Renee's Visit to Ecuador (Part 1: Galapagos Day 1 & 2!)

Adam and I had a great time playing host to our good friend Renee during her time here in Ecuador. She was our first guest to come and visit, so we had a great time sharing our experiences, introducing her to some of the customs and quirks of Ecuador, and creating new memories together!

Adam and I arrived into Guayaquil on Sunday morning, May 24th and Renee arrived later that afternoon. We took the Hampton Inn shuttle to the airport to pick her up and she arrived safe and sound! We spent the afternoon walking along the Malecon 2000 (kind of like the Riverwalk in San Antonio!), people watching, stopping for a quick lunch of seafood (had a great breaded corvina) before heading back to the hotel so Renee could recover from her overnight flight (and so we could recover from our overnight bus ride!).

Day 1 of our Galapagos trip started out bright and early by heading the airport where we caught our flight to Baltra Island in the Galapagos! When we checked in at the airport, one of the Metropolitan Touring travel agents met us to issue our plane tickets, check our bags, and hand us "fancy" pins to identify that we would be traveling on the MV Santa Cruz.

I have to show it off twice right?

Our plane when we arrived in Baltra

When we got to the airport, we stood in line to pay our entrance fee (since Adam and I are here as volunteers, we got to pay the $6 entrance instead of the standard $100 for foreign visitors). After we got through the long line, we were greeted by the naturalist guides from our ship. We had to wait around for everyone else on our trip to get through the line and then we were taken by busses to the dock where we put on the sticky life jackets (which we wore multiple times a day for the rest of the trip), boarded the pangas, and headed off to the MV Santa Cruz.

Adam and Renee ready for our first panga ride!

The pangas that we took to get to and from the ship and the islands

We chose to travel on the MV Santa Cruz for a couple of reasons. One is that Adam gets seasick easily so we wanted a larger ship to help minimize that. The ship can accommodate up to 90 people (on our expedition we only had about 60 people on the ship, not including crew and naturalist guides). The other reason is because we decided to book through Metropolitan Touring since there is a rep that works in the PC office, and the Santa Cruz is their only large ship. Plus Stacia and Jason, the fellow Loja PCVs, have also been on the same ship and had good things to say about it. It was a really nice ship- our room was great, the crew were great, the naturalist guides were knowledgeable, the food was great (we felt like we were constantly eating!)..and they left chocolates in our rooms after they turned down the beds!

Our ship- we were on the boat deck in a triple room

We had time to settle into our cabins, have a quick safety drill, and then had an amazing lunch. During breakfast and lunch, you are served meals buffet style and they usually had a ton of great options. For dinner they would provide us with a menu that had a couple options for soup/salad and main course and we would pick out what we wanted. I wasn't expecting everything to be so nice since our ultimate goal was to experience the islands, so I was pleasantly surprised! I knew they would feed us, but everything was much more than expected.

After lunch we stopped at Dragon Hill on Santa Cruz Island where we did a hike through the lagoons and saw land iguanas, mockingbirds, and marine iguanas.

View of the sandy beach

Galapagos mockingbird

Dinner on the ship was great that first night too! Some turkey, some fish, some seafood salad! Yum!

On Day 2 we started out bright and early (the ship gives a wake up call every morning, followed by a nice breakfast before putting on our life jackets, hopping onto the pangas, and heading out to an island). We first took a ride around the Pinnacle Rock where we got to see Galapagos Penguins (they are the only penguins that live this far north!).

Fat penguin lying on his belly- can you see him among the black rocks?

Then we did a hike up to a summit to see the views of the Pinnacle Rock from afar. They had built a wooden staircase because there was a lot of wear and tear on the land. It was quite the walk up and down!

Our naturalist guide Nicolas explaining the volcanic makeup of the island

View from the top of the summit

Renee making her way down the thousand steps!

After our hike down the steps, Adam and Renee got to enjoy a nice snorkel along the Pinnacle Rock.

We returned back to the ship for lunch and to relax and clean up as we made our way toward Puerto Egas on Santiago Island. In Puerto Egas, we got to see a lot of sea lions, the Galapagos fur seals (which are really sea lions as well), tons of marine iguanas, two hawks mating, brown pelicans, and Renee's favorite- Sally Lightfoot Crabs. Renee also went into the water for a snorkel, where she saw a sea turtle foraging for food, but Adam decided the water was way too cold for him.

Renee drying off and enjoying the sea breeze on our way to Puerto Egas

Renee trying to quietly walk around a lazy sea lion

This baby fur seal, not much more than a week old, is waiting for his mom to return. The sea lion and fur seal mothers go out to sea for sometimes hours or days at a time searching for food and then returning to their babies. We saw a TON of baby sea lions waiting by themselves.

Lots of marine iguanas! They blended in with the black rocks and sand so there were a few times we almost stepped on them!

Lots of shells along the hikes in Puerto Egas

Ok well I have to run into town and getting all these pictures up on the blog is taking a while! So I will continue with Part 2: Galapagos Day 3, 4 & 5 later!!

Some Galapagos photo teasers

I took over 1000 photos during our 5 day trip to the Galapagos so I am still going through them to pick out my favorite ones! We had a great time and I will also post a mini-review of the company that we booked through and our experience on the MV Santa Cruz!

Until then, here are a few teasers:

A sea lion on Rabida Island's red beach

Blue footed boobie on North Seymour Island

Sally lightfoot crab- Renee loved these guys!

Giant Galapagos Tortoise

Cactus on the islands

Off to the Galapagos!!

Adam and I are heading off to the Galapagos this week to see the turtles, Darwin finches, iguanas, seals and the blue footed boobies with our first visitor from America- Renee Dalenta! Woo hoo!

Prepare yourselves for photo overload when we get back!

5/14/ Photo-Every Day Animals

Every day on my way to and from town, I see plenty of animals. The majority are stray dogs, but it is also pretty routine for me to pass by the following animals (as I did yesterday on my walk to Supermaxi):

Ecuadorian goat- he was tied up near the park

The llamas at the park near our house

The noisy roosters that cockadoodle at all hours

And of course, other photos that I haven't captured are the burro, horses, and cows. The funny thing is that we live in a fairly large city of 150,000...so we aren't talking about the countryside here!

Celica and Puyango- More Origami with Teachers!

Wow, I can't believe a week has gone by- so much for the photo a day thing! Lol. It lasted about a month- that is pretty good right?

So as I mentioned in the previous blog post, Eri and I, along with a few colleagues, were going to Celica and Puyango on a two day trip to do an origami workshop with the region's teachers. It was organized by the Ministerio de Educación, with the idea that Eri and I would teach the teachers how to use origami to encourage creativity, concentration, patience, and motor skills among school aged children. They were the ones that had organized the 3-day workshop that we conducted in March, and they wanted us to reach out to teachers that worked in some of the more distant communities. Hence we went out to Celica and Puyango, which are about 5-6 hours by car, depending on the fog.

The first morning started out semi-disastrous for me! We left at 4am and when they go to my house to pick me up, I headed down the stairs without turning the lights on. I thought that I was on the bottom step (clearly not) and totally fell flat on my face! I bent up my glasses and had a cut under my eye...BUT no broken bones! Hurray!! And clearly no photos of me with my crooked glasses (which I have since fixed).

We spent the first full day in Celica working with about 75 teachers. When Eri asked some of the teachers what Celica was known for, their response was, "La neblina" (the fog). And sure enough, though the morning started as clear as could be, the fog quickly rolled in and out! The photos of the school below show the quick change within just a few hours! I have a bunch of pictures of the teachers doing origami, but really...I think you all have seen just about enough kids and teachers folding origami! Let me know if you want to see more though!

Sunshine!

Then fog!!

Then lots of rain!

Lost in the fog during our 10 minute break from origami!

Our white board introduction! 

After our long day in Celica (we started at 8am and ended at 6pm), we drove to the city of Alamor (which everyone kept calling Puyango because that is the canton) where we had a typical Ecuadorian dinner (rice, chicken, some veggies, and fried banana) before crashing at the hotel around 9pm! The next day we started off bright and early at the school, working with about 65 teachers. It is the same routine as the other charlas (starting out easy with origami tulips, dogs and cats...advancing through birds, frogs, cranes and boxes...and then ending with the kusudama). Unfortunately we didn't get to stop at the Puyango Petrified Forest because we had to hurry home to beat the fog that fills the highway, but Adam and I hope to go in the future!

Just in case you haven't seen enough similar shots in our blog!

Even in Puyango, the fog comes rolling in!

Some people have asked how we get around when we go to barrios and towns far from the city center... well hear you have it! INFA provides a driver (usually it is Juanito from my trucha fishing adventure) but for our Celica trip, a different driver of the same name took us.