Home » Ecuador » Lava, Lava, come back to me...

We checked out several toury agencies in Quito, found one with real cheap fares advertised on hand-printed signs in the window, and altho’ cognisant of the old maxim, “more is better”, went in.
Nancy, ah Nancy, odd name for an Ecuadoriana but she was pretty (and) helpful, full of info and this was the only place in town with a vacancy at all.
At the airline office they had no seats to Galapagos for a week or more, altho’ I suspect the toury agencies book everything in sight then on-sell!.

Lava, Lava, come back to me...

Bill Shum
2006-08-21 17:35:45

Displayed times (last time: )

other and tended to talk amongst themselves, they’re at that saddish stage as half their number had left that morning, but gradually we blended in…where you from? Some names exchanged, tell us about the boat…yadda yadda, so, we have a Venezuelan, Braziliana and Moi, a Swiss couple who started their travels in Oz, an Oz guy from Sydney, the usual introduction, he asks me where I’m from, I say Melbourne, I ask him, Sydney, he says, arsehole I reply, he gives me the bird and we grin, some of the others who understand crack up, we also have an Israeli couple and another Israeli guy, a French Canadian couple, and a few others I can’t remember right now, later that night, on board at last, they drag in a Russian couple so I get bumped from my cabin to another, further aft, next to the engine room, but a big cabin, huge double bed, and solitude so I’m happy, especially after I got a couple of beers from the steward(?) for the move.

But, back on the farm, we wandered around for a few hours seeing some giant land tortoises, wonderful creatures, lumbering along, quite quickly in a relative sense, you could see how the hare could be fooled into sleeping while the turtle crept over the finish line!
And then down thru’ the lava tubes, slight claustro but lights along the way and the limited, unseen, vertically challenged headroom. Duck your head, the guide would call out every time someone opened up their skull, luckily, in keeping with the evolutionary spirit here, thousands of taller tourists have bumped their heads enough to have worn a roofline with sufficient clearance in most places!

Eventually down to the wharf and the little tinny out to the boat, it’s dark, probably so we can’t see the decrepitude and compare it disfavourably to the photo of the gleaming model we had been shown at the agency!…No, it is a beautiful boat, past her former glory but not yet past her use-by date, hasn’t seen sails in a long time ...