Home away from home for ten weeks

As of Friday my internship is half over which definitely makes me reflect on what I have done and still want to do. My Spanish has improved to the point where I can get by on the day to day catching buses, buying food, asking for directions and have enough confidence to bicker over prices which is really hard to get used to after always being told the price in the US but I inevitably still struggle a lot of the time. One prime example is the haircut I received a couple days ago. I hadn’t cut my hair in two months so it had turned into a mop so I finally splurged on a 2 dollar haircut, and got exactly what I paid for. I told him half as long, up off the ears and the same length everywhere more or less. But I ended up with a fade with the front half of my head and the back half vary in length by an inch, but luckily I live with two girls and hair grows.
I still want to go out on one of the fishing boats here to just see what it is like but right now they are keeping me too busy but in a week two Belgian volunteers are coming here so I should have a little more free time. After the other volunteers get here there is also talk of me getting sent 7 hours north to Esmeralda which is the state that boarders Columbia to walk a couple beaches and look for nesting Leatherback Turtle and I I’m always game to see more of the country so I’m all about it. Rachele, the Swizz girl that studied in Italy, spent six month in Costa Rica last year working with them and they are so big its unreal and they only eat jellyfish. Here’s a video of one that must have weighed a thousand pounds and is heading back to the ocean after nesting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTX744KB4Hg&feature=player_embedded .

But I’m definitely comfortable with my surroundings so much so that I have stopped writing on a weekly basis partly because I am having so much fun and partly because I’m enjoying doing my responsibilities as a volunteer and not much more. But Peter the projects coordinator was just here and gave me all the sharks data from the last three years so I can look for seasonal trends and in the long run publish a paper so that should increase my ambitions. But the turtles are still giving me plenty to talk about. We went out to capture turtles two more times in the last week and I caught two turtles the first time and three the second so I’ve caught 11 Green Turtles since I’ve been here. Luis has just been letting me capture the turtles because I do alright although I catch half as many as he would. But I always seem to miss the first turtle of the day so when I dove in after the first turtle of the day I was overambitious and dove too deep so I ended up kissing the back of its shell. So I bit my lip and had sore teeth for two days but still caught three for the day.

On Monday if our motor gets fixed we are going to go free diving for Carey (Hawksbill Turtles). The Green Turtles are more ambitious and come into the harbor and eat the fish that the fisherman throw overboard so we catch them by baiting them with fish and then when they get close enough we dive overboard and grab them but the Carey are more skittish so you can’t catch them this way. So you have to go snorkel around and look for them and then when you find on you dive down and grab it and bring it to the surface. Because with the Green turtles you are diving from the surface you are maybe catching the turtle at 6 feet under water at most, but with the Carey they are usual eating on the bottom so you may be diving down 8 meters and then have to bring them up to the surface so it is definitely challenging to bring a 75 turtle to the surface free diving.

Turtle nesting season has officially started with one Green Turtle and one Carey making a nest on Playita which is the beach we patrol at night. Within the last year Ecuador created its first coastal National Park and designated this beach as a turtle nesting beach for research and closed it to the public, but it’s not a hard fast enforcement and commercial fisherman fish in the national park on a daily basis but Ecuador is still making the effort. But each night from 8 to 3 at least three people go camp on the beach and either solo or in pairs walk the beach every hour or so and look for a turtle that is in the process of making a nest. When you find one we count how many eggs it lays and then when it is done nesting and returning to the sea we measure and tag it so we can see how much it grows, how many times it comes back to nest in one year and how many years between nesting seasons. But when we are walking the 6 different beaches we walk looking for turtle nests we inevitably find a dead turtle, some fisherman accidentally catch and then kill or die of natural causes but I’ve found 8 in the five weeks since I have been here.

For the most part it has been Rachele, Elisa and myself that have been doing a lot of the night beach walking but they are good company and like I said I still have yet to see my first nesting turtle so its still novel and I don’t mind the late nights. But last week Rachele Luis and I were camping on the beach playing cards (rummy) and we had an earthquake. Luis was on the phone walking the beach and didn’t even feel it but it was a 5.5 off the coast. So our supervisor called and told us to watch out for tsunamis, mind you we are sleeping on the beach but they never issued a warning and nothing came of it. Later that night I found a fresh track where a Green Turtle had come up on the beach but where she had come out of the water it a big rock face so she came up the beach 30 feet and then saw that there was nowhere to lay her eggs and went right back to the ocean. But if they can’t lay their eggs the first night they usual come back three or four days later so today or tomorrow she should come back.

I had also been trying to make a day trip to Montanita since I got here and in the last week I finally made it there twice. When you read the Lonely Planet guide book it says that if you want to surf in Ecuador to start here and it is def a surf town and very touristy. But the dance clubs and touristy shops is a nice change of pace from the fishing town of Puerto Lopez where I’m staying. It is a 40 minute bus ride and costs five bucks round trip but the people watching alone makes it worth it. There are plenty of Rasta’s peddling there craft and a couple beach acts so it definitely reminds me of Venice Beach, Ca. But we are going to try and make a day trip to Agua Blanca to go check out the sulfur pools in the next week when we can get an afternoon free and the sun comes out. It pretty much 75 every day but at night you definitely need a sweatshirt and pants unless you have someone to keep you warm but the days when the sun comes out it hits 85 and you burn in a hour if you miss a spot with sun block.

We’re headed back to the beach tonight again just the three of us and then the girls are off to the Island to count birds and walk the beach there at night that has three times more turtles nest on it than Playita. Other than that it’s just another week of day beach walking, turtle catching, shark counting and night nesting searching.

So I still haven’t made it to Montanita, so I’m going to stop talking about it until I actually go there but I’m still hearing good things so I’ll make it happen. But another interesting named place, that I will probably never visit in Ecuador is Jipijapa (hippy-happa) and I guess it used to be xipixapa (sippi-sappa). Another word that just roles off the tongue is the Spanish word for word itself, palabra (pah-lah-vRah). And although the Ecuadorian flag is yellow blue and red, purple seems to be their national color. It seems like every tenth person is wearing something purple but it suits a dark complexion. The north pole is on the 90th parallel Salem Oregon is on the 45th parallel and I am currently on the southern second parallel so people here are really dark, and even with all the sunscreen I’m wearing I’m getting plenty of sun. But enough about the idioms and back to the wildlife.

Last week I went with Sandra, who works for EA full time, to Isla de la Plata 30 miles off the coast to count the hoards of birds. We caught a ride to the island on the Machililla National Park boat with two girls studying tourism, with the island being one of the biggest tourist wildlife destinations on the coast especially when the humpback whales are here. I saw one of the last ones breech today while we were walking one of the beaches. So they ended up accompanying Sandra and I on our bird monitoring the 6miles we walked each day which may not seem like all that much but we were bird dogging it so we easily covered twice that much. The first day we counted juvenile and adult frigates using binoculars. There are about 3000 on the island and you are count a valley of them some 300 at a time perched in trees. It was by far the most frustrating thing since I’ve arrived, but guestimates were made on the constantly moving mob. There are only around 20 red footed boobies on the island so we made a quick pass and counted them and just beat dusk home. Everyone always says that everyone talks three times as much on the island because it more or less brings you back to the basics.

I’ve always been a legs guy but the 1500 blue footed boobies on the island made for plenty of cheap entertainment coming up with witty t-shirts. The next day we woke up at 6 and made a pass at the blue footed boobies and would prod them just enough to figure out what they were brooding on. Most had two chicks but some had three. We classified the chicks as either naked, fluffy, uncovered, fluffy juvenile or juvenile. It was cheap entertainment at its finest, especially when you got close to a group of five nesting pairs in a limited area. On both ends of the islands there are good size nazcu boobies which are almost the size of a store turkeys and solid white. Most of them just had eggs because their nesting season is just starting. We also found the two albatross chicks Sandra has been watching and I found two more eggs with no adults around and Sandra said it is getting late in the season so they were probably abandoned. We get up early each day because we can’t touch the birds once the tourists come around 12 each day, but you wouldn’t want to work anymore because the island really starts to cook. It’s a desert which is exactly the environment the boobies need. I did bring the snorkeling gear for some reason so I ended up napping and reading a book about the old mail boat days in SE Alaska in the afternoons. The last day was spent in a similar fashion just at the other end of the island and we end caught the tourists boats back in. Luis’s friend ended up working on one of the boats so I bs’ed with him while everyone watched all the turtles and colorful fish in the bay. The last intern saw a couple manta rays there a couple months ago so I am definitely going to have to bring the gear next time.

After I got back I met up with Margareta on Sunday. My lake of Spanish skills have been inhibiting our coordination on times and days when we are supposed to meet so she did know I was showing up but she grilled up some pork and beef and fried up some plantains. Plantains are reason enough for visiting Latin America. They look almost identical to a banana but have more texture and are sliced into rounds and are fried in oil flattened a little and then fried again. They are basically the equivalent to Americans potatoes because they eat them with everything.

For the first almost three full weeks I was the only volunteer here, but over the weekend Rachele and Elisa who both went to University in Italy and are helping staff Equilibrio Azul showed up. Rachele had been here for three months and then took a month off with this being Elisa’s first time to the Americas. There were also five volunteers that showed up from their University in Quito for nine days. Four of them speak English so this week was the first time I got to speak to someone in English since I arrived and it’s also a help because they know the English and Spanish words. The most sharks I have counted since I arrived here was 80 but on Tuesday we counted 230 and on Wednesday another 130 so it was a busy introduction for them. The turtle nesting season is just starting so the volunteers and I have been walking different beaches we are assigned periodically looking for the first nest of the season. Yesterday Wednesday was also a holiday to honor the dead in all of Ecuador so everyone was at the cemeteries and eating and had a big dance and now this weekend everyone from Quito is coming to the coast for the weekend so it’s Thursday and there are already a ton of people here so this weekend should be interesting.

I also have stopped feeling the phantom vibrates of not having a phone here which is kind of a bummer sometimes so I might pick up a phone but probably not. I also didn't bring my computer so I am having a little trouble uploading pictures like the blue footed boobies but I'll see if I can use someone elses computer.

So a little bit more about the logistics of my stay. Puerto Lopez where I’m living for the next two months supposedly has a population of 18,000 people but it could definitely be called a small fishing village. Right now it’s the dry season until December when the rainy season starts but the weather actually gets better with a little bit of rain but clearer skies and it warms up. The first week I was here I didn’t see the sun at all but it was a steady 75 during the day and 65 at night. It a desert here, cactus’s and all right up to the oceans edge, so when the sun does come out it heats up in a hurry.

Besides the canker sore I got the first week from eating the different food I haven’t really had any problems with Montezuma’s revenge. The food it your typical beans rice and meat but all I’ve been eating is fish. I ate some ceviche and it gave me some stomach problems but other than that I haven’t had any food problems but I’ve been playing it really safe. Only drinking water and juice I know comes from a bottle and mainly eating at “higher” end food places and not a lot of the local places. With the fish market here every day there is plenty of fresh fish to the set lunch or the “meal of the day” which is a soup with fish or carne (meat) and a plate of fish or meat and beans and rice. At the semi local place I’ve been eating a lot called Dona Elsie the set lunch runs you about $2.50. If you order something off the menu it’s from $3-6 but a meal at one of the touristier places will run you around 5-7 bucks and they don’t have a set lunch.

But over the last week I went to Isla de la Plata which is off the coast around 30 miles and stayed there for three days. Its part of the Machalilla National Park and known as the poor mans Galapagos because it has a staggering amount of bird life and turtles. Where we stayed were some classic park service cabins. But the three guys and I all cooked together so it was my first time eating some of the local food besides in a restaurant. And the food was good, and it better be because I don’t think we cooked, ate and cleaned up a meal (with all four of us) in less than two hours. Three square meals a day usually including a nap afterwards.

But we got what we needed to done while we were there. As we were taking off from Puerto Lopez for the Island I found another dead Green Sea turtle but this one had been hit by someone’s propeller. Isla de la Plata also has a ton of Green Sea Turtles like the bay around Puerto Lopez so we went around with a sticker to the boats anchored there that said they would go slow in the “turtle zone”. All of the fisherman quickly agreed to putting the sticker on their boat but there is no real commitment just their word so hopefully it does a little sumnsomething. Because the fisherman use the island as an anchorage when they are out fishing for three days there is a lot of traffic on the beach. So a couple of years ago they built a turtle hatchery so that they can collect all the Green Turtle eggs off the beach and put them in one place so they don’t get broken. So we also rebuilt the hatchery in preparation for the start of the turtle nesting season which I’ll help out with starting next month when it begins.

But the real fun started at night when after diner we donned our wet suits and snorkels and went out to catch tag and measure more Green Sea Turtles. I’m almost right on the Equator so it gets dark every day at 630 and light at 630 which is kind of weird after being in Alaska all summer and having the big swings. But we went out at ten and caught as many turtles as we could in two hours. During the night the turtles are more sluggish so it’s possible to with a little skill to just catch them rather than having to bait them during the day. I’ve never been free diving for turtles before nor have I been snorkeling at night so it was a pretty surreal experience. I ended up only catching three to Luis’s 20(21 as he reminded me last night) but I had a blast. There was also a bunch of bioluminescence in the water which is basically marine microorganisms emitting light when they are agitated. So if you turned off the light we were using to find the turtles and kicked your fins the water would glow with little specs of light. There were two turtles Luis and I were following with our one light and he went after one and I after the other but without the light and I caught it with just the outline of its movement from the bioluminescence, so I was pretty stoked. In any case it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done and I get to go back to the island but this time with Sandra a bird biologist that is doing population monitoring on the island this week and then back for the turtle nesting season in a month.

The sharks has been pretty uneventful. Like I said shark fining here is not illegal for sharks that the fisherman accidentally catch but they are not supposed to target them but it is on the fringes of legality so they still don’t like me measuring the sharks. But they did bring In a Tiger shark which as you can guess has spots like a tiger, which is a new one that I hadn’t seen and they brought in an 8 foot hammerhead that must of weighted 200lbs. But it seems like a couple people are buying the sharks when the fisherman are anchored up in the bay before they come in because two days ago I had only counted 5 sharks from 7-10am so I called it a day and went home and then came back am hour later to buy some fish for dinner and a boat came in with 17 sharks and then they wouldn’t let me measure them because they said I would get sand on them, mind you they are cleaning them on the sand. I am also counting Manta Rays that are brought in and the next day the same two brothers brought in 5 rays that they had already butchered out in the bay so I couldn’t really measure then, and then when I was trying to identify them they told me they were the most common one rather than all five being a rarer variety. The biggest markets are on Wednesday and Saturday when at least a hundred boats come ashore and on the busiest days I’ve counted 50 to 80 sharks with 58 sharks and 8 rays this last Saturday. Anyway, mostly it’s just a lot of waiting around but I brought one good about mail boats in the old days in SE Alaska so I’ve been making progress.

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Its hard for me to make a succinct synopsis of my week without going on tangents and over explaining so bare with me.

So I have never been to Thailand or India but I feel like Ecuador is a combination of the two, very friendly people and nice beaches, but not a very high standard of living and a lot of trash. Which is my only real complaint here is that people just throw garbage on the ground and plastic in the ocean. Sounding like a greener I know, but that’s my only real complaint. They feed the pigs with any food scraps, burn anything flammable but have no way of dealing with plastics so there is a lot of it around, although the EU has recycling cans here for a short time in some neighborhoods, but besides that there really is no alternative. But EA where I am working was started by the Ecuadorian government to try and develop an environmental awareness with an emphasis on humans impacts on the oceans, which I’ll talk more about another time. Although I did find a dead green sea turtle on the beach yesterday that had gotten caught in some fishing rope.

I thought that EA might market themselves as a conservation group that does a lot of field work but really they just need volunteers to do the busy work. And the sharks basically are just busy work but I already got to catch three green sea turtles so I’m not complaining. The fish market I go to every morning produces a lot of fish waste most of which I believe is trucked off for fertilizer but some ends up in the ocean. Green turtles are omnivores and opportunist feeders so they have started to congregate in the bay around Puerto Lopez because of the fish scraps. One of the projects EA is working on is trying to get an understanding of their population so they have been capturing, measuring and tagging them. So we took a couple fish and tied them on a string and went turtle fishing and had five circling the boat within two minutes. Luis says green turtles aren’t the biggest species in Ecuador but they must weigh 75-100lbs and nearly drowned me so I’m not talking trash.

First a little background knowledge. The day before I was talking to a few fisherman mending net on the beach and they asked me if I had a girlfriend and I said no so then they said I must like guys, and I didn’t understand and so started ten minutes of ripping on the gringo. But my point is they like to joke around like all fisherman do during gear work. So its 75 degrees out and the water is around 70 degrees but they think both are freezing so they have me put on a wet suit and mask and snorkel which I’m already skeptical about and then they explain to me in Spanish how I am supposed to catch a turtle. They say I am supposed to wait until a turtle gets close and then dive in head long and grab the turtle by the carapace and then bring up next to the boat. So after the day before I’m skeptical but after they tell me it twice I go along. So one gets close enough and they tell me to go but I still can’t wrap my mind around it, but on the second one I give it a go and the inevitable swing and a miss (due to the refraction of light throwing off the actual position of the turtle of course)ha. Anyway on the second try I grab one with both hands, one behind the head and one on the tail and am in a 30 second tug of war to get it to the surface. I get a breath and then its down for another 15 seconds before I get both of its front flippers out of the water which is where all its power comes from. So then I bring it up next to the boat and Luis and Ricardo pull it aboard while I push from the water. The process goes on twice more with less near drowning experiences, with it only taking me 15 seconds to get them to the surface now. So after we have three in the boat we measure their shells, take a DNA sample and tag them in their rear fins and then yard them back overboard.

So basically this was just practice because the real fun comes when you free dive for Hawksbill and Leatherback turtles. When you are trying to tag these turtles it requires that you snorkel around until you find one take a couple deep breaths and then dive down and grab him and bring him to the surface. So maybe I’ll have a chance to try it in the next couple days on Isla de la Plata. We’re going there to rebuild a turtle hatchery, exactly what that means I am not sure. But it’s supposed to take three or four days so I should be back Thursday or Friday. We went and bought groceries today for the four of us to go for three or four days and it cost under 100 bucks for four days, although we are going meat light.
The portions on food here are also not Tor sized. The first day I ate out, I went to a touristy place that is a little more expensive but I just wanted to test out my stomach and the food was alright. Then I went to a place that a previous volunteer suggested that had beans rice and plantains and then I was really impressed with the food. For a “set lunch” which is basically just the lunch of the day it costs about 2.50 while a specific dish costs around 3 or 4 dollars. So far I have only been eating the fish dishes because I have been going easy on my stomach. I still haven’t tried the fish market food which is a buck fifty for a full meal. I almost made the move today but we are going out to Isla de la Plata an Island 50 miles off the coast with rustic living accommodations so I figured it wasn’t the best time to have stomach problems.

I also got to play some beach soccer with Luis the other day. He grew up here so he knows a lot of people and I keep running into him all over town. But I was walking the beach and was going to go check out a boat that seines for anchovies just like we do for salmon in Alaska but I ran into Luis about to start a game so I ended up playing. I’m a solid head if not shoulders taller than 90% of the people here but man are they fast. In any case they are pretty dam good at soccer but then again they had the advantage of playing on a beach that was 95% sand but that 5% rocks sure made its presence known. They are intense and challenge for the ball but no one ever got a temper and a foul wasn’t called, which was a big change of pace from playing the US or even Iceland. I played the first game but by the second my feet were done. I’m surprisingly beat up after being here for a week. My feet from the rocks, bug bites from no seeums on the beach at the fish market and a couple blisters from my boot tender feet not used to wearing sandals. But its was a relaxing week with the house to myself and I made a couple day trips one to a town north of here and one to a soccer field that have teams playing that have actual jerseys and referees.

Anyway, like I said I’m going to Isla de la Plata (Silver Island) for the next three days, which is known for its bird like, especially the blue and red footed boobies and has albatross nesting on it, so maybe I’ll have some pictures to go along with it. I think that is my only real regret is that I didn’t have time in Seattle to buy a better camera.

After a delayed fishing trip my flight was canceled on the afternoon jet so I got to spend another day in Alaska which I didn’t mind other than it meant that I wasn’t going to make it to Portland to get a few last minute things or see friends. So a quick trip to REI and I was on the plane at 10pm and arrived in Quito at 5pm the next day (east coast time here).

It was off to a good start as my body didn't start convulsing as I stepped off the plane in Quito, after making the 24 hour transition from Alaska. I went the cheap route so I ended up taking six flights yesterday to get to Quito and then splurged on a flight to Manta on the coast for 55 bucks rather than a 9 hour bus ride. I missed the last bus from Manta to Puerto Lopez (PL) by an hour and didn’t feel like paying the 40 dollars for a taxi to I just got a hotel for 17 bucks and paid the taxi five bucks for a two dollar ride I’m sure. A nap in a bed did me good and I caught a bus from Manta to PL for $3, so I’m only a day late to my internship. In the 1980’s Ecuadorian sucre was hit hard with inflation due to falling oil prices so they adopted the dollar (termed dollarization) so everything in Ecuador now deals in dollars. Although using dollars doesn’t do much for my currency collection, besides the 50 cent piece and the sacagawea dollars which I’ve already seen a couple times. And the majority of transactions are with change so breaking a 20 is def a hassle.

In the end it was a pretty uneventful trip here, and the last three hours weren’t that bad because I ended up sitting by an Ecuadorian lady who spoke a couple of phrases of English so just a bar below my Spanish. In any case I learned the days of the week. My Spanish is just stumble along useable. I know a lot of verbs and I worked on my vocabulary but nothing is conjugated and who knows about word order. But Margarita showed me to Equilibrio Azul (EA) where I’m going to be staying for the next ten weeks. I couldn’t rouse Jose to unlock the gate so I went down to the beach where they have an early morning fish market and watched them bring in some hammerhead sharks and fish. I took a two hour nap at the unoccupied lifeguard station (looks like one anyway) and then made my way back and had better luck with the gate this time. Jose showed me around and I watched the introduction to EA which was just previous volunteers slide shows. Jose doesn’t speak English and neither does Luis but Jose is patient and a lot of help.

There were in the process of rebolting the beds so I helped out and now that I see what is holding them together I’m sleeping on the bottom bunk and making sure no one sleeps above me. ha Finished of the last of my American food so I went and bought the basics for 20 bucks and ate spaghetti for lunch and diner with a can or corn, and I’m pretty sure the sauce is actually tomato paste, although it says salsa , so it’s a lot sweeter than I am used to. Other than that, I did a little beach walking and bs’d with a couple fisherman.

I talked to the coordinator in Quito and my main job while I’m here will be monitoring the bycatch of sharks at the morning beach markets. It’s not illegal but there isn’t much information on how many they are catching so I am supposed to sex, identify and measure as many as I can before they cut them up and send them off to Asian for shark fin soup. That starts tomorrow at 6am and should last two hours with the biggest markets on Wednesdays and Saturdays lasting four hours or more. Other than that the only other major new is that everyone else took off so I have a 12 bed house to myself for the night, with Jose off to Quito, but on the bright side I have a dog again. A yellow lab, but he might as well be a golden retarded. He’s a friendly sob and keeps butting his head against the front door because I won’t let him in. ha. Anyway, hopefully this gives you some background so when I go on a rant about something later you’ll have some idea of where I’m coming from.

I’ll let you know what I know when I know but it sounds like turtle nesting season is in a month and a trip to Isla de la Playa (the lucky islands) to watch birds is going to happen in the next two weeks.