5. And relax …. Briefly … despite the unsettled weather and a tea crisis!

With a few days in between our organised trip and my dive trip, we set about doing all the important things like sampling as many eateries as possible, stocktaking and undertaking buying trips for souvenirs, drinking delicious tea and reading some more of our books! A bigger town and population seems to mean more options for restaurants which in turn requires them to up their game in terms of the quality and food choices. It doesn’t seem always to mean that they bother to compete with offers or show much willingness to bring the prices down though. Even I drew the line at paying $15 for ‘avocado toast’ one morning. I did then misread the menu though when checking other options between Spanish / English translations and accidentally ended up having a bowl of chips for breakfast that day! Some other dinners have been absolute triumphs and most delicious!

We have also ventured out on a trip ourselves to see ‘Las Grietas’ - some deep volcanic-fissure swimming pools filled with brackish water. Getting there meant getting a water taxi boat across the harbour and then making our way round a path, following the signs. Rather than be allowed to make your way all the way to the pools, once you get half way, the locals have decided it’s best to make a rule that says you have to be accompanied by an official guide for the final part of the walk and then supervised (in the loosest possible sense of the term) while you swim for no more than 40 minutes. They charge you $10 each for the privilege. Our guide ensured we found our way to the pools - navigating us along the only one track which only goes one direction with no possible turn offs. She then busily sat and played on her phone doomscrolling while we supervised ourselves in the pools!

Aside from eating and beach trips, it’s otherwise been very relaxed. We got a second load of washing done by a nice lady who really didn’t charge much and returned it all fresh smelling and neatly folded. Dad didn’t even moan this time that he needn’t have even brought the relatively small amount of clothes that he’s got since I keep insisting on getting laundry done. He’d have been fine with just a carried bag and a few bits, apparently! There are hot water facilities here and Dad has a fridge so the tea is plentiful. I’m getting through my tea bag stash but I think I’ve got enough left - definitely no Yorkshire tea in the shops here! Dad has also followed his packing instructions and got tea bags with him. He particularly excelled himself when I requested the cup that he’d brought with him to make a tea and he produced one of his best bone-china pint mugs from his hand-luggage.

Souvenir shopping has of course been a joy - but is accompanied by the ever present sound of fire-alarms running out of batteries. I’m not sure if fire-alarms are a relatively new thing here or whether it’s just that no one in Galapagos has been educated on how batteries work but there is definitely something that needs some refining. There are two in the common area of our hotel-lodge and one, on average, in every 3 shops you go in with a beeping fire alarm. San Cristobal had the echoes of sea lions. Santa Cruz has a cacophony of bleeping fire alarms and either an impressive ability of the locals to block out the sound or an impending battery crisis. Either way, it’s annoying. I preferred the vomiting sea lions.

The weather in Galapagos is best described as ‘unsettled’. This should be ‘winter’. That should mean largely cloudy, totally dry days with cooler temperatures hovering in the low twenties at most and even cooler evenings. However, El Niño arriving means that the climate is not as expected. It can swing between overcast to bright blue skies within minutes and does so frequently during each day. There is also the odd bit of rain that will fall periodically, mostly a light shower and sometimes just drizzle. Having researched the expected weather, I’ve got 4 jumpers packed. 10 days in and I did stop taking my jumper out in the evening in case the temperatures suddenly plunged by 8-10° and got chilly. It’s humid, can be cloudy but is never below 26°C at the very lowest during the day and possibly down to 24° as a minimum at night. El Niño is a climate cycle where a combination of stalled winds from the west and warmer sea temperatures concentrating, as a result, in the east impact climate. It also means the warm sea currents suppress the colder upwelling currents which would bring nutrients (& other creatures) for most of the animals who depend on the sea for their food source. It will likely impact the diving too. Locals say that this is the third year in a row that the rainy season earlier in the year also didn’t bring much rain - a disaster for an island nation where water is already fairly scarce and they don’t have the infrastructure to store much long term or utilise desalination yet.

Talking of water shortage, we experienced our own absolute crisis this morning. On tripping out my hobbit hole to collect my first cup of tea for the morning, I was horrified to discover that the water dispenser was empty. I grumbled off upstairs to the backup supply only to discover that was also empty. I stomped over to Dad’s room to alert him to the disaster. The woman who totally ineffectively ‘cleans’ the hotel (she’s brushes leaves about) finally arrived at 8.10am (I’m fairly sure her start time is at least 8am) and I appraised her immediately of the situation. While she didn’t seem to appreciate the full urgency of the crisis, she did go and get a water refill. I then showed her that the upstairs dispenser was also empty and she seemed unconcerned as she pointed to show she’d replaced the primary one. I persisted and organised her into also replacing the back up. I won’t go as far to call it an actual near-death experience of extreme thirst when I realise how serious the water situation is for the local climate and islands. But it really was close.

After recovering from this morning’s dehydration events, I recovered by going for brunch and watching the small fish market trade fish which are prepared for sale under the careful supervision of the pelicans! Then over on the water taxi for a few hours on the beach, watching the iguanas and various sea-birds who patrol the shore line. Just back from the beach are some brackish lakes and salt flats, which seem to bring some other birds in too. Plus a lovely mockingbird who let me get really close to take photos and sang to me while I did it. Or he may have been singing to the female mockingbird I noticed on a roof behind me. And more lizards of course!

Tomorrow morning (Wednesday) , bright and early, I shall be heading off to the meeting point for my dive boat trip for a week. Dad is set up for his week with the fridge stocked, painting equipment and thousands of photos for inspiration ready and his mission to try every coffee shop and eatery in town! I think it’s unlikely there will be any signal at all where I’m going as the islands are remote and uninhabited by humans. Bliss! … I’ll be back in a week!