Absolutely Galápagos

by David Fletcher

  Well, having digested this remarkable revelation of cross-species behaviour, Brian then had to swallow another, this one concerning the habits of a… swallow-tailed gull. There was one sitting on a nearby cactus, a rather handsome creature rendered in black and white, with a scarlet ring around its eye – and with an amazing lifestyle, in that it is the only nocturnal gull in the world! Yes, quite incredibly, this chap on the cactus would be off at dusk to fish fifteen to thirty kilometres from land – in the dark. And whilst it is known that it is quite partial to small fish and squid, it’s not really clear how it manages this night-time feat. It may be through exploiting the bioluminescence of its prey or it may have special visual and sonar facilities – and in this context that red ring around its eye might help. But even so… who the hell would choose to spend its nights in the middle of an ocean, hovering around and having to find a meal in the gloom? Brian certainly wouldn’t. No more than he’d have chosen to live on South Plaza.

  It really was pretty threadbare in terms of vegetation. It did, however, close up, have a certain stark beauty, albeit, thought Brian, stark beauty probably very soon loses its appeal, particularly if one is starving. Yes, despite those noble and novel efforts of the local iguanas, this really was a place for just seabirds and sea lions. And when Darwin’s party had walked those one hundred metres from where they’d landed up to those hidden seacliffs, that’s just what they found. For here, flying around were various boobies (no sniggering, please), some red-billed tropicbirds and a couple of brown pelicans. Oh, and on the edge of the cliffs were old, spent bulls who, just like most of the Nature-seeker husbands, were living out their days free from the stress of competitive mating and everything that that sort of stuff entailed. Instead they could just lounge around, even if they had to climb up some ruddy great cliffs to do this – which Brian thought beggared belief but, according to Darwin, was exactly what they did. Such are the unfathomables of the natural world.

  Well, a little less unfathomable was the path which, in a loop, took the Nature-seekers back down the slope of the South Plaza slab and to that man-made quay where they’d first disembarked. Here they were collected by the pangas and returned to the Beluga, there to be served with more food for their evening meal than has been seen on Plaza Sur for the last ten years. And then, after what had proved to be a wildlife-packed day for them all, Brian took Sandra back to their cabin to provide his wife with what he hoped would be the perfect full stop to this pretty-well perfect day. Yes, he thought it was about time to lift her eyes from the circumscribed horizons of places such as Santa Fe and South Plaza and invite her to scan the more expansive horizons of the whole of South America – by his imparting some more ‘interesting facts’ about another of its component countries. And the country he had chosen for tonight was Suriname.

  Now, he was pretty sure that she knew where Suriname was – at the top right-hand corner of South America, sandwiched between Guyana and French Guiana – but he doubted that she knew too much about its incumbent president, a gentleman (in the loosest possible terms) by the name of Dési Bouterse. So he would now ‘fill in that gap’.

  ‘Sandra,’ he started, as soon as she’d got into bed, ‘shall I tell you about the guy who runs Suriname?’

  Sandra looked across at her husband who was in his own bed, and she was clearly about to say ‘no’. But she just wasn’t quick enough and Brian carried on.

  ‘You see, Suriname, as well as being the smallest country in South America, is also the only one to have as a leader a guy for whom Europol has issued an arrest warrant…’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Yes, this guy… errh, Dési Bouterse, is not what you’d call whiter than white. Back in the 1980s he was the sort of de facto leader of Suriname when the country was run by the military, and in 2010 he became its elected president. But the point is that back in the eighties, he was a pretty naughty boy and was very probably responsible for any number of his fellow Surinamese not making it to old age. And then he got involved in drug trafficking. In fact, in 1999, he was convicted in absentia in the Netherlands – which, of course, used to own Suriname – and sentenced to eleven years in prison. Hence that Europol arrest warrant…’

  ‘Not an ideal CV for a president,’ observed a now mildly engaged Sandra.

  ‘No. But it clearly impressed his son, who ended up being sentenced to eight years for international drugs and arms trafficking – and furthermore, it’s maybe not the worst CV you could have if you’re called upon to run what is modern-day Suriname…’

  ‘Meaning?’ enquired Sandra.

  ‘Meaning that Suriname is now an established and growing transhipment point for South American drugs destined for Europe, and it’s also renowned for its degeneration into corruption ever since it got its independence from Holland back in 1975.’

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘Yes, ah. In fact, Suriname is an ideal candidate for recolonisation…’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘No, it is. I mean, loads of the locals cleared off to Holland because it became so bad after independence, and it’s still in a complete bugger’s muddle – and a bloody menace to the rest of the world. You know, through its drug trading stuff. Whereas next door, in French Guiana – which is officially still part of France – the locals enjoy the highest GDP per capita in the whole of South America. And I’m sure the downtrodden plebs of Suriname are quite well aware of that…’

  ‘Yes, Brian, but we’ve had all this out before. You cannot go round proposing recolonisations. You’ll get into all sorts of trouble.’

  ‘Yeah,’ conceded Brian. ‘But not because my new “altruistic colonisation” idea wouldn’t work, but just because it’s not PC – even when you’ve got a clear-cut case like Suriname, where everybody would probably welcome it with open arms. Other, of course, than the guys at the top, the same guys who are exploiting its dysfunctional independence for their own personal and selfish ends…’

  ‘Well, I hope you got a sympathetic response from Ban Ki-moon. I mean, I am assuming you’ve brought this wonderful idea to his attention…’

  Brian looked at his wife and grunted. He’d just received the final full stop to his perfect full stop to the day, and he knew it. He would now leave Sandra to go to sleep and turn his mind to other things before he did the same, things like that remarkable cross-species arrangement between marine and land iguanas. It was just so remarkable – and so disconcerting. Hell, he thought, what would happen if any of those nocturnal swallow-tailed gulls ever got it together with our own opportunistic herring gulls? Blimey, you wouldn’t be safe eating your Mr Whippy even after dark…

  4.

  Overnight, the captain took the Beluga due east. He was heading for San Cristóbal, the most easterly of the Galápagos islands. It was a journey that started out with the normal pronounced rolling and the normal intrusive engine noise, and it probably continued with these unavoidable accompaniments until it ended. But Brian would not have known this – because he slept like a log. Yes, it seemed he was taking no time at all to acclimatise to the inescapable features of the Beluga’s ocean locomotion, and Sandra, he would discover, was having similar success. She was not, however, having such a dream-filled night – and, unlike her husband, she certainly wasn’t dreaming about bioluminescent ice cream…

  It was those thoughts in Brian’s head before he’d dropped off. They’d continued into his unconsciousness and had manifested themselves as a vivid image of a gloomy Skegness beach, on which Charles Darwin was studying a luminescent 99 ice cream, while all around him were silent hovering herring gulls, all of them wearing elaborate, Elton-John-type, red-coloured specs. But then it got worse. Because both Mr Darwin and the beach disappeared, and in their place was a newscaster on a TV channel called ‘Cross-species News’, announcing with glee that Frankie Boyle had inseminated an amoeba, apparently with the intention of producing an offspring that as well as
thinking it was funny would also think it could think, neither of which it would ever be able to do – obviously. So just as well then that it would be so sterile that it was an absolute certainty that the F. Boyle bloodline would be permanently snuffed out.

  It must have been a residue of this dream-state thought that caused Brian to be in such a good mood when he woke, a mood that was in no way dented either by the appearance of a not quite perfectly blue sky or by the promise of horseflies…

  It was true. Darwin, the previous evening, had imparted the not very welcome news that the site of their first expedition on San Cristóbal was a hotspot for horseflies. This was a sheltered beach beneath an old volcanic cone called Cerro Brujo, and whilst it apparently had a huge expanse of fine white sand that was reminiscent of powdered sugar, it also had a complement of large biting insects that was reminiscent of the contents of Brian’s worst nightmares (Frankie Boyle excepted).

  Nevertheless, Darwin assured his flock that the horseflies were worth it. And so were the sandflies! And this was because at the back of the beach was a lagoon that was home to both great egrets and great blue herons, and off the beach was some easy but worthwhile snorkelling. And anyway, in 1835, while Captain Fitzroy was climbing that Cerro Brujo cone, one of his muckers, a guy who went on to appear in a Brian dream about see-in-the-dark ice creams, took his first walk here. Yes, this was where Charles Darwin had made his inaugural venture into the Galápagos ecology. So how could Brian and his friends not follow in his footsteps, even if it might mean the odd bite for all concerned? And even if it might mean a slightly more challenging wet landing?

  Yes, there was quite a swell near the beach, and disembarking from a panga was more a test than it had been at Santa Fe. Particularly as there was an audience, and this audience was not made up of a Galápagos hawk and a gang of Galápagos sea lions but of a clutch of Galápagos visitors, a score or more of swimsuited tourists who, like the Nature-seekers, were risking insect bites – and not really adding to the peace and the serenity of this beautiful spot. In fact, this place, in Brian’s mind, was far too popular to be anything but an also-ran in the highlights of his Galápagos adventure. There were four boats anchored off the beach, and all of them had brought to this ‘remote spot’ more than enough people to make it feel anything but remote.

  Oh dear. People were having the effrontery to spoil Brian’s experience of the Galápagos archipelago – by sharing it with him. This would not do. Didn’t they know he was very sensitive to crowds – or to more than a handful of people, come to that? Especially if those people were being so inconsiderate as to be sitting on a supposedly pristine beach on an otherwise isolated stretch of a Galápagos island.

  Well, he got over it – sort of. But he quickly decided – and agreed with Sandra – that a walk along the beach and a look at the lagoon might be abandoned in favour of an early return to the water. Not above it in a panga, but below it with a snorkel. This would have the advantage of avoiding all those beach-type perils, including sand in any available interstice or orifice, sunburn, stubbed toes – and, of course, the mouthparts of all those unthoughtful biting insects (to say nothing of the company of all those inconsiderate strangers).

  It was done. Directly after their witnessing a forty-something Darwin doing a standing backflip on the beach (!), Brian and Sandra were afloat in the shallows of the Pacific Ocean, and within a very short time they had been joined by the majority of the other Nature-seekers. It seemed that they too had been overcome by a distaste for the company of either unknown humans or unseen biting insects, and, like Brian and Sandra, were eager to see what the sea had in store.

  Well, a short summary of what it had in store might be ‘not much’. There were some fish around – particularly where one was required to risk a calf or an elbow coming into contact with undersea rocks – but there weren’t many fish. Furthermore, the sea was very murky, and this murkiness was not helped by the continued arrival of other inflatables containing more of those people to whom Brian would never be introduced. Even, he thought, if their inflatable ran him down, a possibility that eventually graduated to a probability – if only in Brian’s mind – as ever more vessels appeared carrying clients from what must have now been an armada of boats off the coast.

  It was quite strange really. Brian had never studied hyperbole – because he’d never had to. It just came to him naturally. So, even though there was only a trickle of people being ferried to the beach, he could make it sound as though it was a rerun of D-Day, in exactly the same way that he could paint a picture of a veritable cloud of horseflies when he had seen only one – and not one of the Nature-seekers had been bitten. But perception and perspective were everything. And from his perspective he could perceive only a disappointing visit – to this stunning white beach – and he was very pleased to find himself back on the Beluga and on his way to its next destination. This was the one and only town on San Cristóbal – and the capital of the whole Galápagos province, a place burdened with the somewhat challenging name of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno.

  Had the Ecuadorian president, Alfredo Baquerizo Moreno (1859-1951) been called instead Alfredo Fuerto, this settlement of 7,000 would have found itself not with a tongue-twister (that encourages even the locals to refer to it as simply ‘Cristóbal’) but instead with a name that just rolls off the tongue. But there you go. You can’t rewrite history, just as you can’t stop the Beluga rolling when it’s underway and you’re trying to eat lunch. You can, however, leave the lunch table quite promptly and join a quartet of other Nature-seekers on the flying bridge, there to take in the coast of San Cristóbal as it passed by on the left – and to look out for the appearance of Puerto etc.

  This quartet was made up of the two married couples: Josh and Madeline, and Horace and Sally. They were all of a similar age (about ten years younger than Brian and Sandra) and they were all eminently ‘civilised’. That is to say, they were all the sort of people with whom, on a small boat, one would willingly spend two weeks of one’s life, and they were already proving themselves to be stimulating companions.

  Josh was a retired businessman – and a little enigmatic. So Brian never discovered what his business had been, and was left to try to imagine what it could possibly have involved. He eventually concluded that it was nothing ‘normal’ – like dealing in clothes or the manufacture of car parts – but something intensely arcane and desperately dull, like the procurement of flanges and gaskets for commercial hydraulic compressors, or something not in the least bit arcane and dull, like the fitting-out of strip joints. Anyway, he was a really pleasant guy who had a tendency to talk in short, considered ‘spurts’ and a tendency to be able to spot and identify even the littlest of little brown jobs. He also had a lovely wife: Madeline.

  Madeline was the antithesis of a loud and opinionated woman – and of an obese woman. She was quiet, thoughtful, attentive, very kind – and quite slim. In fact, if the world was full of Madelines, we would need only half the food we grow, half the land we use – for everything – and, more importantly, it would be a far better place. There certainly wouldn’t be any conflict and there wouldn’t be much noise. Brian thought Josh was a very lucky person – or at least very good at choosing a partner.

  Horace was fortunate as well. For not only did he have a temperate nature, a sharp mind and a good sense of humour, but he also had an extremely pretty wife: Sally. She, apparently, had helped him in his self-made business, an enterprise that provided commercial lighting anywhere around the world – and the sort of stimulation that made Horace appear younger than he was. He would prove to be an ideal companion on this trip – and a dab hand at underwater photography. Not the David Attenborough took-six-months-to-film-it type, but the bloody-good-for-a-hand-held-camera-whilst-snorkelling variety. And he could often even remember what he’d ‘snapped’.

  Anyway, as well as helping her husband with his business, Sally had also been a nurse, and thi
s showed in her nature. She was another Madeline – albeit shorter and… well, just slightly more ‘pleasingly shapely’. However, unlike Madeline, she was sometimes (justifiably) forthright and she rivalled her husband in the sense-of-humour stakes.

  So, all in all, not a bad set of chaps with whom to be sharing a flying bridge – and, of course, the anticipation of arriving in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, an anticipation, it might be said, that rose to a climax when PBM appeared in the distance – and only shrivelled entirely when they’d seen it close-to.

  Initially, as the Beluga turned towards the town to find a mooring within a whole flotilla of boats, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno didn’t look at all bad. It looked like a somewhat laid-back fishing port (which it was) nestling rather comfortably at the back of a turquoise-blue bay and set against the greenery of the island beyond it. Its status as a capital and as an administrative centre was very well hidden (as was the nearby San Cristóbal Airport that links it to mainland Ecuador). In fact, even when the Nature-seekers were within just yards of it, it looked just as it should. There were some well-used piers and some obvious evidence of fishing – but there were also a refreshing number of sea lions around. Brian had been told about these creatures and how the locals have even provided them with a small beach in the town for their preferential use. But he had not expected to see them in such close proximity to the ‘business part’ of town, or draped about in such numbers. They were on the back of boats in the bay, on buoys in the bay and on the steps of the pier where the Nature-seekers eventually disembarked (by using an alternative ramp).

  Anyway, here on the town’s ‘esplanade’ it was still all OK, even if some of the shops and ‘cafés’ beyond the piers didn’t look exactly chic. But then the Nature-seekers were loaded onto a bus, and the bus set off – to take them to the object of their excursion: a lake – and the real nature of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno was revealed.