Where the wildlife is free to flourish (March 31, 2001)

by Jill Hartley

For the oil spill in the Galapagos to have claimed only two pelicans suggests that the islands must be divinely blessed. Jill Hartley visits a pristine wilderness

My name is Lourdes," said our cruise director with a polished smile, "like Madonna's daughter." It seemed like a pretty good opening line, but it was completely lost on the Saga holiday group we had joined on board our Galapagos cruise ship.
" What did she say?" a friendly seventy some thing boomed in my ear. "She said her name is Lourdes, is in miracle," I replied.
It seemed fining, as the islands have just witnessed a miracle. To describe their recent escape from a major oil spill as luck seems a ludicrous understatement, Surely it was the intervention of the Almighty.
As we boarded a dinghy on the island of San Cristobal to take us out to the ship, we were amazed to see the wreck of the oil tanker Jessica, just a few hundred yards offshore. There she lay — a seemingly harmless piece of rust-bucket scrap being lapped by a pristine sea. It was only four weeks since she ran aground, but it was as if nothing had happened.
In the water, we didn’t see one speck of her filthy load.
In January the Jessica was on its way to refuel our cruise ship, the Galapagos Explorer II, when she struck rocks and began to spill oil into the waters surrounding the volcanic islands where the unique “tame'' wildlife inspired Darwin to publish his “natural selection" theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species.
Freddy, one of the on-board naturalists and our guide, modestly played down his own role in being one of the first to help with the clean-up process, and said we should give thanks for the strength of the Galapagos currents which had swept the oil slick out into the vast Pacific.
" We were extremely lucky," he said. "We could have been witnessing the world's worst ecological disaster. In the end only two pelicans died.
" The doom merchants who say that vital fragile marine life was damaged at the beginning of the food chain should remember that these islands are no stranger to disaster. They have faced volcanic eruptions, tidal waves and erratic weather patterns."
The Explorer II, which can carry 105 passengers, is the biggest of the 82 tourist ships allowed to cruise the islands. She is also the most luxurious.
We had a cabin with a double bed and enough room for a sprawly sofa, plus hot showers, airconditioning, five-course dinners and a cocktail list as long as the Ritz's.
But the main attraction is on shore. As we have all read often enough, the wildlife here has evolved without fear of man. But nothing prepares you for the reality. T will never forget our first Galapagos landing on the island of Espanola. The shiny black rocks were alive with scuttling Day-Glo orange Sally Lightfoot crabs and dozens of marine iguanas, a subspecies unique to the island, flashed their crimson and turquoise patches to the sun. Who says reptiles don't preen?
We almost tripped over the ever-present sea lions, catching some rays on the rocks, or snoozing in snuggled-up groups on a perfect white sandy crescent of a beach (anywhere else in the world, and there would already be a string of hotels). All my fears that there would be too many of us disturbing the animals were unfounded. The Explorer team deftly split us into groups of no more than 12 for on-shore expeditions and we were restricted to designated paths to avoid treading on nesting sites.
I expected Sir David Attenborough to pop up from behind a rock, boggling as we were at the totally fearless birds. Cheeky mockingbirds jumped on our feet (in Origin of Species, Darwin says one tried to undo his shoelaces) and soft, grey swallow-tailed gulls with red-rimmed "mega-hangover" eyes — all the better to see each other at night — nested in our path, or among the rocks at eye level.
It's hard to decide who are the greatest scene-stealers. For many it has to be the boobies, either masked (black and white), blue-footed, or red-footed with sky blue beaks and yellow eyes — so comic that they must surely have been designed by Disney. For others, it's the magnificent frigate bird, which we were lucky to see on the island of Genovesa during the breeding season, when the inky black males inflate their awesome crimson throat to impress the ladies.
The first Galapagos National Park rule is "Don’t Touch the Animals", but there is nothing to say that they can't touch you. inquisitive boobies pecked at our cameras, and I felt a gentle nudge on the thigh when swimming one day with a group of friendly sea lions.
Sadly, transgressions occur, even in the Garden of Eden. We witnessed people cuddling up to boobies and lifting iguanas into better camera poses.
Incredibly, for a party of alleged wildlife lovers, one of our number even attempted to sit on a slumbering giant tortoise for a holiday snapshot. Loud cries from the rest of us soon stopped him.
Later, when we snitched on him to Freddy, he smiled knowingly and said tourists did little harm. The real threat to the wildlife, he said, came from unscrupulous local fishermen. Over the years, whales, fur seals and lobsters have been hunted to the brink of extinction. And only the week before a sea captain had his boat impounded when port officials found 800 illegally caught sharks on board, destined for the lucrative Far East market, where they would end up in shark's fin soup.
The temptation for the Government to give in to the developers is huge, as tourism to the islands is Ecuador's single biggest garner, injecting more million a year into the economy.
Even though visitor numbers have soared in the past five years (from 45.000 to 70.000), only 8 per cent of the islands' 4,500 square mile land mass is open to tourists, and then only on strictly controlled itinerants with accredited guides. A £245 return flight, plus a compulsory visitor tax of £70 par person, both helps conservation and keeps out the wrong kind of tourist.
Trying to keep the wrong kind of oil company out of Amazon is a much bigger political issue, and far more of a threat to the rainforest than tourism. Ever since Texaco Struck rich reserves in the northeast of Ecuador in the Seventies, vast swaths of jungle and many indigenous communities have been destroyed in pursuit of the "black gold". Canodros, the Ecuadorian company which owns the Explorer II, has to be applauded for its noble efforts to protect and help the Achuar, a group of blow-gun hunters, who live ill simple huts on the south- eastern Amazon tributaries. Fifteen years ago, in the bean of the rainforest, near the Peruvian border, they invested £1.4 million to build Kapawi, a 20-room ecolodge.
It took until 1994 for the Achuar to agree to a deal with Canodros; this will give their community eventual outright ownership of the lodge by 2011. Meanwhile, Kapawi pays the Achuar £1,400 a month and instructs them in the finer points of running a hotel. The plan is ambitious, but worthy.
We joined a Heart of Dark-ness-style expedition by propeller plane from Quito, landing or a mud airstrip, before making a one-hour journey down-river to the lodge by motorized dugout canoe. We saw groups of sunbathing turtles, the flash of neon green parrots, huge cobalt butterflies — and, yes, we can now say we have seen swallows in the Amazon.
I'm no lover of voyeuristic tourism, but for many visitors the highlight was a visit to an Achuar village. Here we learnt that these shy jungle dwellers had virtually no contact with the outside world until the late 1960s, when missionaries began establishing contact with them. Until then they were naked polygamous hunters, frequently killing each other in fights over hunting rights, of women.
Trough an interpreter we asked Guido, one of the village ciders, if his life was truly better for Christianity, T-shirts and tourists with greenbacks. He kicked at the dust with his western travelers' sandals and answered shyly, that yes, it was better because the killing had stopped.
Next morning, one of our group said he bad returned to his room to find his pajamas laid out neatly on the bed, with towels stuffed in the limbs. In the half light he thought his room was occupied.
A harmless prank? An Achuar curse? No one knew. But if you had the choice between running around naked in the jungle, and stuffing a towel up the pajama leg of a lawyer 'from Fulham, which would you choose?