Our month in Galapagos can be described as a month in the rainforest/jungle, with a few three-day breaks of island tours.
Stef explained this dichotomy really well in her post Galapagos: Beauty and the Beasts (note that I´m riffing on her use of Beauty and Beasts…)
We spent four weeks (four- and five-day weeks) working on a farm in the San Cristobal highlands. While there, we:
- cut down blackberry bushes and small trees (with machetes), large trees (with a chainsaw)
- built a 50-foot wooden walking path
- built a set of stairs
- cleaned 40 pairs of rubber “Wellington” walking boots
- dug a bunch of deep post holes (without a post-hole digger)
- pulled a couple of hundred oranges off of trees
- squeezed those oranges to make juice
- were bitten by several thousand mosquitos
- spent all of our time walking around in hideously uncomfortable rubber Wellington boots, covered in bugspray
We learned a lot, had some real fun, met some really cool people (Ceasar, Hernan, and the Socken family for starters), and walked around in a LOT of mud. These photos are of that side of the Galapagos. If you want to see the pure beauty of the Galapagos, check out our posts on the islands and on the animals. You’ll see roasting pigs, bonfires, crazy showers and sinks. Of course there is lots of mud! And you’ll see the Huntsman spider (the size of your hand) who adopted us and guarded our bedpost every night – at least, that’s what we chose to believe…
See what I mean by the pictures…
