reptiles of the Galapagos

The islands are named after a saddle (the Spanish word), based upon the shape of the shell of some of the tortoises, which have evolved to be able to stretch their necks up high, to get the juicy leaves from the cactus that has evolved long trunks to keep the leaves up high out of reach of normal tortoises ... I do not have any particular interest in tortoises but they are hard to avoid in the Galapagos Islands.

Now there are only some estimated 30,000, and this following plenty of work by conservationists to breed and reintroduce them to parts where they had died out.  It is estimated that when Darwin visited the islands there were 250,000 there.  But people came and hunted them, with ships filling their holds with them, stacked alive and upside down, as they would stay alive like that for up to a year, providing a store of fresh meat for the sailors.  Away from such a cruel end they are long-lived - one taken by Darwin in 1835 only died (in Queensland zoo) in 2003.  They are also quite fascinating - did you know that as youngsters it is not possible to determine their sex, but that when they mature, in males the undershell changes to a concave shape (to enable them to mount a female), the tail grows longer and the penis migrates from its internal position to the end of the tail?

But I much preferred the iguanas, both the land and the marine varieties.  The land ones mostly seem to have a kind of smile on their face (although this one looks quite grumpy) and are very pretty, in varying patterns of cream, yellow and black.

The marine iguanas were more ferocious looking, although mostly just laying around in big heaps trying to keep warm (this being the cold season in the Galapagos as the Humboldt current brings cold water up from the southern oceans).  They are black in colour, however those from Española (Hood) Island are much more colourful, particularly during the breeding season, and some appeared to have come into season early.  This made them more aggressive towards other males too, so quite entertaining to watch!

I was very keen to see a snake or two as well (I'm sure you've all seen the BBC footage of the snakes hunting the young iguana!), although not hopeful as they are not seen all that often.  But we were lucky and saw three snakes, one long black Fernandina snake and two stripey Galapagos racers.  The first snake we saw was out in the open, seemingly basking in the late afternoon sun.  We discussed whether or not it was actually alive, this being highly unusual behaviour, when a mockingbird came along to cause trouble.  It pecked at the tail end of the snake, lifting that end up, and the snake - clearly very much alive - reared up at it.  They are very mildly venomous, apparently, but kill their prey through constriction.  A battle ensued, with the bird continually pecking at the snake, seemingly trying to drag it even further into the open, whilst the snake tried to fend off the bird whilst moving towards cover.  We moved on once the snake had safely made it to the cover of a bush, although the mockingbird was still hanging around.  Wish I'd thought to video it, as my replacement camera did not take good enough photos, but these three blurry, washed out pictures give some idea of what the interaction looked like:

a camera curse

Somehow - I'm not sure exactly how, but I have been feeling a bit clumsy lately - my camera slipped out of my hands as I tried to take a photo through the gate at the top on an Inca tunnel in the Pumapango Archaeological Park in Cuenca, Ecuador.  Rather than landing at my feet, it caught a part of the gate and glanced off it sideways, into the tunnel.

Down it went, bouncing off the rocky floor, down and down. Down into the Inca underworld (this photo taken with my phone).

The guards found a key and opened the gate, climbed down, and retrieved my camera, but there was a dent in one side of the lens cladding, and the message on the screen "System error zoom" when I tried to do anything.

I spent the rest of that day traipsing round the streets of Cuenca searching for a camera shop, certain that I'd passed one the previous day.  I was going to the Galapagos and I had to have a camera!  There were plenty of stores developing photos and taking portraits, but the only cameras I could find on sale were little pocket starter ones, with something like a 5x zoom - no substitute at all for the 24x zoom Panasonic Lumix compact camera that was sitting broken in my hand.

Several stores, however, referred me to a camera repair shop called La Victoria.  I didn't have any hope that my camera could be repaired, but I found the shop and the man there was confident that something could be done and so he sent my camera off the next day to their repairman, whilst I continued to scour the outer suburbs of the city hoping to find a place selling Panasonic compact cameras, following leads from internet searches which didn't really help.

Finally the store confirmed that they could not repair my camera.without a two-week wait for spare parts - but that they had a Panasonic Lumix for sale.  It was a bridge camera, probably capable of taking better pictures than my compact, but bigger and bulkier and more complicated to use.  The kind of camera you would have to hand around your neck, rather than being able to put it in a handy little case attached to your belt, as I am used to.  & they wanted $520.  In cash.

I didn't have the cash, so whilst I was deliberating over spending that much money on a camera that was in a style I didn't like, I went to a bank to see if there was any way of getting cash with my credit card (in Panama we don't use a PIN but simply a signature); no, I couldn't.  I went back to La Victoria - what if I agreed to pay extra to cover the credit card commission?  The man telephoned his boss and they conferred for a while - and agreed that I could buy the camera with my credit card but for $600.  So, in some anguish about shelling out so much money for a camera I didn't want but would need for just my two weeks in the Galapagos, I handed over my credit card.  They refused to give me an official receipt (the one I'd need to reclaim the 12% VAT at the airport) - it seems they were on the fiddle which I suppose is why they only wanted cash initially.

Anyway, I bought the camera and transferred my 8GB memory card into it from the broken old camera.  Waiting at the bus station that night I was able to download all the photos off the memory card (including shrunken heads in the Cuenca Pumapungo museum!) and onto my laptop, and edit them as necessary to be uploaded to the internet next time I had a connection.

Next morning, waiting at the Quilimbe bus station in Quito for my onward bus, I got to use the new camera for the first time - a distant snow-capped peak (Cotopaxi) with a thin strip of cloud across it.  It certainly wasn't as easy to use as the old one (way more features!) but the picture looked nice.  I was going to have three days to get used to it in Mindo before heading to the Galapagos.  One thing I particularly disliked about it was its size and its sticking-out lens, which made it feel quite fragile, especially as it hadn't come with a camera bag.  So I packed it back carefully into the bubble-wrap the shop had given me and into my day-pack before boarding the bus.

As I got on, a gentleman who I assumed (from his dress and manner) to be a bus official asked for my destination and then told me where to sit, doing the same for the two people behind me.  I placed my day-pack carefully on the floor between my feet, one strap wrapped around one leg as I always do, but the bus man asked to put it up on the overhead rack for me.  I told him I'd rather keep it with me, but he referred to the regulations and said it had to go up top.  "Careful with it!" I said, as he took if from me, "It has a camera in it, it's fragile".  & he placed it, carefully enough I suppose, up on the shelf behind me.

I wasn't at all happy about this.  I am always so careful with my belongings when I travel, with my bag always not just in sight of me but attached to me somehow.  I saw he'd done the same to the woman (another tourist) who got on behind me, but in the ten minutes before the bus was due to depart she decided to use the bathroom, and so retrieved her bag when she got off.  I noticed that she kept it with her when she got back on and nobody invoked 'the regulations' at that point. More and more people got on the bus, some of whom had to stand in the aisle, and I was watching carefully to ensure that no-one was getting off with my bag.  I was really unhappy about it not being with me - or even within my sight - a real sense of unease that I can't explain.  Finally I couldn't stand the stress of it any more and pushed past people standing to go and retrieve the bag.

I cannot describe the sinking, dreadful feeling as I moved the bag - still in the same place, and with all the zips done up, but only weighing half of what it should.  My laptop had gone, my mobile phone had gone - and my brand new $600 camera had gone.  I accused the bus conductor of being in collusion with thieves for telling me to put my bag there, but it turns out that the man who told me to put the bag there was not a bus employee but an imposter.

The police were called and I agreed to file a report, so they collected me and drove me back into the heart of Quito, to the tourist police office, and filed my report.  Afterwards they took me back to a bus station, but via a photo development place where I bought one of those poor quality, low zoom starter cameras - I had to have something for the Galapagos.  & again, they would only take cash ($180) which left things pretty tight for the rest of my trip.

I went through several days of alternate tears and anger over this, cross with myself that I hadn't acted sooner on my instinct, and frustrated that despite the CCTV camera on the bus I didn't get the feeling there would be much effort made to catch the perpetrators.  It seems that the bus route I was on is notorious for thefts, though I don't know whether they always use the same trick they used with me; if I lived there I'd be more than happy to take the same route again and try to entrap them!  Fortunately with the combination of my new small camera and a new large memory card, and a very kind cabin-mate on the boat with a good Panasonic camera who was happy to lend it to me - and wildlife that tended to stay there and wait while we switched memory cards - I was largely able to get the photos I wanted from the Galapagos.  More frustrating was the short trip to Mindo that preceded the Galapagos, where I saw birds such as plate-billed mountain toucan, giant antpitta and bronze-winged parrot, but was unable to photograph them with the tiny replacement camera.

Then when I got back to work but with no laptop and no phone ...  & discovered how many of my regular websites had been 'open' on my old laptop with me no longer remembering the passwords; clicking "forgotten my password" so they can send a code to your registered phone number doesn't work either when your phone was stolen alongside your laptop.  You might notice from comments on the previous post that I struggled to get into here to post this!  There was a glimmer of hope financially when I discovered that the trip is probably covered by my employer's travel insurance (as I used my annual home flight allowance to buy the air ticket), but I cannot produce a receipt for the stolen camera, only a credit card slip which says I bought a 'product'. Attempts to contact the shop reveal I did not even buy it at the well-known La Victoria, but at a little unnamed place next-door which capitalises on such confusion.  I just have to keep reminding myself though how lucky I was they did not steal my passport (which was with the phone), and presumably did not find my purse with money and credit card inside.  That would have made things far more difficult.

For those wondering, by the way, the photo of the Inca tunnel had already been uploaded to the cloud from my hostel before my phone was stolen!

around the Balkans

I was able to slip in a quick trip to the Balkans before our Amsterdam conference - just a few days each in Serbia, Kosovo, and Bosnia & Herzegovina, but that was enough to get a flavour of the culture and an introduction to the complicated history, too complicated to understand properly in such a short time.  I suppose a summary would be that the region lies on a kind of crossroads between Asia and Europe and so was invaded and occupied over and over again through the centuries by Celts, Romans, Slavs, Hapsburgs, Byzantines, Ottomans ... and parts were also bombed by the Nazis and most recently by NATO.


As a group we were most interested in the recent history - the break-up of Yugoslavia and what followed - but, maybe not surprisingly, our Serbian guide avoided the subject and focused instead on the fourteenth century under Stefan Dušan before the Battle of Kosovo where the Turks defeated Serbia, beginning 500 years of Islamic rule.  The resentment against the Turks is still part of the politics for some, shown by the fairly recent persecution of Kosovan Albanians and of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs.

We arrived at Srebrenica the day before the annual commemoration of the massacre.  In addition to the thousands of existing graves there were around seventy newly dug graves awaiting the burial of remains of victims identified during the past year.  It was very moving as families surrounded these empty graves, some in tears - the genocide was only 22 years ago so the memories are still fresh and raw.  & there is still work ongoing to find further remains and carry out the DNA testing required to identify them.  A difficult task, as the re-burial of many victims, in an attempt to hide the evidence of the massacre, was crudely done such that many partly decomposed bodies were broken up in the process.  I heard of one victim whose remains have been found at five different sites.  A later visit to the Srebrenica Gallery and the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide in Sarajevo provided more information - including gruesome photos and videos.  Hard to believe that this happened in Europe, in my lifetime.

Maybe in part because of the history, I found myself a bit ambivalent about Serbia, but totally smitten by Bosnia & Herzegovina.  It's easy to focus on this recent history as the evidence is all around, from the museums and memorials, the tunnel in Sarajevo (used to get people in and out during the four-year siege by Bosnian Serbs), the mortar holes in buildings, and even a monument erected in the Republika Srpska (one of the three constituent parts of Bosnia & Herzegovina) to the war criminal Ratko Mladič - the underlying tensions between the different ethnic groups did not go away just because a peace accord was signed.  However there is also beautiful countryside, great architecture (including several UNESCO World Heritage sites) and a great ambience in Sarajevo and, although very touristy, in Mostar.

Really oddly, I cannot post my best photo of this famous bridge in Mostar, as every time I try to upload it I get the message "Upload failed: server rejected" (has blogspot been hacked??) but this is a different view of it, taken from the top of the minaret of the Koskin-Mehmed Pasha's mosque.  One of the only places in the world where the minaret of an active mosque is open to the public.

Another stunning place was the village of Počitelj with its ruined fortifications:

An enjoyable half day was spent travelling up a terrible track to the village of Lukomir, the highest settlement in Bosnia & Herzegovina (at 1,500m), a place that is only occupied for half the year because of the deep snow that cuts if off over the winter.  The houses are built of stone and sit next to the stunning Rakitinica canyon.  The picture shows one of the old buildings (they seem to function as houses and barns at the same time) with the edge of the canyon behind.

Just one more picture from Bosnia & Herzegovina, forgive me, the Kravica Falls:

I shouldn't ignore the other two countries, however. Even Serbia had some reasonable Roman ruins and the beautiful winding Uvac Canyon with its nesting Griffon vultures and 6km long Usac cave full of stalactites and stalagmites.  Kosovo is low key, but very nice, the most impressive parts for me being the old painted monasteries.  No photos were allowed inside Gračanica monastery, but in Visoki Dečani we were allowed to take non-flash photos of the amazing frescoes.  It's impossible to capture the impact in a photo of all those amazing paintings surrounding you, (you really do go "wow!" when you enter!), but here is one pic looking up at part of the ceiling.  The frescoes date back to the 14th century, and the monastery is protected by KFOR (a NATO international peacekeeping force), since as recently as 2007 it was attached by Kosovan Albanian insurgents - as noted above, ethnic tensions have not gone away even though there is currently peace.

in rural Haiti

I had one of the assignments in Haiti that I really enjoy - where I get to go out to visit some of the communities where we do our development work.  Always so much more satisfying than sitting in the office looking at documents.

The journey to this particular community was not an easy one, up steep, rocky tracks that apparently become so slippery as to be impassable after rain, and a short spell driving through what had become a seasonal river following Hurricane Matthew last year.


I couldn't capture it in my photos but in places the track was so steep that I held on tight, nervous that we wouldn't make it.


But the driver was very good - and used to this kind of road I suppose.  Even he, however, couldn't get around the obstacle that faced us around the next corner:

It had seemingly fallen onto the track from the hillside above, and there was no way of driving around it.  Thankfully we were two vehicles, with a number of young men, and after some considerable effort they moved the rock off the track.

Finally at the community, I met some of the community management committee, a group of people who had realised that if the community were to develop, they had to organise themselves to make this happen.  As the community leader told me, "The government have abandoned us".  Apparently the teachers have not been paid for the last three years.

Their small community school was paid for with donated funds a few years back, and at the end of my visit I went to verify the existence of a filing cabinet and some teaching materials we had delivered to them at the start of the school year. They told me proudly that they had just succeeded in getting their first pupil to university.  This was quite astonishing when I saw that there were not even any desks or chairs for the children to sit at, and the school principal said quietly that he was very happy with what we had provided - but that he would really like a desk.  I thought of him when I was booking my flight for my next work assignment in Brazil.  There was a flight home departing Sao Paulo at midday; another flight was departing at 05:24, meaning a night without sleep before the seven hour flight home. But taking the early flight would save $200, and who knows what difference $200 could make to that tiny community school.  Certainly every little bit helps.  & it's good to be reminded, every so often, of the realities of life "in the field"- for those who will never in their lifetimes even dream of the kind of life I've had.

getting lost in Panama

In my ridiculously busy schedule of the last few months, I had a weekend in Panama in between trips to Nicaragua and Haiti.  I could have sat at home and rested, but the apartment was a mess as the landlord had moved all my stuff as he worked on fixing the ceiling (although he had removed and painted over the mould before fixing the pipe above where the water was leaking from so the mould was already starting to regrow amongst the drips ... sigh ... such is Panama) so I decided to go out for the day.

We have a few Whatsapp groups for different interests, one of which is Panama Hike and Beer.  I don't like beer but they were running a hike on the Saturday described as "easy" so I joined them.  It started off easy - a local bus to a nearby town, a climb over a low fence, a jump over the litter, and we were in a patch of rainforest with a sort-of trail.  Just five of us, which was nice.  After walking for an hour so so we reached a stream, and the others proceeded to cross it, stepping carefully from one (slippery) rock to another.  I pondered turning back at this stage, but they persuaded me to stay with them - but without making it clear that we were now going off trail, to rely just on the GPS of the hike leader to make it back to some form of civilisation.

To cut quite a long (six hour) story short, the features marked on the GPS (such as a road) didn't seem to be there, whilst lots of fallen trees, streams, thick rainforest vegetation interspersed in places with thick reeds growing to above head height were there.  It was quite a tough hike.  The leader kept saying we were x metres from a road, but the best we found was a stony track that disappeared into nothing.  Then we saw a sign in the distance, and were hopeful that we had reached at least the edge of civilisation, but a closer view revealed this:

... a warning to keep out because of unexploded ordinance!

So we gave that area a wide berth.  We had no choice but to keep going though, as we would never have been able to follow our winding route back and by now we were running very low on water, and two of the five seemed close to heat stroke.  Still trying to follow the GPS (with the battery charge nearly gone), we got to a rather wider stream - more like a small canal.  There was a dammed area which we were able to cross, and an abandoned lighthouse came into view higher up the slope ahead.  We pushed on.

& to our relief (well, you knew I made it out or I wouldn't have been writing this) we hit a cleared area with a road, and some way beyond it the Cocolí Locks of the Panama canal.  We collapsed beside the road for a while in the shade of a tree, but then flagged down a passing vehicle.  It turned that we were inside the restricted zone of the canal.  Before long a security vehicle came along with a policeman and a canal security person inside, and of course they stopped to question us.  Turned out that we were not the first foreigners to somehow find ourselves in the restricted zone, and we were not arrested but rather escorted out onto a public road where we were able to find a taxi.

Quite an experience, and not one that the hike leader has shared with other people signed up to his Whatsapp group!

yet another corner of Nicaragua - the Indio Maíz Reserve

After so many weeks away I was entitled to a little compensatory leave, and joined up with a birding trip to a very remote corner of Nicaragua.  The Indio Maíz Reserve is on the Caribbean side of the country, just north of Costa Rica.  Nobody really goes there apart from a few fishermen (and perhaps the drug smugglers who are rumoured to use this sparsely populated coast to get their drugs from Costa Rica to Honduras, on the way up to the US), and there is only a small population of indigenous people, who are remote enough from the main part of the country that they speak English creole rather than Spanish.  Even the settlements that had been there were fading away.

If you can't read that (even in extra large size the writing is small and faint) it concludes with a note that the British cemetery was used until the 1980's.  This is what it looks like now:

In this state partly through neglect, but partly because of Hurricane Otto that hit last November - the southernmost hurricane on record in Central America which made landfall right where the lodge is located.

Unfortunately the company I was travelling with had not heard about the hurricane.  So the itinerary I read in late March, with its references to 8km of trails around the lodge in pristine rainforest, and much more primary rainforest to view mostly from a small boat, where we could see all kinds of rainforest birds not to mention otters, tapirs and perhaps even manatees, still reflected the situation pre-hurricane and was, frankly, a load of rubbish.  There was only a 1km trail that was passable, and even that just passed through a post-apocalyptic landscape of broken vegetation.  This is a view from the river.

Hardly a dense, pristine rainforest.

However it was quite fascinating to see the effects - how powerful nature can be - as this forest will surely take decades to regenerate.  We all tried to make the most of it and our poor guide, as well as predicting that we will get sizeable refunds, made superhuman efforts to find us birds so I was able to add Great Green Macaw, Nicaraguan Seed-finch, Masked Duck and Least Bittern to my life list - all of which are pretty difficult to see.  The green basilisks and the green and black poison dart frogs were pretty cool too!

visiting home and family

I was going to post something about my recent time (nearly four weeks) in the UK, but it was so depressing that I really don't want to.  Let's just say it was very cold, and too right wing.  I was glad to get away.

Although London will always be my favourite city, in part because of the amazing variety of culture there.  On my first day back I went to an exhibition of world music photography (which the Royal Albert Hall kindly let me and another woman in to view, even though it had officially closed the previous day), and then that evening to a concert by Bassekou Kouyate, Seckou Touré and others (an Afro-Cuban thing) that was superb.  If I'd had time I would also have gone to see Orchestra Baobab, Leftfield, and a talk by Yanis Varoufakis.

& being in the UK of course gave me the opportunity to visit my Dad, which is always nice.  Lots of discussions on politics, which can get heated but always remain discussions rather than arguments.

Then, just one week after spending time with my Dad, I was with my Mum in Kenya!  Probably the first time in thirty years that I have seen both of my parents within the same month, let alone within a week!!  Nice to visit her too, with lots of discussions on the pros and cons of living in a different country and culture.