Absolutely Galápagos

by David Fletcher

  Now, it is worth at this point saying just a few words about this particular member of the Galápagos archipelago, and the first word should probably be ‘large’. Yes, Isabela is by far the largest island in the Galápagos, and at nearly 1,800 square miles, it constitutes almost a half of the land area of the entire archipelago. It is also about four times larger than Santa Cruz, the second largest island in the group. Then there is its youth… Because, Isabela, sitting on the west of the Galápagos archipelago, is one of its youngest islands. It was formed just one million years ago – by the irresistible merger of six shield volcanoes. Furthermore, its youth is emphasised by the fact that five of these volcanoes are still active, making Isabela one of the most volcanically active places in the world. Indeed, one of these volcanoes, a giant called Sierra Negra, last erupted in 2005. And it was this volcano that Brian and his colleagues were scheduled to climb today – right up to its enormous crater!

  Before partaking of breakfast, Sandra had asked her husband whether the itinerary for their trip had made clear that it would involve a close encounter with an active volcano, and Brian had not been able to assure her that it had. Whereafter he found it almost impossible to assure her that an ascent of said volcano was the most sensible of endeavours to embark on, particularly as the ascent would involve a hike of over two miles and a climb to an altitude of almost 3,700 feet. Nevertheless, a decision was taken to go for it, not least because all the other Nature-seekers were raring to go, and ducking out of this one would have been unforgivable. What’s more, it would probably be a fantastic experience.

  It started, as all their island expeditions did, in a panga. And the two pangas together first made a mini voyage around some offshore rocks, in order to observe some of Isabela’s marine iguanas and some of its modest population of penguins. Then it was time to head to the mainland and into the waiting arms of its solitary port, the already mentioned Puerto Villamil. This place sits on the south coast of Isabela – towards the east end of this coast. And as (in Brian’s mind) Isabela has the outline of a seahorse emerging from an egg – and facing left – that means that this modest port resides on the underside of the egg and a little towards its right. Where it resided on the scale of the ungroomed and the shabby remained to be seen.

  Well, initially, all looked well. As Brian’s panga approached a small wooden landing stage, there were just some small open boats to see, some of them with sea lions aboard, and beyond them some vegetation and some reasonable-looking buildings. But then the Nature-seekers boarded their ‘bus’ and it was soon ‘Grotville’ once again. As their transport made its way through the ‘suburbs’ of Puerto Villamil, it also made its way through yet another manifestation of the unkempt and the uncared for. It was a little like an unplanned holiday village, Brian thought; one built on a lava field, where the object had been to disfigure the landscape, and not only with the substandard quality of the buildings but also with an accumulation around them of every variety of detritus one could possibly assemble. And no. This wasn’t just middle-class arrogance in play; it was the unavoidable truth that, in common with the inhabitants of Santa Cruz and San Cristóbal, the folk of Isabela didn’t seem to give a damn. They didn’t major in omnibus design either.

  Ah yes. Brian was not content to be horribly mean-minded about Isabela’s town planning. He also had it in for its transport system – as represented by its (one and only?) ‘bus’.

  You see, it wasn’t actually a bus. It was a flatbed truck, onto which somebody had bolted six rows of metal chairs and then provided them with some cover in the shape of a metal canopy. So there was something a bit bus-like about it, and in many of the less fortunate parts of the world, it would pass muster as a regular bus without any sort of debate. However, the fact remained that it had more in common with the sort of open-sided transport one sees in theme parks, and it was not very comfortable. Particularly when Isabela’s answer to Fangio engaged its afterburners and roared out of Puerto Villamil in the direction of Sierra Negra. In fact, Brian soon decided that he was experiencing not just an uncomfortable ride but also a ride that was unquestionably scary. No seat belts, no sides to the vehicle, no cushioning, probably no MOT, but instead just lots of speed and the sense that the driver was quite possibly self-taught and by no means necessarily stable.

  Anyway, he managed to keep his vehicle on the road – just – and Brian attempted to distract himself by taking in the scenery. Initially this was quite a difficult task because the scenery lacked anything that might have been described as scenic. It was just indeterminate scrub and farmland, with the only points of interest provided by the occasional one-careless-owner-and-in-desperate-need-of-attention ‘farmstead’. Oh, and there was an overcast sky as well, which did little to help but instead threatened some dampness to come.

  Oh dear. But never mind, because the truck/bus was now climbing the enormous feature that was Sierra Negra, and farmland had almost given way to natural vegetation – and some quite impressive displays of erosion. Because skirting the tarmacked road, as it ascended the sierra, were deep water-created gullies, which not only represented a further potential hazard for the occupants of the bus but also a vivid illustration of how mankind’s activities can so easily have an unintentional impact on the environment. Remove vegetation – by building a road or farming or forestry activities – and soon the soil that supported that vegetation is washed away. And in this instance Brian reckoned that there was a pretty good chance that the road would be washed away with it. He just hoped that this didn’t happen until he and his friends had been delivered back to the Beluga.

  It was just as he was wallowing in these murky depths of his world-class pessimism, that the driver brought his vehicle to a halt. Not through the use of brakes, but by disengaging his foot from the accelerator pedal and letting the slope of the road consume the truck’s momentum. His brakes, Brian assumed, were held in reserve for emergencies. Or they might even be held in reserve back in a garage somewhere in Puerto Villamil. And that would only become apparent when the vehicle embarked on its homebound descent. But hey… all was OK now, and what’s more, the driver had stopped his vehicle for a reason, and that reason was Darwin’s catching a fleeting glimpse of a vermillion flycatcher.

  This chap is a little treasure. Or at least the male is. Unlike the female, who has to make do with a palette of yellow, off-white and brown, he has brilliant vermilion undersides, a vermillion breast, throat and cap, and a black eye-band that runs to and joins his black back where this rises to the nape of his handsome black neck. He is therefore relatively easy to spot, with his brightness standing out as a marker against a background of green vegetation. That said, Darwin had only glimpsed him and had now lost him, even though he and all the Nature-seekers were off the truck and busy scouring the roadside vegetation with their assembled binocs. Then he was seen again. And then he came closer, and soon all Darwin’s charges had observed him at length and he could join that ‘list of birds seen’ – with a special commendation for his beauty and his charm. He was really splendid, and he had provided all the Nature-seekers with a welcome pause in their ascent of the volcano and with a much needed stretch of their legs – given that after forty minutes of trucking, their legs would be very much put to the test.

  The bus had left the flycatcher and now, after another ten minutes on the road, it was coasting to a halt in a small car park that was clearly its terminus. From now on it would be an ascent on foot. Or at least it would just as soon as the majority of the Nature-seekers had availed themselves of what, after that flycatcher, was yet another ‘first’ of this Galápagos adventure: a stand-alone public toilet. It wasn’t grand, but neither was it connected to a tortoise farm or a tortoise-breeding centre. It was just sitting there on its own, and that made it a toilet to remember. And after a two-mile walk up the volcano and a two-mile walk back, quite possibly a toilet to revisit…

  Anyway, that was for later. Right now, after
the initial mass-relief session had been concluded, it was time for the walk, and that meant it was time to embark on a trek up a track. The track in question was broad and, to start with, quite muddy, after which it became somewhat upward and somewhat endless. In places it was eroded, in the same way that those road edges earlier on had been eroded, but it was still a fairly easy track to negotiate – if, that is, one discounted its upward incline. And quite frankly, this was rather difficult to discount. Brian, for one, was finding it very hard to ignore the fact that each step forward entailed lifting his entire body weight up by at least an inch. And if one stopped to re-engage with one’s schoolboy knowledge of stuff like mass, energy, power and force, one would soon conclude that lifting one’s own body weight again and again, even if in small incremental steps, was an exercise that could in no way be dismissed from one’s mind. It represented a real physical effort, and unfortunately Brian had never in his life been an ardent cheerleader for even a modicum of physical exercise let alone a sustained physical effort.

  Nevertheless, he could recognise when he was being a wuss – and when everybody else was not being a wuss, and just getting on with what was actually no more than a gently inclined stroll. Hell, it was already clear that the Nature-seekers were not scaling the outer walls of Sierra Negra’s caldera by using a vertical path, but instead by following what was a much more manageable route around the caldera. This meant that it was much longer than any vertical path – obviously – but also that it could offer those who used it the most modest of gradients, the sort of gradients that real Nature-seekers could take in their literal stride, and that Brian, if he had any sense, should just get on with and enjoy.

  Well, in the event, he managed it. And so too did Sandra. There wasn’t much to see beyond the coarse vegetation that bordered the track and there was virtually no wildlife around. But the act of just plodding up what did look very like an endless track became a joy in itself. And this joy was accentuated by being in the company of a group of like-minded souls who today had found themselves in the sort of splendid isolation that can only be offered by places such as an active volcano on a large and still largely uninhabited island in the Galápagos. One could also, of course, relish the privilege of such a walk – in the sense of how many other people in the world, at precisely this time, would somewhere be walking up an active volcano. Brian actually considered this as he trudged upwards, and concluded that an accurate number was impossible to arrive at, although it was probably a little bit higher than the number who belonged to Nicola Sturgeon’s official fan club but quite a bit lower than those who had left it.

  Anyway, after more than an hour of walking, Bill and Andrea had established a clear lead over the rest of the party. Which was why, without Darwin’s guidance, they overshot the party’s destination. This was a lookout point to the left of the track, which was obscured by some dense vegetation. Darwin felt obliged to call them back, lest they continued around the track that skirted the caldera and ended up lost or exhausted or both. When they had then rejoined the party and the party had made its way through the vegetation, it was not very long before a consensus had been arrived at. And this consensus was that the seemingly endless trek up the track had been more than worth it. This was because the view from the lookout point was not just stupendous, but it was almost literally stupefying.

  The volcano’s caldera, which had now come into view, was, like most calderas, essentially circular in shape and its floor was an expanse of just barren lava. However, that expanse of lava was absolutely immense, and it was absolutely immense because Sierra Negra’s caldera has a diameter of no less than ten kilometres. That means you could probably have fitted most of Redditch into it, and other than losing their connections to Birmingham and having to cope with some unusually high temperatures, the citizens of Redditch could then have continued to go about their business as if nothing had happened. This wasn’t, of course, a mental measure of the caldera’s size that was made by other than Brian, but it might serve to illustrate just how enormous and just how spectacular this natural feature was – and how even more spectacular it must have been when it erupted.

  Darwin had been at this lookout point when that last happened – in 2005 – and he attempted to explain to the Nature-seekers what he had seen and what he had felt. Because on that occasion the eruption was on the north side of the caldera – directly opposite from where they were now standing – and that eruption had caused lava to flow all around the eastern and southern edges of the caldera. This was still apparent, as was the colossal amount of lava that must have been on the move at the time. What was not apparent, however, but was now being made clear by Darwin, was the colossal amount of energy – and heat – that had accompanied the eruption. And he made this clear by informing his charges that it had been possible to observe the eruption from where they were now standing for only a few minutes, because the heat being spewed from the Earth, a full ten kilometres away, and the heat from the lava flow was just too intense to bear for any greater length of time.

  Brian was impressed. Indeed all the Nature-seekers were impressed. Who would have not been? And who, if they were anything like Brian, would not have been made to feel really insignificant in the face of this enormous manifestation of ‘natural indifference’? Yes, here was the result of the Earth doing what it does. By coughing up just a tiny fraction of its guts, it has had no trouble whatsoever in forming this absolutely gargantuan crater – as well, of course, as the whole island of Isabela – and at no time were we, the all-important masters of the universe, given even a passing thought. Yes, we are just incidental. We are just a transient, trivial tenant on this fabulous planet, and it sometimes takes a sight like the caldera of Sierra Negra to remind us of this fact. Which, Brian thought, was quite enough philosophy to last him for the rest of the day. And anyway, it really looked as though it could rain now. So wasn’t it about time he and his comrades made it back down the track, ultimately to swap their trek for a truck and for some of them then to concern themselves about the existence of any brakes on that truck?

  It was OK. The walk back down was as easy as pie – and the Nature-seekers weren’t even rained on – and then the truck’s driver adopted only a reckless speed on the way back to town and not one that was unquestionably suicidal. Furthermore, there was even a fleeting glimpse of another vermillion flycatcher on the way down. Although, as it was in exactly the same spot where the first had been seen on the way up, Brian thought it highly likely that it was the same bird. He also thought that Darwin and his fellow guides probably paid one of the locals to provide it with a supply of premium honey-roasted flies, bought from somewhere like Fortnum and Mason, and guaranteed to prevent this bird from ever leaving its patch, and therefore making it available for viewing by all those who might pass by on a truck. Oh, and the truck, when it got back to Puerto Villamil, was able to stop. Whether this was as a result of some sort of braking system or a side effect of some unknown natural phenomenon was never established. Brian leant in favour of the latter…

  He also leant in favour of being idle in the afternoon. After lunch back on board the Beluga, he and Sandra could have joined a number of the Nature-seekers and returned to Puerto Villamil, there to visit another tortoise-breeding centre and to wander around some brackish lagoons. However, following his experience of heat, loud Americans – and tedium – at the tortoise-breeding centre on Santa Cruz, a further visit to another such institution held out only minimal appeal. As for the lagoons… well, now that he’d experienced Puerto Villamil, he was not especially eager to experience any of its ‘attractions’, no matter how much wildlife interest they might provide – and no matter how successful he was in suppressing his misgivings about the people of Villamil…

  Yes, he had been doing some reading. And he had discovered that in 2007, some fishermen from Puerto Villamil had killed eight Galápagos tortoises, three of which had been over one hundred years old. Furthermore, not on
ly did they kill them but they apparently cruelly tormented them first – and all for the worst of reasons. You see, these fishermen were engaged in an act of revenge. They were apparently pretty upset that the authorities were attempting to control their activities, even though their activities were illegal and constituted a fundamental threat to all marine life in the Galápagos National Park.

  What they were doing was sweeping the floor of the ocean around Isabela, and dragging up starfish, lobsters – and sea cucumbers. Now, sea cucumbers have been described as the ‘earthworms of the sea’, because they do a similar job to earthworms on land. They consume and grind down materials into finer particles that bacteria can then break down as part of the ‘nutrient cycle’ of the sea, and where they are eliminated, the sea floor becomes hardened and can no longer be used by other bottom-dwelling creatures. Indeed, the environment is essentially fucked and it can take decades to recover. Unfortunately, sea cucumbers also feature (alongside shark fins, of course) as a must-have delicacy in the Far East, which is why the Isabela fishermen were quite happy to ravage a pristine marine environment in order to find them, and then kill tortoises as some sort of sick revenge when the national park guys sought to impose some much needed quotas on their catches.

  Well, it will be no great surprise that any activities involving the nauseating eating habits of certain Chinese people and the decimation of a marine environment – and, indirectly, the brutal murder of some wonderful endangered animals – will not be well received by Brian. Furthermore, the fact that the decimation process has not been brought to an end will by no means help matters, and it could even be said that he has always had only the utmost contempt for anyone who has so little respect for the world around them. To fish – sensitively – is OK. To ravage – without any thought for the environment or for the future, no matter what are your needs – is odious beyond words. And you will find that sensitive little souls like Brian will want nothing to do with you and nothing to do with your scruffy little town. Instead, they will probably want no more than to stay on their sea-going craft and contemplate one or two more of life’s endless and fathomless mysteries…