Travels with Charlie Horse, Galapagos, September, 2004

This is the only travel story I have been able to recover from email prior to 2007. This particular story occurred near the end of my year traveling through South America. I had no actual desire to visit the Galápagos Islands but decided to on my father’s behalf. He taught biology and said it had been his dream to one day go there. Sorry, Dad, I did my best…

September, 2004

Under the counsel of my Lonely Planet travel guide, I buy a flight directly to the port of Santa Cruz in the Galapagos without booking a tour of the islands. The guide insists that it will be much cheaper to find a last-minute deal on a boat that is short a passenger. Upon arrival, however, I discover that nearly everyone here is carrying the same travel guide with the same advice, and all boats are either in maintenance or completely booked and I waste three days trying to find something. A group of Israeli college students, in the same boat as I (or, rather, not in the same boat as I) try to convince me to make the most of the situation and join them scuba diving. I was only certified nine months prior in Panama haven’t dived since. “I heard dive sites here are very advanced and I´m very, very much a beginner,” I argue. They assure me that it’s all very easy, and, plus, “if you join, they’ll give you a great discount.”

“Don’t worry, be happy,” the smiling Ecuadorean divemaster with tobacco-stained teeth assures me later that evening, as he holds my $100 bill up to the light to make sure it’s not a counterfeit.

“I will give you a private safety dive before the real dive,” he promises as he asks me to try on the rental mask, wetsuit, snorkel and fins.

The next morning, after a two-hour rocky boat-ride to the dive sight, the divemaster suddenly orders us all overboard. “But what about my safety-dive?” I ask as I frantically fish through the collection of masks, fins, and snorkels at my feet to find the ones I had earlier spent so long picking out. I’m sitting at the edge of the boat with my, or at least someone’s, equipment on, trying to remember everything from my dive class taken nine months earlier but remembering nothing. I recall that I was supposed to have a “dive buddy,” but everyone except me and the “Capitan” is now in the water. Drawing on memories of the Jacques Cousteau episodes I saw as a kid, I press my mask to my face and fall backwards over the side of the boat. Next thing I know, I’m descending quickly, much too quickly, and my mask is filling up with water. I can’t see and I have no memory of what Jacques Cousteau did next. Heart racing, I finally find the button to inflate my vest, which I was supposed to do before I had entered the water, and so I do, shooting up to the surface. There, I decide to abort and swim to the boat, but the boat is now nowhere to be seen and I’m in four-foot swells and only five meters from some very jagged rocks; an area even the sea lions find inhospitable. The divemaster (I assume anyway as he is under water by this time and out-of-sight) starts pulling me down by my fins. I kick him away with all the force I can muster.

“Mi mascara no me cabe!” I exclaim in broken Spanish when he emerges next to me with a scowl on his face. “Regreso al barco!” I insist. Instead of helping to wave down the boat though, he simply exchanges masks with me and gives me a thumbs down sign, which, in retrospect, seems the perfect hand gesture for the situation. I press the other button on the device to deflate my vest and begin to descend again. This time I have better luck. The mask fits and I start to calm down.

“I am so fortunate to be here, diving in the world-famous Galapagos islands,” I remind myself.

“Safety check,” I remember dive instructor saying nine months ago, so I start by checking my air gage, which I manage to find after a few underwater yoga maneuvers. Only three minutes into my dive, the panic I thought I had conquered returns with force. The gage shows I’m in the red zone. I can’t recall from my dive classes how much air that means I have left, but I’m certain that red is not a color you want the gage to show when you’re only three minutes into your dive. Not remembering the hand-signs for “low oxygen” or, “I’m about to suffocate and die,” I desperately swim to each of the other divers and point to my gage. No one seems to understand what I’m trying to communicate. Finally, I locate the divemaster and, realizing my plight, immediately hands me his spare mouthpiece. I stick it in my mouth, swallowing what seems like a gallon of saltwater in the process and suck the air through the tank of the man that I’m now straddling, like a baby chimp clinging to its mother. I proceed to hold onto his back for the rest of the dive, seeing nothing but his black neck hairs, which appear giant through my mask. Once safely back on board, everyone is surly with me. One guy is bleeding from a gash on his forehead, due, he claims, to me falling backwards off the boat onto his head. Everyone else is just upset that their dive was cut short thanks to my oxygen problem, which they all insist was my fault. “I was supposed to have a safety dive,” I mumble sheepishly in my defense.

The next day, things start looking up. I haven’t contracted the bends and I learn that space is available on a cruise through the islands, which I buy immediately and then arrive to the port on time only to wait six hours for the dinghy to come to shore to retrieve me. Once on board, all is good... a fun crowd, a nice crew, a hot dinner—yes, things are definitely looking up. The boat is to embark later in the night so, after dinner, I grab the top bunk bed in one of the cabins and drift off to sleep, excited to awake the next morning next to a new uninhabited island, just like Charles Darwin must have done nearly two centuries earlier. Just after dawn, I look down from my bunk to see that three others have entered my already crowded cabin with only four occupied beds. Someone’s heavy backpack is thrown on top of my knees, fully awaking me. I throw on a pair of shorts and exit the cabin. When I look out over the deck onto the ocean, I realize the collection of nearby boats look identical to the evening before. I hear a lot of commotion and yelling near the kitchen and so I go to investigate. I soon learn that spaces on the boat have been oversold and we are dangerously over-capacity and that the port police are refusing to allow us to leave Santa Cruz harbor until at least ten of us vacate the small ship. There are no volunteers as all of us have paid in cash and no one is being offered a refund. Furthermore, each of us has been waiting days, if not weeks, for a tour of the islands.

The standoff continues for another three days. We become confident enough that that the boat is not going anywhere that we begin to spend the hot afternoons on the deck helping ourselves to the beer and food we have found in the industrial fridge. We dive into the cool clear water as we watch the blue-footed boobies do the same. Evenings are passed watching VHS National Geographic videos of the archipelago, learning about all the wildlife that we are so close, and yet so far, from seeing. On day four, after learning that each of us has been sold a totally unique and different itinerary and after discovering our beer supply is depleted, I, a guy who I learn was in the Israeli military, a sixty-year-old Ecuadorean woman and two other mutineers waive down

a passing boat, escape to shore, hitchhike to town in the back of a pickup truck, and march to the ship owner’s house. Three of us knock on the front door, but to no avail. The Ecuadorean woman tries to knock down the door with a two-by-four while my new Israeli friend climbs onto the roof to try to break into the second-floor window. Finally, the police arrive and I explain what is going on. They are apparently well aware of the owner’s business shenanigans, and they haul her off to jail (or so we are told) and the next day we find a lawyer to present our case to the Department of Tourism. By the afternoon, we learn that she will be returning everyone’s money. We triumphantly return to the boat to inform the others and retrieve our belongings.

A few fellow passengers and I, now bosom buddies after our four days on a small and crowded yacht, are committed to make the most of a bad situation and learn that there is an island nearby that one can visit without needing to be on a tour. We book a seat on a small twenty-person “panga” and are so humbled by kindness of the locals who all insist that we gringos sit at the front of the boat. We smile politely and thank them for their generosity. Less than thirty minutes into the four-hour ride, we realize that the front of the boat is the part that rocks violently with each wave and the part that gets inundated with the saltwater spray and the rogue and not-so-rogue wave. Luggage and person soaked and cold, I was initially thrilled when we finally saw the island’s shoreline only to be reminded of the fact that most shipwrecks occur not deep in the ocean, but crossing coral reefs close to shore. Three separate times, the captain makes a run for the pier over the shallow reef, only to have to turn around and smash through the oncoming waves. Finally, we make it to the town’s dock, each of us kissing the ground after disembarking with our soaked belongings.

The owner of the hostel kindly loaned us some dry clothes and after a tepid shower and dinner, I return to my private room and jump into bed, anxious to warm up and drift off to sleep. A knock on the door ensues and the owner of the hostel yells through the door, “All of your amigos are going to rent horses tomorrow and go up to a volcano. You will come?” I hesitate. After a brief horseback ride as a Boy Scout and the three days of saddle sores that ensued, I had sworn never to use another animal for transportation, but I don’t want to feel left out, so I ask him, “Are they safe?” “Oh, si!” he replies, “very transquilos. Casi burros!” “And only $50 with discount!” he adds.

“Ok,” I say with resignation and dread, “I’ll join.”

The following morning, we pile into a van and drive to the stables, although “stables” seems a bit of a stretch of the word. The horses are tied to a couple posts and look horribly malnourished and covered in burrs. The owner of the horses, who appears in only slightly better condition, shows me how to mount the horse using the nylon ropes that serve as stirrups. My emaciated horse is named, “Charlie” (after “Charles” Darwin, I wonder?) We start on a gradual uphill and, for a short while, all is good. I am thinking, proudly, "I’m riding a horse! I, Doug Liden, am riding a horse! Yes, my back and butt hurt a bit, but I only have a half hour until I reach the top of this volcano, and yes, I´M ACTUALLY RIDING A HORSE!"

Perhaps the horse was sensing my enthusiasm or perhaps it was simply enjoying the short downhill interlude, but it decides to break into a jog. "NO, Charlie, whooaa, shhhh, horsy" I insist as I gently pull back on the reins, which are just two old nylon ropes, just as I have been taught twenty minutes earlier. Somehow though, the horse gets my signals confused and starts cantering faster and faster until it is in a full gallop as swift as Sea Biscuit. I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to, and of course I want to and I try to, God knows I try to, but the horse ignores my pleas in both English and Spanish. Perhaps considering me dead weight, it throws me off its saddle, which is really just a large plastic bag covering a bit of hay, presumably added for padding. I hit the ground and am dragged for another thirty feet before the plastic bag slides off him and he is free. “I have a broken back!” I yell from the side of the path as the other riders saunter by. Once they discover that I meant I had broken my back more than a decade ago, continue on. My body aches and bleeds as I descend, alone and on my own two feet, for the next ten kilometers.

“$60,” the owner says when I finally return to the stable. “No discount,” he clarifies. “Horse return, no saddle.”

I was hoping this trip to the Galapagos would teach me about natural selection, evolution, survival of the fittest, etc., but not exactly in this way.