Dear family and friends,
"Prickly
pear cactus! Prickly pear cactus! My Gahd, I can't believe how much he talked
about prickly pear cactus! We've got
millions of prickly pear cactus in Texas,"
Cecelia started in a whisper but ended with a near squeal to emphasize her
dismay that Ruly, our naturalist tour leader, would spend so much time
discussing something which is so uninterestingly common in her home state of Texas.
Cecelia
is from Port Aransas on the Gulf Coast, and was apparently unaware that our tour to
the Galapagos Islands was intended for more
than just folks from her home state. Or
alternately, she may not know that prickly pear cactus does not grow in Canada, England,
Norway, and northern United States
from whence the other nine of us on the tour come, or that this is a unique
species of prickly pear cactus. In her
mid fifties with sun-bleached hair, brightly painted toe nails, and the
grooming of someone desperate to look younger - but being resolutely betrayed
by the sagging flab bubbling over her belt line - I am not quite sure why
Cecelia decided to come to the Galapagos Islands. With the urbanity of one who has seldom
traveled outside Texas, I am quite certain that she has no knowledge that the
Galapagos is the crucible of the Theory of Evolution, or as commonly known, Survival of the Fittest Through Natural Selection,
as proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859. Darwin spent less than one month in the islands in 1835,
but his extraordinary ability for observation permitted him to identify many
different endemic species - that is, they only occur here in the Galapagos -
including 14 different species of finches, now known as Darwin finches. It was his keen observations of how
specialized the finches had become in adapting to their particular environment
that propelled him to his conclusions of the evolution of species.
The
Galapagos Islands, a group of some twenty islands and forty islets, lies 1,000
km off the coast of Ecuador
with the equator running directly through it.
The Galapagos were my next stop after flying out of Santiago.
Then an enjoyable flight took me from Quito,
the capital of Ecuador, to
the airport located on Baltra
Island from where I was
whisked off to board the vessel Cruz del Sur for a five day/four night tour of
the highlights of several islands.
