Endangered Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

Don't touch anything is the new motto of these fragile islands

By Adam Roy

As our engines sputtered to a stop, a group of blue and crimson Sally Lightfoot Crabs strolling across a nearby rock froze in place and trained their eyestalks on us, skittering away when we drifted too close. From a grotto in the lava cliff high above our heads, a pair of Blue-Footed Boobies peered down at the Queen Mary as divers moved about the deck, donning scuba equipment and checking computers. Clearly, we were causing a bit of a stir.

Geared up, I leaned against the railing of the cabin cruiser as the dive master ran through his final briefing. He would lead us along the edge of the wall and signal us if he saw anything interesting. We should keep an eye on our pressure gauges and let him know when we were down to half a tank. And please, added the dive master, don't touch anything.

In the protected seas of the Galapagos Marine Reserve, "Don't touch anything" is more than an admonition: it's a way of life. Even as cruise ships have replaced whaling vessels, runaway growth in the Galapagos' tourism industry and the islands' skyrocketing population have kept native fauna on the defensive. With the Ecuadorian government hesitant to turn away tourism dollars, the future of the islands' ecosystem may well rest on visitors and residents' ability to create a new culture of sustainability on Galapagos.

Much like the islands themselves, what makes the seas surrounding Galapagos so unique is their remarkable biodiversity. Located at the intersection of the warm Panama Current and the frigid Humboldt, the waters of the archipelago support a wide variety of sea life, including marine iguanas, dolphins and several species of shark. It's a kind of aquatic Wonderland, where cold-water species like the Galapagos penguin swim among schools of gaudy tropical fish.

The localized temperatures and finicky currents that make these odd juxtapositions possible also made diving in the Galapagos a bit tricky. 50 feet below the surface, the water was clear but cold, chilling me even through my thick wetsuit as we swam along the ocean floor. Next to us, a pair of comically mismatched manta rays, one about five times the size of the other, shuffled along the sandy bottom. Underneath a spur of lava rock, a green sea turtle regarded us before gliding off with a lazy wave of its flippers.

The wilderness of the reserve finds its counterpoint in Puerto Ayora, a bustling bayside town on Santa Cruz Island's southern shore. The dive shops and restaurants jockeying for space on Puerto Ayora's streets are a testament to the eco-tourism industry that built this town, and most residents seem determined to preserve that livelihood. Restaurants' landscaping doubles as marine iguana nesting ground, while hotels provide biodegradable soap and encourage guests not to kill spiders out of concern for the island's food chain.

Unfortunately, as the population of Puerto Ayora continues its explosive growth, alarming signs of friction are beginning to crop up. Tires, plastic bags and other detritus wash up along the shore of Academy Bay with increasing frequency. Over the past 15 years, the number of introduced species has more than doubled.

According to the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF), a scientific organization based in Santa Cruz, current rates of growth in the tourism industry seems to be following a "boom-and-bust" pattern, putting both Galapagos' ecosystem and economy in grave danger. To avert the crisis, CDF looks to get island residents involved in the tourism. In July 2007, after UNESCO placed Galapagos on its list of World Heritage Sites in Danger, CDF Executive Director Graham Watkins emphasized the role of local, family-owned businesses in promoting conservation.

"This island culture must prevail over the existing frontier culture that does not recognize such limits and the need for sustainability," Watkins wrote on the group's website. " It is our fervent hope that we can create a truly sustainable society that cares for these islands ."

A two hour boat trip away, sleepy Floreana Island offers both a glimpse into Galapagos' past and a showcase of what the islands still have to lose. The highlands of Floreana were once a hideout for pirates, who took advantage of the island's supply of fresh water and convenient lookouts to keep watch for enemy vessels. Later, the island would become home to one of the first families to settle in Galapagos, the Wittmers.

When Heinrich, Margaret and Harry Wittmer arrived from Germany in 1932, they found themselves in a challenging new world. There were no stores, no post offices, no cruise ships puttering from island to island. Their chosen life was the garua rainy season, a wooden house in the shadow of the mountains and the impossibly vast, blue stretch of the sea. Their home, now a hotel, still has an aura of pioneer sturdiness around it. Above one door, a sign in German reminds passerby "God helps those that help themselves!"

Back on the boat, we followed Floreana's coast to a small cove, where we donned snorkeling gear and slipped beneath the surface. Only a few minutes in, I did a double take when I spied a mountain of manta rays in the shallows. I counted 21 of the flat, heavy-lidded fish heaped one on top of another. A quick tally by the guide came up with 25. As I gaped, a pair of white-tipped sharks emerged from a grotto and swam a few circuits before retreating back into the darkness.

On the way back to the boat, the guide paused to dive down, resurfacing a moment later with a sea cucumber in his hand. Snorkelers immediately clustered around him, passing around the sea cucumber and stroking its nubby hide. When the guide noticed me treading water at the edge of the circle, he held out the spiny orange critter to me and asked if I wanted to touch it. I shook my head no.

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Traditional Chichicastenango, Guatemala

Brush with Mayan traditions in the highlands

By Andrea Davoust

Of all the Central American countries, Guatemala is the one where the indigenous culture remains most alive. Nowhere is it more readily visible - in the clothing, rituals and language of the people - than in Chichicastenango, a small, sleepy town in Guatemala's western highlands, which springs to life every Thursday and Saturday during its arts and crafts market.

My friend and I reached Chichicastenango late one rainy afternoon - with much relief. From the sprawling, polluted streets of Guatemala City, it had been a three-hour ride in a converted, brightly-painted American school bus, deeper and deeper into the mountains. And what a journey!

The bus charged through crowded intersections, roared down steep hills, swung at breakneck speed around hairpin turns, chugged up roads nearly concealed by rolling clouds before dipping into yet another lime-green valley, but at last it screeched into Chichicastenango. We tumbled out onto a nondescript street, still unsteady on our feet from the eye-widening ride, and seconds later the bus tore off.

The next morning, we set off bright and early to explore the place. The town itself was fairly unremarkable. While most of the one-story buildings were painted bold yellows, oranges or pink, many were just plain concrete. For a place which was supposed to be home for 50,000 souls, it also seemed rather small.

After strolling just a couple of blocks, we had already reached the main square, where very few of the stalls were open, as everyone obviously was waiting for the next day's big market. Nonetheless, there was a pleasant, quiet feel to the place, with few cars driving through the unevenly paved streets.

I also loved the way the women dressed: in a riot of colours. They all wore thick dark blue or dark grey skirts, with fine vertical stripes of darker purple alternating with lighter grey motifs. Their blouses were heavily embroidered with enormous roses or diamond patterns in blazing pinks, yellows and blues. Every single bundle they carried was wrapped in rough striped blankets, again drawing from every hue of the rainbow. It was a natural kaleidoscope, definitely not a show put on for tourists.

After visiting the square, we hiked up the pine-covered hill just south of town to Pascual Abaj, a shrine to the Mayan earth god Huyup Tak'ah. The shrine was little more than a foot-tall ring of blackened stones with a Christian cross in the middle of a clearing, but again, the traditions proved very much alive, as we observed an elderly couple burning some herbs as a sacrifice.

As we were heading back to the center, it started to pour, so we found refuge under the makeshift roofs of the food stalls in the center of the market and ordered two mugs of scalding hot watery coffee. Women were expertly patting corn dough into tortillas, then slapping them to cook on grills. The gesture is common all over Central America, but we were surprised to see dark tortillas. "They are made with black corn," explained the woman, pointing to the different sacks of grain.

Corn is an essential staple here, to the extent that it forms part of Mayan mythology. "The gods created man out of corn," the woman reminded us. "I am from Europe, so was made from wheat," I joked back. She immediately shot back with the eternal where-are-you-from question. My travel companion came from El Salvador - the country literally next door. Yet the woman had no idea where it was. "How many hours by bus?" she asked. As to my home country, France...judging from the uncertain look on her face, I might as well have come from Jupiter. It occurred to me that she had probably never had the chance to venture outside her mountains, a poor campesina selling tortillas every day of her life.

The next day for the artisanal market, the town was so bustling it was barely recognisable. The stalls on the square were bursting with carved masks, jade jewellery, cloth dolls with button-eyes, bags and purses of all sizes and of course blankets. We pushed our way through the crowds, trying not to step onto the women who had simply spread their baskets of fruit on the ground between stalls. A few other pale-skinned tourists stood out in the crowd, all at least a head taller than the Guatemalans.

On the steps of the 500-year-old Santo Tomás church, sellers had covered every available inch with buckets of irises, chrysanthemums and lilies. A young girl read the paper, her legs wrapped in a red and green blanket, while a very matronly woman pottered around, carrying three live chickens. A grey-haired man in corduroys and a sweatshirt, kneeling at the top of the steps, was swinging a pot of incense, shrouding the whole scene in thick scented smoke.

I felt privileged to be witnessing such an authentic scene. Guatemala styles itself as "the soul of the earth" and indeed, up in Chichi the townspeople have not yet sold out to the small trickle of tourists coming their way.

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Colorful Cartagena, Colombia

Feel the beat in this pulsating Caribbean getaway

By Dianna Beaufort

On our first night strolling the streets, we were high-fived by a busload of revellers swinging past and nearly scooped up into the mayhem. Party groups are driven around town in colorfully painted chiva's, open-sided old school buses. Blasting tinny music is an integral part of the experience while the dancing on board sways the chassis of the chiva to the beat of Colombian salsa.

Cartagena is a bit of a party place. It's a common weekend getaway for people living in the capital of Colombia, Bogotá. Most stay in Bocagrande, a peninsula stretching out into the Caribbean Sea where hotel chains and high-rises dominate the skyline. If you're willing to depart from the sea (it's fairly grey here anyway), it's a much more attractive alternative to stay in the old city center. And if partying in a chiva isn't your kind of thing, then there's always a romantic horse and carriage tour. By far, however, the greatest pleasure comes from simply walking the streets.

The history, color and vivacity of Cartagena is sensational. At night the streets of the inner walled town glow like my childhood Light Bright screen: colors pop against the black sky. During the day, the sun intensifies the vibrant hues: cobalt blue adobe houses, hot pink hotels, pastel pink churches, white wooden balconies, deep mahogany doors and the bright yellow passageway of Las Bóvedas. These vaults in the northern corner of the city's walls were built as military storerooms and were also later used as jails. Today Las Bóvedas house shops selling an array of crafts. Though mostly geared to tourists, the leather, ceramics, clothes, Christmas decorations and jewellery are of high, hand-made quality.

Perhaps Colombia's most illustrious souvenir is the emerald. I imagined a poetic mix of blue skies and yellow sun making the emerald so green, but emeralds are big business here (remember Romancing the Stone?). It's wise to do your homework first since quality—that is to say: clarity—can be temporarily improved under the eye of a potential buyer. Beyond the product itself, the means of acquiring the stone is not something to be taken lightly. Emeralds come from deep mines in the mountains, and in the 1990's a ferocious ‘green fever' ripped apart the countryside as speculators disregarded the law and practically enslaved miners to get their goods.

Slavery is in fact what gave Cartagena its special advantage. In 1525 it became one of the first European settlements in the New World and obtained exclusive slave-trading rights. Today, you sense a deep awareness of their history and the mixed blood of Colombian ancestry, from the African street dancers to the statue is of India Catalina, a beautiful native Carib who was an interpreter to the Spanish. You can taste it too, in the comida criolla (Creole food).

Snacks carts with butifarras, smoky mini-meatballs, can be found all over. Plaza Santo Domingo is the most lively square with its café's serving up, of course, Colombian coffee. In its center lounges a voluptuous bronze Venus by Colombia's most famous artist Botero. It acts as a little reminder of how voluptuous you could get if you feasted on everything on offer, including arepas (egg wrapped in deep-fried corn pastry) and Colombianas, a sugary carbonated drink like the cream sodas of long ago.

Apart from restaurants and small-scale hotels, the streets panning out from Plaza Santo Domingo are full of small businesses, such as shoe shiners, tourist stalls, typists, buskers, mimes who may follow you for blocks and money changers who approach you on the street. Unidentified exchanges take place too, through the spindles of window balustrades.

After Cartagena's declaration of independence in 1810, the first settlement to do so, it rode on its reputation as the Heroic City for some time. Today its heroism has waned, but it remains full of gracious open plazas, elegant colonial structures and confident, entrepreneurial people. Everyone is a walking cell phone, selling calls for 250 pesos a minute. "Llamada, llamada," they shout as they traipse through town. Casual providers wear a cardboard "Llamada" sign around their neck and the more serious service providers have their territorial corners.

The old town feels like a village, with relaxed villagers helpful to each other and tourists. Cartagena may have a slightly seedy reputation among foreigners but it does not feel unsafe. Street commerce is a way of life, and so too, is music. Everywhere there is music in Cartagena's streets and always there are people swaying, tapping, gyrating to the beat, as though the streets are their living room. You get the sense here that they live life to live it joyfully. And whether you're swinging on a chiva or slow-dancing to the fully-equipped stereo in your hotel room (they all have one), you'll soon be pleasantly surprised that you have caught the fever.

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Elemental Iceland

Feel the planet's untamed energy in Europe's westernmost island

By Andrea Davoust

I went to a desert island for work. Not the palm-trees-and-sandy-beach kind of island, mind you. My company sent me to Iceland, the icy piece of rock jutting out of the North Atlantic, just below the Arctic circle. In the middle of November. I absolutely froze, of course. But I also swam in a hot turquoise lagoon, just outside Reykjavik. And that is what I found so fascinating about Iceland: over there, water comes as either icebergs or as scalding steam. Truly, I had arrived at the land where ice meets fire.

Because of Iceland’s position on the mid-Atlantic ridge, the blood of the Earth boils up through its soil, in the form of countless volcanoes and hot springs. At the other extreme, glaciers and ice fields are a huge part of the Icelandic scenery. I came unprepared for ice-climbing or any other feat requiring Viking stamina, but was still able to explore some of the country's more accessible natural wonders.

In Reykjavik, my friend Marta and I booked an excursion called "horses and hot springs". The tour company drove us out into the Icelandic countryside – if the scrubby, treeless expanses surrounding Reykjavik can be described with the same word you might use for rolling English pastures. (In fact, the lava fields of Iceland are so desolate that NASA astronauts have practiced moon landings there.) At the riding center, we donned fleece-lined jumpsuits with reflective bands - on top of our double layer of clothes, coats, scarves, gloves- plus a helmet over our hats. "We look like obese space invaders!" shrieked Marta.

She then waddled out into the wind, which was driving the thermometer to 18 degrees (Celsius) below zero. Our horses were sturdy little mounts. They carried us across a flattish, tundra-like landscape, totally devoid of trees, its brown monotony here and there interrupted with a sprinkle of snow.

No matter how hard I buried my hands into the horse's bushy mane, I couldn’t warm my fingers enough to feel them. My horse sensed that I was a poor rider and took malicious pleasure in falling behind everyone else, in spite of my attempts to prod it ahead. A couple of mind-numbing hours later, we returned to the welcoming warmth of the center, dismounted and peeled off the layers.

A bus then took us through snow-flecked plains to the Geysir field, from which the English word geyser is derived. Leaning into the biting wind, we made our way across a lunar-like, pockmarked area, past a muddy bubbling pool, to Strokkur. Like Old Faithful in the United States, the spring is well-known for the predictability of the eruptions - every ten minutes.

As we arrived, the crater, which was the size of a small jacuzzi, was steaming lightly, like a cauldron cooking. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Strokkur violently spewed out a ten-foot-high cloud of thick white steam, which blew across the field. After a few seconds, the geyser spurted another, as if on the second convulsion of a vomiting fit. We clapped and cheered. Pretty soon the freezing wind drove us back to the bus, and we left for the next site, Gulfoss waterfall.

Again, the Arctic wind brought tears to our eyes as we slipped and stumbled on the icy path to the edge of the cliff overlooking Gulfoss. The "Golden Falls" plunged down a double cascade into a deep gorge. The water foamed and frothed, tinged with pink by the setting sun. The spray rising from the falls had solidified into arm-length stalactites hanging from the hand ropes along the footpath. After just enough gazing and photo-snapping, we once more retreated to the heat of the bus.

Our final visit was to the Blue Lagoon, a natural geothermal pool set in the middle of a barren lava field. Shivering from the walk between the changing rooms and the pool in our bathing suits, we carefully lowered ourselves into the hot, milky blue water. The pool was instantly relaxing.

As we waded in the chest-deep water, we could feel the swirl of hotter, almost scalding pockets, where the mineral water sprang from the ground. Marta and I caked our faces in silicate mud dredged from the bottom - "excellent to soften our skin!" we exclaimed. Having gone through so much bone-chilling cold that day, we decided to we also deserved a massage at the Blue Lagoon spa. All in all, Iceland was an otherworldly experience, one where the powers of the Earth could truly be felt.

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