by Don George
As we cut through the waves, the warm wind scrubbed away my jet lag and the salt water on my lips awakened my senses. As Jeremy took in his surroundings and spotted a great black frigatebird soaring over us, he wondered aloud at its wingspan.
“Up to seven feet,” answered naturalist Paul McFarling.
“Wow!” said my son, reaching for his camera.
“You know what it’s looking for?” Paul asked.
Jeremy shook his head.
“A booby,” Paul continued. “Frigatebirds are the pirates of the skies. They snatch food from other birds, especially boobies. I’ve even seen them reach down the neck of a baby booby and take out the fish a mom or dad just fed it.”
Jeremy swallowed hard.
“Look!” Jenny cried, pointing to eight bright yellow leaves the size of platters under the water, their edges gently flapping in the current. When the leaves began to swim, I thought my eyes were playing tricks.
“Ah, golden rays,” Paul explained. They soared along with exhilarating ease, undulating in formation like oceanic Blue Angels. Jenny grabbed her camera. Click, click, click.
In two hours we motored past a spectacular succession of wildlife: pelicans up there, sea turtles over there, sea lions and sharks, two kinds of iguanas, three kinds of mangroves, hundreds of Sally Lightfoot crabs. Overwhelmed, all we could say was “Look! Look! Look!” as if the world were being reinvented before our eyes.
The next morning, after an overnight passage to Isla Espanola, we boarded pangas bound for Punta Suarez. As we pulled up to shore, sea lions slid through the waves beside us and bellowed and flopped onto the beach, oblivious to our arrival. Hopping onto black volcanic rock, we realized with a start that all around us were marine iguanas as black as the rock. They sprawled over every available surface, and where no rock was available, they sprawled over each other, sunning themselves, motionless.
Momentarily disoriented by the sheer abundance of life on the beach, I failed to see an iguana that was literally underfoot.
“Dad, look out!” Jenny shouted.
I froze, stopping my boot two inches above the creature’s head. It didn’t even blink.
As I recovered from my near-misstep, Paula Tagle, our naturalist guide for the day, reviewed the rules. “One, don’t touch the animals.” (Jenny shot me a grin.) “Two, don’t take anything—anything.” (A glance toward the L.L.Bean-clad septuagenarian holding a seashell.) “Three, don’t bring any food onto the islands. And four, stay with your group; don’t stray off the trails or beyond the marked areas, and don’t wander around on your own.”
Jeremy whispered to me, “Do we really have to stay with the group? Can’t we just explore on our own?” There was only one answer: When in the Galápagos, you go with the group. So we walked with everyone else, our straggling line rising over boulders and slithering past sere silver-green scrub until we came to a bleak, wind-blasted depression.
“We’re approaching a prime blue-footed booby nesting spot,” Paula said. A moment later we turned a corner and there they were. At first glance—at least to my untrained eyes—they looked like any other gray-and-white birds. But then I spotted my first pair of blue feet. Superb, magnificent, like Dr. Seuss creatures come to life. Blue feet to the left of me, blue feet to the right of me, blue feet in the sky above me and nearly under my feet: “Honey!” my wife, Kuniko, called as I narrowly missed placing a big brown boot on two webbed blue beauties, whose owner looked up at me with curious brown eyes.
“Excuse me, your boobiness,” I said with an elaborate bow.
Just then, a booby landed to our left with a feathery flourish, splaying its feet out, like Fred Flintstone braking his prehistoric car.
“See that display?” Paula asked. “That’s the male’s way of attracting a mate.”
“Guys,” Jenny sighed.
Around another bend we witnessed another mating ritual, which I came to think of as the blue-footed booby stomp. Two birds face each other, and one lifts its left foot high in the air, holds it there, and then sets it ceremoniously down. It does the same with its right foot, like a blue-soled sumo wrestler limbering up before a match. Watching them, I realized that there was no comparison between seeing this on the small screen in my living room and actually being here.
It only got better, especially for Jenny and me. Having lagged a little behind the others, we were strolling along when, on the path right in front of us, a female lifted herself to reveal a bright white egg.
“Dad!” Jenny cried, gripping my arm and pointing. Right then, the shell cracked and a new, wet chick appeared. We watched, stunned, as it struggled into the world and its mother plopped protectively over it.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jenny said.
Me neither, I thought. Me neither.
I hadn’t really associated the Galápagos with underwater life, but as we plunged beneath the waves off Isla La Tortuga, I realized I had omitted an important part of the equation. Black-white-and-yellow Moorish idols with thin arcing top fins, blue-eyed damselfish, and banded butterflyfish swam lazily below us. A pair of sea turtles stroked gracefully by. I finned ahead through a school of brilliant gold-and-blue surgeonfish, which parted to pass me. For a few glorious moments their fins were close enough to tickle my cheeks.
I had been hoping for some bonding family moments, and as we poured out our day’s stories over dinner that night aboard the ship, I realized that there was something about encountering these extraordinary creatures in their own wild world that cleansed the mind and tugged at the soul.
In the old days, Paula told us, sailors thought the islands were enchanted because they seemed to drift; they were never quite where mariners’ maps said they would be. The islands were also working some kind of magic on us, but still, there was the occasional minor mutiny, like when Jenny announced over dessert the next night, “I’m not going to the lecture tonight.”
“Why not?” Kuniko and I asked simultaneously. Not go to the lecture? It was unthinkable.
“I’m suffering from an advanced case of I.O.,” Jenny said.
“Ai-yo?” I asked, imagining some sort of exotic malady.
“I.O.—Information Overload,” she said, and then wandered off to stargaze on deck.
Over the next few days, I too began to experience symptoms of I.O. On every excursion, we had a naturalist assigned to our group, who was invariably a walking encyclopedia, proffering a staggering array of information about whatever serendipity sent our way.
Our morning walk on Isla Genovesa began with the unusual discovery of a frigatebird skull near the path. Picking it up, Paul said, “See the little channels that run down the beak here? They’re unique to the frigatebird. It desalinates water through its eyes and the salt runs out down these channels in its beak. Very efficient.
“Oh look!” he continued, pointing to a speck in the sky. “There’s a lava gull, the rarest gull in the world. There are only about 800 of them; they’re endemic to the Galápagos. Completely gray and they have a very funny laugh. They’re little scavengers; I’ve seen them pick up booby eggs and smash them to get at the food inside.”
I was filled with guilt, wonder, and longing. Who knew the world was so rich with facts—but who could possibly retain them all? Wouldn’t it be nice to take a morning off and just sit on the deck in the sun, sipping something cool? But who knew what I’d miss? That would be the day everyone would come back exclaiming about the once-in-a-lifetime (fill in the blank) they’d seen.
I tuned back in to Paul’s narration. “Ah! Now here we have the large ground finch. You’ve heard about Darwin’s finches and how they were the key to his theory of evolution? On each island the finches developed different characteristics in order to survive. Well, the large ground finch has developed a beak that enables it to crack open and eat enormous seeds—look at that beak! It could probably crack open a Brazil nut. But the thing is, to have a beak that big and a body so small is very
disproportionate, so when it jumps around, it always seems to be pitching forward. Its small body seems to be trying to catch up with its big bill.”
It was dazzling and dizzying. In fact, the naturalists provided four checklists for guests—one each for plants, birds, and fish, and another that combines mammals and reptiles—to keep track of what they see. One afternoon Jenny and Jeremy kept count and identified thirty-two entries on the mammals-and-reptiles list, sixty-six birds, sixty-seven plants, and seventy-eight fish.
At the Charles Darwin Research Station in the main town of Puerto Ayora, on Isla Santa Cruz, researchers are doing vital work, trying to redress some of the biggest problems man has introduced to the islands, such as the goats that eat the vegetation indigenous creatures need to survive. The Ecuadorian government has been performing a delicate juggling act since it declared much of the islands a national park in 1959. That same year the Charles Darwin Foundation was established, and five years later the research station opened. The station works closely with the Galápagos National Park Service to monitor the wildlife on the islands and the interaction between the species, including humans. In this setting, we are the threat—that’s why we’re guarded by naturalists and confined to narrow paths while the animals and birds roam free.
The researchers and naturalists have won small but significant victories, such as raising 2,500 tortoises and repatriating them on their native islands, where they had been nearly wiped out by human predation and goats.
We encountered several of those Santa Cruz tortoises one afternoon in the island’s lush highlands. There, in a world of spindly evergreens, moss-draped cat’s-claw brush, and lush, broccoli-like scalesia trees, we came upon a field of tall, dripping grasses where a group of giant tortoises had paused on their laborious migratory journey to the ocean. With their thick-ringed carapaces, scaly bent-in legs, long leathery necks, and squat, wrinkled heads, the tortoises seemed survivors of another age.
“Paula says fossils show that tortoises—or at least mammals a lot like tortoises—were alive when dinosaurs lived,” Jenny told me.
Ah, I thought, not even I.O. can keep the good stuff from sinking in.
I squatted down in front of one tortoise and tried to imagine the weight of the shell on my back, the slow, plodding journey over mud and rock and sand. “I wonder what it’s thinking?” I said aloud, lost in my reverie.
“Not much,” Jeremy said, walking by. “Paul said their brains are about as big as a walnut.”
In ensuing days, we witnessed a bloody head-butting battle between land iguanas, walked over ropy flows of pahoehoe lava, followed a zigzagging school of leaping dolphins, spied vermilion flycatchers and Galápagos penguins, explored moonscapes of rust-colored volcanic spatter cones, and contemplated repeatedly the sheer miracle that life had ever taken root on these distant, bleak, and barren islands. While snorkeling, Jeremy encountered a shark that was bigger than him, and on another day, a couple of frisky sea lions seemed to single Jenny out as their playmate. Kuniko had gone from amazement at not having to use a zoom lens to becoming emotional at the idea of so many different species living together in raucous harmony on these isles. And I had my castaway hour.
If we are lucky, we take a few journeys in life that send roots deep inside us, that live and grow with us. If we are extraordinarily lucky, we get to share such a journey with others we love, and it becomes a bridge between us.
Our Galápagos odyssey was just such a bridge. Our dinner conversations are still enlivened by sharks and sea lions, birds and iguanas. And as I recall the beating sun and the screeching birds, it occurs to me that maybe we are unwitting accomplices in a greater evolution than even Darwin knew, one designed to bring back seeds of peace and wonder to plant in the hard rock of our larger world.
Machu Picchu Magic
After six extraordinarily fulfilling years at Lonely Planet, in early 2007 I decided to spread my writing and editing wings and become a freelancer. So I was unfettered in early 2010 when a high-spirited travel website named Gadling asked if I would become their features editor, commissioning and editing high-quality literary articles and writing my own stories regularly as well. I leapt at the chance, and a few months later, I was able to assign myself a trip to a place I’d been wanting to visit for decades: Machu Picchu. As with Uluru and the Galápagos, this longtime longing freighted the journey with anticipation and apprehension from the beginning. Could the site possibly meet my expectations? As it turned out, as so often happens with travel, that quest for one particular experience led me to multiple, unexpected lessons and riches, and I ended up writing a five-part series about my explorations throughout the Sacred Valley. But my two days in those airy, isolated Inca ruins, described in this excerpt, were the highlight of the trip, where a connection occurred that I will never forget.
FOR DECADES, MACHU PICCHU HAD BEEN at the top of my Places to Go list, but somehow, in twenty years as a travel writer visiting more than seventy countries, I still hadn’t gotten there. In the spring of 2010, I was beginning to despair that I ever would. Then, through a combination of serendipities, I was invited to take an eight-day trip to the Sacred Valley, culminating in a visit to Machu Picchu.
I spent my first days in the Sacred Valley exploring cultured, cosmopolitan Cusco and the ancient sites of Moray, Pisaq, and Ollantaytambo. Then, on my third day, I awoke at 5:40 to bird trills, wood smoke-scented air, and barely containable excitement. Today was a day I’d been waiting for most of my traveling life: We were going to Machu Picchu!
My guide, Manuel, and I hit the highway at 6:00 a.m., passing sheep, pigs, and cows being herded into pens and villagers in brightly woven capes and great hats walking along the side of the road. After twenty-five minutes we arrived in Ollantaytambo, where porters in bright red ponchos waited for Inca trail trekkers; too pressed for time to make the four-day trek, we were taking the quick route: a storybook blue train to Aguas Calientes, the town nearest Machu Picchu, where a bus would wend to the base of the site.
On the twenty-minute train ride, Manuel pointed out where bridges had been washed out or railroad tracks twisted and tossed into the river by the floods that had raged a half year before: stark reminders of nature’s raw power. This train, he said, had restarted operations only three months earlier. I thought of the Inca temples we’d seen and of Manuel’s words at the beginning of our trip: “The Spaniards called them idolators and maybe they were—but I think they did very well; they had a big respect for nature.”
Then we reached booming, ragtag, pizzeria-and-hostel Aguas Calientes, where we walked through a market maze and boarded the bus for the twenty-minute back-and-forth bounce up the dusty road to the ruins.
Here’s the thing about Machu Picchu: No matter how many photographs you’ve seen, stories you’ve read, or posters you’ve absorbed, nothing can prepare you for the surreal whoosh of actually being there. From the spot where the bus drops you, you walk up some narrow stairs and some winding paths, the sun beating on you, the sweat starting to trickle down your back, and then you reach a level area and take a few more steps and—whoosh!—suddenly there it is, spreading out before you, the gray granite walls and poky roof remains and green open lawns and jungly green rock-thrusts just beyond. Suddenly it hits you: Machu Picchu—I’ve arrived!
For a while you just stand and stare, absorbing it, letting it seep into you. Then eventually you become aware of the other travelers, some as stunned as you, and you decide it’s time to head into the ruins. And then time suspends, and you spend two, three, four—you don’t know how many—hours wandering, letting your hands trail along the rock, smelling the grass and the granite baking in the high-altitude sun. You visit the agricultural sector and the industrial zone, the Temple of the Three Windows and the Temple of the Condor, the Sacred Square and the priests’ chamber, the House of the Virgins of the Sun, the Watchman’s Hut, the cemetery, the Temple of the Sun and the sundial. But what you are really doing is walking through time.
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You’re imagining what it was like 500 years ago when a thousand people lived here—their woven clothes, the potatoes and maize they grew, the grain they stored, the granite they dragged laboriously from the quarry and the gold and silver and chisels, the wood and water, they used to break down and shape the stone. You imagine the runners arriving from Cusco, the robed priests, the weavers and warriors, the singers and teachers and pottery-makers.
And then you’re imagining what it was like ninety-nine years ago, when a twelve-year-old boy brought a discouraged Hiram Bingham to this rocky revelation. What must it have felt like to gaze on this tumble-jumble of intricately wrought walls and plazas, trees and vines? You imagine the crescendo of emotion and astonishment, the arc of enlightenment, as Bingham gradually realized what he’d found, what he called the Lost City of the Incas.
And then you think about what this discovery set off, a succession of events every bit as tangled and dramatic as those ruins: A foreigner recognizes the significance of this remote site, clears and plunders it, and in so doing creates a global icon that is responsible for sustaining as much as 80 percent of the local economy today, and that has literally put Peru on the international tourist map. This eventually encourages the Peruvian government to reallocate significant resources to study and preserve other ancient sites and artifacts in the area. The ever-swelling procession of Machu Picchu pilgrims, even as it underpins and integrates the local economy, threatens to undermine and disintegrate the site itself.
You recall what Manuel said on the train, how the torrential rain and floods of earlier this year dramatically demonstrated just how economically fragile the economy of the Sacred Valley is, how much it depends on this one site: From February to April, when floods took out those tracks from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes, 78 percent of visitors to the region canceled their trips.
So visiting Machu Picchu is, like the site itself, multi-layered: There’s the historical backstory, the cultural backstory, and the economic backstory. And then there’s the pure human experience of being present at Machu Picchu. All of this roiled inside me as we roamed the ruins. I felt a pulsing presence there, but something wasn’t quite connecting, somehow it wasn’t getting through to me. Before the thought formed in my head, I knew it in my heart: I had to come back at dawn.