can, of course, observe a number of giant tortoises, all looking about as active as Brian felt, and one can listen to (young) Darwin’s dissertations on these beasts and on what the Foundation is doing to breed more of them and so help in the protection of their various species. But frankly, that can get you only so far, and one cannot help noticing the absence of anything inherently interesting amongst the jumble of buildings that make up the site, just as one cannot help noticing the intense heat and, even worse, the presence of other visitors in the shape of some not-so-quiet Americans. They were organised into two groups, and both groups included a disproportionate number of US citizens who had clearly graduated from the High Volume Voice Projection and Short-distance Shouting Institute. Brian could barely believe it. He had, after all, met plenty of softly spoken Americans in his time. But the majority of these guys… well, he wondered whether there was some sort of competition going on – for the title of this month’s loudest, most bulbous visitor to the Galápagos, with maybe the possibility of picking up the much-coveted annual title as well. (And yes, there was not much leanness in evidence either; just the sort of shapes that occur naturally in the biggest of the giant tortoises…)
Absolutely Galápagos Page 8
