Mindo Madness, Part 2

I took almost 900 photos this weekend, probably about half of them of hummingbirds. Here's the highlights.

First of all, the first thing I saw upon entering Mindo was this ridiculously adorable puppy.

There are maybe 24 hummingbird species that frequent Mindo, and just about every restaurant and hostelería has feeders set up to delight visiting clientele. I spent an embarrassing amount of SD card space on them over the course of the weekend...

I also went to a butterfly garden, where unlike in the States, visitors are encouraged to pick up butterflies and let them lick banana bits off our hands.

Pretty flowers!

I also took a "chocolate tour" the same day, the main focus of which was the demonstration of the by-hand chocolate making process, which involves roasting and shucking chocolate beans, grinding them into a paste, and then cooking the paste in water with some added vanilla paste. We got to taste 100% cacao chocolate (bitter as coffee) as well as the stuff we saw get made, which ended up with a fondue-like consistency, and with only two ingredients (chocolate, vanilla), was surprisingly sweet and tasty.

In Mindo, I stayed at a place called La Roulotte, whose special feature is that guests stay in "gypsy caravans," three renovated wagons that are styled to resemble a rustic but very attractive caravan set. The grounds are also lovely (although the two ponds give them a large mosquito/sandfly population) and the owner (my host mother's cousin) and two staff members always went out of their way to see that I was well-fed. Also, I got bacon here.

Yesterday, I took the main local tarabita across a large gorge to some trails which led down to a series of waterfalls.

Hiking around them was great fun, and after the nearest couple, there weren't many people on the path, which really let me enjoy the area. During my return, clouds had surrounding the higher areas at the top of the trail and the tarabita was completely swathed in mist.

Tarabita view on the way over:

(Yeah, that guy's just hanging off the back, no big deal.)

Tarabita view on the way back:

After the tarabita, I hiked a little over 2 km out to a very rustic lodge to inquire about a lek of Gallos de la Peña (Andean Cock-of-the-Rock) that occurs daily there. Mindo is famous for its multitudes of exotic birds, but the Gallo de la Peña is particularly famous and sort of a town mascot. The British couple who are taking care of the lek reserve for a six month stint gave me the details, and I was up at 3:45 this morning to take a 4:30 cab, hike an hour in darkness and about half an hour more in the pre-dawn light, and be at the lekking site for the 6 AM excitement. Here's some shots of the fellows:

Honestly, I think these guys are just about the cutest little suckers ever. Curious, adorable, enigmatic; I love them. They make sort of a squawking call and bob their front halves up and down in a funky lekking dance. Unfortunately, I don't think they attracted any females today, but they certainly did charm me! Also, the one on the bottom has bands on its legs because there is a lot of research being done on this population and it has been mist-netted as part of a study.

Watching the lek and trying to get photos today really gave me a new respect for nature photographers. It was pretty tough to get clear shots of the birds, and I had to set all of my camera settings manually. I'm sure it's a little easier with a pro-quality, longer lens (and the photography skills to match, which I definitely don't have yet), but doing this sort of thing full time would be a challenging job. Nevertheless, at the end of the hour-or-so of prime lekking, I headed back feeling like I had just gotten a taste of David Attenborough's life... Incredible!

Mindo Madness

Well, with not enough time left in the semester to really justify a ticket back to the Galapagos, I've been landed with a week to kill on the mainland. And since I've sort of been-there-done Quito, I figured I ought to visit some more exotic Ecuadorian locales, like, say, Mindo. My host mother has a cousin who owns an hosteleria here, and miraculously enough, he was leaving Quito to go back to it this morning so I was able to snag a free ride *and* get a discounted room here.

We left Quito around 7 and got into Mindo around 10 AM, having stopped on the way at an awesome restaurant called El Armadillo. Didn't see any armadillos there, but there *were* flocks upon flocks of hummingbirds. We sat down for coffee and there were dozens of them flying all around us--the air was thick with the sound of their beating wings! Unfortunately, I can't post photos now because I didn't bring my laptop, but I'll put up a photo post when I get back on Monday.

Upon getting to Mindo and working out the terms of my room rental, I was set loose on the town and immediately went to explore the trails on the grounds of the hosteleria. As it turns out, the mosquitos here are the size of small helicopters, everywhere, and really, really aggressive. Whenever I would stop to take a photo, I would be mobbed by them. There are also these itty bitty bloodsucking flies that leave welts and little blood blisters when they bite, and they definitely bit the crap out of me today. Honestly, I think I'm going to be lucky if I haven't died of bloodloss by the time I get out of here... So far I've gotten dozens of bites all up and down my arms and huge welts all over the place. I never had problems like this at the nearby Maquipucuna!

Other than censusing the local vampire population, today I also went to a butterfly garden and hiked down to the end of the road, where there were some hand-operated tarabitas (although apparently without anyone to actually operate them) and some more hostels. I also took about a thousand photos of the local flora, explored the town, investigated birdwatching prices, saw the traditional/by-hand chocolate making process, walked home along a road lit only by the moon and fireflies, and hunted for frogs on the grounds of my hostel. Seriously, Mindo is an awesome place. I love little towns surrounded by mountains and it is safe as well as charming (see bit about walking home alone on an unlit road).

More tomorrow; for now, I'm off to go hunt down more frogs!

The News From Quito!

The San Cristobal airport. So glad I didn't ask which gate to go to. That would have been awkward.

 
Guys, I've had a great two days. The plane flight to Quito was loads of fun. For starters, we got fed THREE TIMES, beginning with a full meal on the way out of Galapagos. I can't believe we get Full Meals on two hour flights in Ecuador! Definitely not something that happens in the States... The last time I got a full meal on a plane was on a 9-hour flight to Japan (not counting the plane into Galapagos)! Then on the flight from Guayaquil to Quito, they gave us little mini-empanadas!

So cute! They were filled with tuna, though, so not your ideal empanada flavor, but whatever. And then when we got off the plane in Quito, we got even more food--granola bars with peanuts and raisins. Wow! THREE TIMES we got fed on that plane trip! Also, the trip itself was nice and smooth, not bumpy coming into Quito like last time. Even better were the views of the mountains as we came in--there were almost no clouds, just a few low ones, and we were able to see several very snowy peaks coming in. Apparently it's quite uncommon to see them all unshrouded like this, especially Cotopaxi, so we were quite lucky!

Cotopaxi:

Cayambe:

Among others.

We also got a great view of the Quito smog layer, which extends all the way to Cotopaxi. Ew.

I added lines at left and right to make it more visible, but I think it's probably fine without them. It was way thicker right over the city too.

I was also excited to see the new Mariscal Sucre Airport. It's way bigger and way more sleek and modern than the old airport was, smells nice, feels like a modern airport, views coming in were way better... I thought it was really a big improvement. Yes it's way out of town, which is probably a huge pain and expense for tourists, although there is an interesting new boom of hostels springing up around it, in amongst the ramshackle houses that make up the edge of town. And I'm sure Quito could have done better things with the money than fix a not-broken airport. But I still thought it was a lovely place to arrive into. Driving into town, I reflected on how everyone had told me before going to Galapagos that the new airport was going to cause all kinds of traffic problems because the road infrastructure to serve it hadn't been put into place yet. We were moving pretty fast and I had just decided that the infrastructure business wasn't a big deal when we stop at a stoplight and my host father (who picked me up) starts telling me how poorly thought out the road situation was in regards to the airport. As it turned out, we went about 0.1 km further before crossing a bridge with only one lane in either direction. Hmm... I guess we just got lucky with the number of cars on the road today, then. Fortunately, they are apparently building a better access way into Quito.

Also, this car trip marked the third time that I can recall having a conversation entirely in Spanish that lasted over an hour. The first one was with the GAIAS security guard (during which time I discovered that he's a 9/11 truther, of all things) and the second was with the owner of the DVD shop on the malecon. Today, I also had a decently long conversation with JuanCa, IES Quito's mildly eccentric guardian of students and sometimes-bodyguard for the rest of the staff there (or at least Eduardo), while he was showing me how to take the bus from Quito back to the valley. He informed me that of all the places in the world, he wants to travel to Germany because they have the best metal bands there.

I was told that the family didn't have a car, but they actually do. Actually, they have several, which is nice. My new host father used to work with the petroleum industry (he's a specialist in the economics of energy), but I guess something about the Correa administration caused a lot of layoffs (I missed the exact detail in Spanish) so now he's working as an economics professor at a technical university in Quito, and I get the impression that they don't have that much money left. But even though he left the oil business two years back, the family still has a really nice, modern house. His wife is an interior designer who is also serious about painting and she designed the interior and has painted most of the artwork that hangs in it. Half the house has two stories and half three, with the staircase in the middle so that when you walk up it, it feels like there are five floors, plus the basement. Most of the rooms have walls (and/or ceilings) with a variety of colors, and mine has a series of concentric angles raised out of the slanted ceiling.

 
My floor is imitation wood paneling, which, despite its artificiality, is a refreshing change from the tile/linoleum that I've found on the floor of every other room in every other Ecuadorian house. I mean, it's still sort of a form of linoleum, but at least it doesn't look like it. I have no idea why Ecuador likes tile so much, but it is essentially the only indoor flooring material here and used liberally in the walls (indoor and outdoor) and outdoor walkways as well, without regard for slipperiness when wet. There is a set of tiles out front of a store in between my house in San Cristobal and the hospital/Kicker Rock restaurant area that are literally so slick that I slide on them in my tennis shoes even when they are completely dry. I would say How can people possibly let this hazard exist? but then I think back to all the times since coming to this country that I've almost fallen into one of the large, unmarked utility pits that are frequently open in the sidewalk...

My new host family has three children, only one of which is still at home. He recently had to switch from USFQ to a cheaper (but far worse) university in Quito, where he is finishing his degrees in architecture and law. He also loves to paint and write music, although he's having trouble finding anyone in Ecuador interested in promoting it, since his lyrics tend to focus on his liberal ideologies rather than on more marketable romantic themes. He speaks English fluently, although like most Ecuadorians he spends a substantial amount of time commenting on how terrible he is at the language, and we talked extensively over our dinner of peanut meal balls with sweet and sour sauce (apparently a trademark food of Ecuador's coastal region) tonight. He's concerned about the apparent recent use in America of 3D printers to print plastic weapons. Of the other two kids, the daughter finished a degree in interior design and is living in Peru and the other son is studying economics at a British university in Prague, which amazingly enough is still cheaper than USFQ, Ecuador's most expensive university at $7000/semester. Overall, the family members I've met are all really awesome and way easier to communicate with, even in Spanish, than my host family in the Galapagos, and I'm really excited to be living with them.

They also have the biggest golden retriever I've ever seen, a beast named Lazarlo who is roughly the size of a mountain lion. Last night, he decided he liked me and would therefore demand my attention at all times, both by nudging me incessantly for pets and by trying to hump my legs while I walked around the kitchen.

Size comparison. His head is bigger than mine.

I also found this new interesting thing in the kitchen last night... Every single egg is marked with the company name and the expiration date (which is the same for every egg in the carton).

I asked my host mother why they bothered marking every egg instead of just the carton and she suggested that it might be a marketing technique.

This morning, I managed to forget the time zone change and left late to meet Eduardo, who was taking me to my doctor's appointment. I also forgot the treatment history form that the doctor in San Cristobal gave me as I flew out the door, so we had to run back to the house for that too. All told, we left about twenty minutes after our intended departure time of 9:00. From Cumbaya in the valley, it's a half hour car ride to Quito, but there's always traffic, so we'd left well in advance of the 10:20 appointment and still had an hour to get there. Eduardo is one of the safer drivers in Quito, which is probably why he's allowed to drive students around, but that still meant that we went slower than I anticipated and since I'm still well adjusted to Quito's frantic vehicular mayhem, I found myself silently thinking "Why are we stopping at a yellow light? Yellow in Quito means 'Speed up, you can make it!'" and "Why didn't we just muscle into that brief gap in the cars? Our car was bigger than theirs and now we'll have to wait for like five minutes to get another!"

We ended up getting to the hospital zone around 10:20, at which point Eduardo called to say we'd be five to ten minutes late. Then we spent another 25 minutes looking for the clinic building and, that done, a parking space. I figured we'd have been allotted a half hour for the appointment and that they'd probably have just canceled it by then, but 'Ecuadorian time' came to the rescue again and the bored receptionist simply told us that the doctor had just arrived. We turned around to see him throwing on his white coat and were ushered right into his office.

Naturally, he spoke perfect English and my concerns about translation were entirely unjustified. He let me give a brief description of the problems and then looked in my ears. It took him about a second of looking in the right one to exclaim at the vast quantities of wax within and move me over to another table with equipment that could be used to remove it. I've never had my ears suctioned out before, and it was an interesting if slightly painful experience. That done, he assured me that he didn't see anything at all related to a cholesteatoma (which is what the doctor in the Galapagos said I had), and even whipped out a thesis he'd written on the subject in Switzerland a while back to prove that he actually knew what he was talking about. We did some more tests of my hearing, including a tuning fork test and a standard decibel threshold test in a room that wasn't anywhere near as soundproof as it should have been. Afterwards I pestered him about all the other symptoms the doctors in the Galapagos had said they'd seen and he insisted he didn't see any of them. He stuck a camera stick in my ear to attempt to prove it to me, but he'd been using hydrogen peroxide while cleaning the wax out and all my ear canal really looked like to me was a mushy foam. (It was also really hairy.)

At the end of the exam, he decided that all my problems were probably caused by having too much wax mashed into the little corners where the eardrum joins to the ear canal and that the Galapagueña doctor had misinterpreted some of it as a symptom of cholesteatoma. I was a little dubious that such a seemingly innocent thing could cause all the symptoms I've been having, so he gave me some antibiotic drops to use for now in case there's still some residual infection and told me to come back in five days so we can make sure nothing else is amiss. Despite my doubts and some lingering twinges of pain, though, I will admit that over the course of an hour or two after the appointment, my hearing returned to normal and the feeling of pressure I'd been experiencing subsided. So yay for that. I'm a little sad that I left the Galapagos early now, though, since I was looking forward to attempting a trip to Floreana and some artisanal fishing this weekend. But I guess peace of mind is worth something, especially for someone as hyperreactive and paranoid as me.

I also discovered that the hospital I went to is right near the teleférico, on the slopes of Pichincha, which is one of the big things that I didn't get to when I was in Quito the first time. My plan is to get Eduardo to drop me off there after my follow-up appointment on Tuesday so I can see the sights, and then wander down the verdant park boulevard that is Avenida Mariana de Jesus towards the IES center and catch a bus home again after exploring Quito a little more. Also, now that my surgical calamity has been averted, I figure I shouldn't waste time lounging around in Quito and I don't want to be too much of a burden to my host family, who weren't really planning on having another student around for at least another week and a half anyway, so I'm going to try to go so some other places in Ecuador that I didn't make the first time around. I'm hoping to leave for Mindo Saturday and return Monday evening, and I'm considering trying to make a trip to Quilotoa next week.

While we were walking to and from the clinic this morning, we were solicited by a number of indigenous women with baskets of fresh fruit for sale. Pears; clementine oranges; luscious, juicy strawberries... I wanted some really badly, having been fruit deprived in the Galapagos for the last three months, but Eduardo insisted that I was not to buy food off the street. Fortunately, later, when I got back to Cumbaya, I went to the new mall that opened right across from the university and found a waffle stand where I got a waffle with chocolate sauce and tons of strawberries for $2.50! Also, my host father wasn't kidding when he said that they'd build a skywalk between the university and the mall to promote after-school shopping! Ah well, capitalism at its finest!

All in all, I have to say, even though the Galapagos was a really great place, there's just something I love about Quito. I've been tremendously excited to be back here. The weather these past few days has been gorgeous and coming down the hill from the hospital, we could see all of the snowcapped peaks surrounding the city with no clouds whatsoever. There may be a smog layer, but the mountains are beautiful above it and something about the bustle of the city just charms me! I'm really happy being back here.

Early departure

Well, I've been having problems with my ears for the past month and a little more, so I'm leaving the Galapagos Islands tomorrow, a little over a week early, to see a specialist in Quito. I'm definitely sad to leave the islands, particularly since I wasn't able to make it to Floreana, the fourth (and smallest) inhabited island, and the one with the most awesome post office. But I need to get my ear looked at and figured out, so I'll accept defeat on this one. I'm also not really looking forward to returning to Quito anymore, since I have been looking forward to seeing my beloved Quito host family again since arriving in the Galapagos, but they are apparently unable to host me any further, which is perhaps the biggest disappointment of the trip for me. As for this blog, I have a lot more to say about the Galapagos and will try to post more if I have easy internet access in Quito. For now, have this:

In a country where you can't drink the tap water, how do you get your fluoride? Well, you put it in the salt with the iodine, of course! I wish I'd thought to take a photo of the awesome salt bag I have stashed in my room to put on here... By the way, the word for "iodized" is "yodada." Makes me think of Yoda!

Power Outages in the Galapagos

Short power outages are not terribly uncommon here--we get them maybe every couple of weeks--and we had one this morning which got me to thinking about them and delayed my leaving the house for a while. The trouble with power outages isn't so much the lack of lights, it's the fact that they take the water supply with them, even though we've had plenty of rain recently. Our water is stored in a giant underground cistern and pumped to shower level by an electric pump, so whenever the power's gone, the showers are gone.

Probably unrelatedly, the post office was closed today, although I've mailed things on Saturdays before. Across the street, however, was a children's event. I see these every so often on the malecon, little storytelling circles that attract a lot of locals. This time, there were paintings and cartoons hanging up to dry, and a puppet show was taking place when I walked up. The theme of the event seemed to focus on conservation and some of the unique species of the Galapagos and mainland Ecuador, which is nice to see, especially since a lot of people agree that one of the main problems in the Galapagos right now is the lack of education about just how special the area where the residents live is. Many conservationists are hoping that by making children aware of the value of the nature around them, they will be more likely to engage in sustainable activities, instead of trying to get rich quick off of tourism or fishing, so I was glad to see the event.

Long Time, No Blog

So, having not posted for almost two months now, it's high time I get back into things.

I suppose I should try to do at least a little recap over what's happened over the past month and a half, since there hasn't been that much of excitement happening recently. The main two consuming tasks that I've been dealing with since my last post have been searching for jobs, and getting my housing sorted out for next year (what a nightmare). I spent the entirety of March frantically applying to any remotely interesting job I could find, panicking that I would have nothing to show for my most internship-able summer in college and worse, nothing to show to the people who spent so much time writing me recommendations this year.

Through some miracle, my efforts paid off recently with an offer for a position in Panama! I'm tremendously excited because it's an interesting job with a really successful and famous PI and I'm hoping that I will be able to both develop scientifically (I'm going to ask about doing my own project on the side) and get some guidance in terms of future career options. The main focus of the internship, though, is with these itty bitty frogs, called túngaras, and their mating calls, which vary in complexity and have the unfortunate effect of attracting both more females and more predatory bats as the complexity increases. Here's a photo I found on the internet:

The photo makes it look gigantic, but apparently they're about thumb-sized. My job is going to be to go out every night, track down as many of the little suckers I can find, bring them back to the lab, and do experiments with the females which basically involve playing two different male calls from speakers on opposite ends of a room and seeing which ones they prefer.

I've also had some more challenging classes recently. Our first class was a basic introduction to evolution, ecology, and the Galapagos Islands, and I knew most of the material already. Our second class in the islands was a phylogenetics class, which I had been wildly excited for because I've been really wanting to learn how to do more phylo work. Unfortunately, any class for which twenty people have to download a dozen programs on USFQ's maddeningly slow internet and then use them all successfully with no prior experience is bound to be riddled with technical difficulties and we spent most of the first two (out of three) weeks just trying to get enough of the programs working on everybody's computer that we could do the project at all. Still, despite the time crunch at the end which came from my getting almost nothing done the first two weeks, it was an interesting class and I enjoyed getting experience with more programs. Our professor from that class has the distinction of being in David Attenborough's most recent special on the Galapagos, where he is shown doing some work on a finch population which appeared to be on the brink of speciating into two new species with differing beak shapes but has been rehomogenized by the recent surge of available human food, which apparently can be consumed with any style of beak. That set me to having fantasies of meeting David Attenborough walking down the Malecon (waterfront) that still linger...

The class after that was called Evolution, Medicine, and Health. The first two weeks were fairly dull, with classes consisting of outdated films and line-by-line student presentation rehashes of the day's assigned reading followed by a little discussion. We did get to watch the film Powaqqatsi, though, which features images of people and societies around the world but more importantly, is set to the music of Philip Glass, whom I have a certain affection for. The best part is the opening series of images, featuring miners in the now-defunct Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil carrying bags of dirt uphill by hand. The sheer number of human bodies present in the images, and the history of the mine itself, are fascinating and I definitely encourage everyone to check them out. (After that the film is still powerful, but just not to the same degree.)

For the third week of that class, we returned to Santa Cruz (our first visit was during our spring break island hopping tour) and got a new professor, actually the co-director of GAIAS and currently teaching our last class here as well. In Santa Cruz, we spent an afternoon at the Charles Darwin Research Station, listening to some lectures about conservation activities and other research in the Islands. I poked around the center during our breaks and found a research garden and a "laboratory" that was really just an unwalled, open air room with racks of animal skulls and tortoise shells all over the place and a giant whale skull on the floor. Other people managed to find the tortoise and land iguana pens. I was disappointed that we didn't get an actual tour, especially since we haven't had a chance to see land iguanas anywhere else. I got a photo of the lab, but my SD card reader bit the dust a couple weeks ago, so I need to hunt down the connector cable that came with my little camera before I can upload any more photos.

Anyway, now we're into our last class, which is called Human Ecology and Maritime Communities. Our professor is Diego Quiroga, the aforementioned co-director of GAIAS and one-time Olympic competitor (Swimming, Moscow, 1980), and he's by far the best professor we've had in the Galapagos, in terms of lecturing ability and desire and ability to provoke discussions. In my opinion, his facial features also bear a striking resemblance to those of a marine iguana. The class is very philosophy-based (filled with -isms, as the former student who lives in one of the apartments in the rear attachment of my house pointed out), and we're talking about really debatable, theoretical points, like how best to model the history of the Galapagos in terms of hypothetical cyclical patterns. Unfortunately, though I respect Diego's skill and enthusiasm for the topics, I am completely uninterested in the material. The class also involves 50+ pages of reading per night in the form of two gigantic papers.

The highlight of the class is the book that we're reading on top of the other papers. It's called Evolution at the Crossroads, and it's fascinating. I burned through the first 86 pages tonight and will probably finish it over the weekend. It offers a loving but somewhat unsettling look at the Galapagos today and is honestly the best book I've found if you want to understand the current state of the islands. I'll bring my copy back to Rochester if anyone wants to read it and I'll try to give it a more thorough review once I've finished with it. We also have to do a research paper, because two tests, the book, and all the readings definitely aren't enough to fill our days. I decided to survey tourists on the Malecon about their motivations for coming to the Galapagos, with the hypothesis that since its original opening as a tourist destination, the islands have shifted from being more of a destination for scientific, naturalistic inquiry to one of recreation.

To be perfectly honest, that was actually one of my biggest misconceptions about the Galapagos before I came here. I genuinely thought we would get here and all the other tourists/foreigners here would just be a bunch of biologists nerding out about walking in Darwin's footsteps and whatnot. I had no idea that it was actually a huge surf spot and there are people who just come here to hit the beaches. Walking around the Malecon, it feels a lot more Miami Beach and a lot less Field Camp... Regardless, I'm actually getting pretty excited about the survey I'm making for the paper, which is weird, because I'm sure once I'm stuck writing up the full ten pages on the 2-hr flight to Guayaquil I'll start to resent it a little more.

That's about all I've got in terms of academics for now. We also went on Spring Break in the interim, but that story deserves its own post. The other long-term, time consuming thing I've been dealing with is an ear infection that I've had since spring break. Apparently they're pretty common here because the water is fairly unclean. Unfortunately, since it's the water that's the problem, I've been told to stay away from the beach until the infection is gone and I've been dry for a month now, since the infection is apparently antibiotic-resistant or something, and I've just been on stronger and stronger antibiotics with the hope that something will get it. The current medication seems to be having a decent impact on it, though, although we'll see tomorrow when I hit the hospital for another check with the lovely (and English-speaking) doctora there! And hey, because this isn't the US, the government pays for a substantial amount of medication, meaning that my treatment has been mostly free! The only thing I regret about it is that it's prevented me from finishing my scuba diving certification and going snorkeling. I'd sort of been rationing the snorkeling spots here, putting off going to some of them so that I'd still have new places to explore throughout the semester. But now it looks like I won't be able to get to one or two of the ones I really wanted to see... Oh well.

To do list for tomorrow:
1. Go to the hospital to see if my ear is better.
2. Mail packages to my recommenders. I bought them each a magnet, a mug, and hot chocolate or Galapagos coffee, for a total of $15 each. Unfortunately, postage out of the Galapagos will probably be at least twice that, which is something I probably should have thought about before getting them so much stuff.
3. Make inquiries about how to travel to Floreana, since apparently my super clever idea of going for free in one of my family's tiny boats is not going to pan out.