The Galápagos Islands of Ecuador were my first international travel experience at the impressionable age of 19. Feeling stuck and discontent in the Ivory Tower, and with a burning itch to see what else was out there, I headed to the Galápagos as a volunteer ESL teacher with the program WorldTeach the summer after my sophomore year of college. During those couple of months, my eyes, my whole self, widened in so many ways. On the island of San Cristóbal, I met my first boyfriend, and also had my first exposure to partner dancing, which has now become a big part of my life. Several years later, in 2005, I returned to the Islands to do a documentary project on that former boyfriend, who’d fascinated me with his stories of growing up in an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon Jungle, and that turned into my first book, an ethnographic memoir.
This year, 22 years after my first visit to the Islands, I decided to return again, now in a very different life context, with my 9 ½ year old, animal-loving daughter. I was excited to share with her a place that had so captured my imagination, and sparked a life-long interest in other ways of life, including two tours as a Peace Corps volunteer. Back then, at age 19 and then in my early 20s, the Galápagos seemed home to an ideally simple lifestyle for its human inhabitants. People like my boyfriend Fredy hadn’t even heard of Harvard, the school I was attending at the time and that, along with the all-consuming struggle to gain admission to it or a college like it, had been such a big part of my teenage years and my young adult identity.
The way Fredy described life on his island back in 2001, if you were hungry, you could go up to the highlands and pick bananas or oranges, or go out fishing. Besides other food, a few clothes, and beer, he paid for just rent in a small room with a lightbulb above his head, so didn’t need to work for more than part of the year. Outside of my teaching duties, I spent a lot of time with him that summer, as well as with my host sister, Nancy, who was 15 at the time and keen to introduce me to snorkeling spots, including at the beach across from her family’s small house, and dance with me.
Arriving on San Cristóbal with my daughter June in early 2023, it was mesmerizing just walking on the boardwalk and watching the abundant sea lions, red crabs, and iguanas. It was great to see Fredy again, too, though he is more occupied now, married to another gringa from Tennessee, and to rediscover the fruit milkshake called a batido that I’d had every day with grilled cheese for lunch at my former host mother’s thatched-roof ice cream store. Guanábana, my favorite flavor, was still there – and I learned that it is a relative of the paw paw, a fruit I’d recently become familiar with in my home in Appalachia.
Batidos were one Galápagos food option that my daughter could get behind. She was not excited, as I was, to see yucca, and the tasty larger grain corn that I’d remembered, swimming in our almuerzo‘s soup. The standard lunch in town used to cost $1, I remember, but now it is $5 or $6. The whole island is much more developed—and expensive. In fact, right now next to where my host family’s casita was, opposite the beach Playa Mann, there is foreign university – a branch of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partnership with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. On the waterfront nearby, walking toward downtown, a branch of Hotel Indigo just opened, with rooms going for over $700 a night.
Luckily, we were able to stay in my former older host sister’s empty apartment for our two weeks on San Cristóbal, easing our budget and making me feel more like a local, even when there were so many white tourists walking around that I didn’t feel as special anymore, for sure. Of course, not having a set role to perform, a special usefulness, a purpose (which on my first visit, was being a teacher), made me feel less connected to the local culture and people. Unlike 22 years ago, Fredy was now busy most days with leading tours and family obligations, so my daughter and I were largely on our own. We discovered, in the evenings, a ping-pong club with a teacher who said the sport saved him from vice, and who was eager to train my daughter in proper table tennis form. One afternoon, we spent the afternoon with one of Fredy’s old friends, Giovanny, who I remember interviewing for my documentary project in 2005. June played soccer for a bit with two of his children while I learned a little about his life (married to a woman from Kansas, lots of travel), and work (in a tourist agency, and raising cattle in the island’s highlands). When I asked him why, after having seen many different parts of the world, he and his wife had chosen to settle and raise their children on San Cristóbal, he spoke of nature, tranquility, and safety.
The island did still feel like a very special place. Going to the beach and swimming or splashing in the waves at the shoreline became June and my main activity. On shore or in the water, we were alongside many lobos marinos, sea lions (literally, “marine wolves”). June would frolic among them, just having to be careful of the big machos, who could sometimes attack. While I kept more of a distance on land, the lobos would occasionally startle me by swimming right under me like torpedoes. We would go to the beach either early —first thing in the morning – or, more often, in the late afternoon and stay until sunset. While not terribly hot, with a high around 80 each day, we learned the skin-scorched hard way that the equatorial sun was brutal in the middle of the day, causing us usual non-nappers to change our schedule and become aficionados of the mid-day siesta.
Our Galápagos days were certainly not all tranquility, however. It was election season, and not too long after arriving, we found ourselves holed up in our apartment with the windows closed and our ears stuffed with earplugs due to the blasting music and announcements from a political rally in the form of a party happening across the street that would continue until 3 AM. Other days, we would be bothered by blasting repeated snippets of Reggaeton music, announcements, and ads coming from a loudspeaker set up at a nearby corner. One of the refrains of a Reggaeton-style political ad that we must have heard a thousand times went, “Este es un pie de derecho,” meaning literally, “This is a right foot,” the real meaning being that the sponsoring candidate would be a step in the right direction. Fredy and his wife told us that they suffer through blasting music at their house from neighbors, too — and not just at election time — but that there really is no recourse.
I kept wondering if, among the locals of the town, any of my former students would recognize me from the classes I taught there in 2001. But among so many white tourists, that would not have been easy. My favorite of the classes I led back then was to a group of women — mostly fishermen’s wives — in the evenings. The goal was to help them in the tourist industry to sell things to foreigners. Perhaps, I thought, some of them, if not retired, were now selling groceries or hawking trinkets to June and me, without us recognizing one another?
Being a flexible eater is not one of June’s strengths in the US, so finding things she would eat on the Galápagos was an extra challenge, with even usual standbys like eggs to not be to her liking (as well as in short supply at the time due to an avian flu on the mainland). I called upon my Peace-Corps-learned skills a bit: foraging in foreign small grocery stores and improvising with what was available. I was cooking most meals for us—out of habit, to save money, and also to avoid traveler tummy troubles, so June ended up subsisting on mainly pasta, hot dogs, and peas. One day, however, we caught sight of an interesting-looking, spotted red fish with bulging eyes at the fish shack that I decided to try. I learned that fish is supposed to be eaten for lunch rather than for dinner here, as the fishermen bring in their hauls in the morning and it is best to eat the fish fresh. The fish seller told me the name of the fish was brujo, or witch/sorcerer, but it seems the English translation is Pacific spotted scorpionfish. Sautéed with oil, salt and lime in a frying pan —for lunch, as recommended— the spotted witchy fish was a surprise hit.
Traveling as a mom was a lot different than as a single person, for sure. June had fun bodysurfing one afternoon, clinging to Fredy’s back, and did enjoy marking off the animals we’d see daily on a laminated, fold-out picture guide to the island’s fauna, but in her estimation, whether her days were good or bad seemed mostly to depend on whether we stopped for ice cream or bought other edible treats. In the foreign environment, without her usual home playmates or activities, she seemed especially attached to the games and podcasts on her phone. This, along with her reluctance to try to speak any Spanish (even though I did notice her able to understand more and more of it as the days went by), made me question my parenting and wonder if I should disallow screen time in an effort to have her soak up more of this unique travel experience. Then, I noticed her joy in jumping for hours at the shallow edge of the water where the waves lapped in, and her delight and keen eye in discovering the local cats, which seemed to impress her more than the native animals, and realized that people pick up things in different ways —there is no one-size-fits-all travel experience. Just because I’d had a life-changing experience on these islands years ago, did not mean that she was going to now.
After two weeks on San Cristóbal Island, we traveled by rocking power boat (feeling like we barely survived the motion sickness – June threw up four times!) to the more remote Isabela Island for the second half of our stay. I was seeking a more low-key, tranquil experience for us, and got that, in part: the environment on Isabela did seem more relaxed. In fact, my first impression was that it was like West Africa, with palm trees, less traffic, and sandy streets. However, whereas 20 years ago, gringos on Isabela were probably few and far between, there are plenty now, enabled by those newer—albeit most choppy—speedboat passenger ferries that have made island hopping more common among tourists.
My former host sister Nancy, who now lives in Montreal, has family on Isabela and hooked us up with one of the apartments that she usually rents on AirBnB. I didn’t think we’d be able to meet in person, but a week before we left for the island, she texted me with the news that she would be visiting Isabela during our stay to help renovate her building. Now both mothers, we would be able to reconnect after 22 years.
June and I were able to snorkel (or “goggle,” as she preferred) much more easily on Isabela, as there was a lagoon within walking distance called Concha de Perla that was not being constantly battered by waves. And we did so nearly every day. Back on San Cristóbal, I had seen some really cool fish swimming among the rocks. black ones with orange-tipped fins, black and yellow striped ones, and occasionally, larger fish, about a foot long with shiny turquoise scales. It was pretty captivating, and made me able to bear the cold water longer. But at Concha de Perla, or “Pearl Shell,” the viewing was much better. One day, we noticed several sea stars resting at the ocean floor. They were much plumper than the dried ones I’d seen, so I wondered if they are the same starfish that I used to see in books as a kid. In any case, they were really cool to spot, and diving down a little to try to get a closer look, some impressively ornate decoration became apparent on them. Another day, a huge ray awaited us at our usual snorkeling spot. About five feet across, dark gray, with a tall hump in the middle, he gave the impression of a cross between an elephant and an alien. “I don’t want to be around when he starts moving!“ I said to June. But when he did start moving, beginning with a delicate fluttering of his thinnest, outer circumference, it was fascinating, and we ended up swimming behind him for a ways just to have the awe-filled privilege of observing.
Occasionally, my underwater gazing would be interrupted by June shouting, “Mom, watch out for the swimming iguana!“ which sounded comical, but I was glad for the warning. We loved watching the iguanas swim, as they don’t move their legs at all, only their tails: swish, swish, swish, in a mesmerizing half–eight, eel-like motion.
June and I were also riveted to, and had laughs observing, the interactions of mama-and-baby, or mama-and-younger-but-still-dependent sea lions, and comparing them to our own. We were easily able to see ourselves in the various mother-and-youngster couplings on the shore, usually in which the young sea lion was constantly wanting milk or other attention — making noises, poking with its snout, hitting with its flipper, and shoving at its mother, who looked sometimes tolerant, sometimes exasperated, and clearly just wanted to rest. When the youngster was really out of line, mama lobo would lift up her head and rebuke the young one, who would be momentarily quieted, but then usually go right back to the attention-seeking, rest-prohibiting behavior. It made me glad and hopeful that June saw herself relate so strongly to the young sea lion in this behavior pattern: maybe, I thought, there is hope for rest for me in the near future!
Nancy came to Isabela for the week with her two-year-old son, Omar, whom she spoke to in French and Spanish (he was also learning English and Arabic from his Lebanese father back in Montreal). It was great to reconnect with her in a mix of Spanish and French, and have that local in on some of the island’s goings on—which, given the season, were largely political. Like on San Cristóbal, pickup trucks blasting slogans and flying different colored flags would periodically charge down the sandy streets of town, each color buttressing a different political party, sometimes accompanied by cheering parades of supporters. We attended two different political parties together, where musical artists were brought in from the mainland and barbecued meat, as well as juice in plastic baggies like they would sell it in West Africa, were distributed to the onlookers. At the first one, the dancing only happened from about midnight to 3am, so headachey, exhausted me missed it. But on the final one, the dancing had to start earlier because of Ecuador’s election “dry law,” which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Election Day as well as 36 hours prior. No alcohol, no party, I guess? It was fun to dance with grown-up Nancy, recalling how, as teenagers, we had called ourselves the bailadoras locas.
Festivities aside, Nancy was doubtful that any of the political parties was really going to make the improvements that the island needed. I was struck by the politicians at the rallies speaking about how to draw more tourists to Isabela—as though there were not enough? — and how to make the island prettier and more inviting for them. Nancy thinks the need for improvement of basic services on the island should be primary, like getting potable tap water and modernizing and expanding the hospital, for instance. Currently, injured and birthing people, she said, need to be transported by speedboat to Santa Cruz — and some die on the way! More strict law enforcement is needed, too, she said, like imposing fines for not cleaning up after your dog (there was poop all over the streets) and people riding their motorcycles with kids hanging off, not strapped in or protected in any way. Additionally, like on the other inhabited islands, there was quite a bit of litter on the streets as well, which I heard was nearly all thrown by locals rather than visiting tourists. This lack of care for surroundings struck me as sad, and it was incongruous, in any case, with the constant message of conservation and protection one gets in general there.
Election Day came during our last week on the Galápagos, and I learned that Ecuadorian men and women there vote separately and have to go to entirely different polling stations. Why? Just custom. One article in Ecuador Times points to the argument that when voting separately, women can feel freer from coercion from their husbands or fathers, making them more comfortable — just as they do by having separate bathrooms! The division by sex is certainly deeply socially rooted here. However, the same 2018 article points out that over 600 Ecuadorians (now surely more) have requested a change of gender on their identity cards, in part to be able to vote in the line or voting area where they feel comfortable.
On our second-to-last day on Isabela, I “deigned” to go on one tour geared for tourists: a short boat ride to Las Tintoreras, a spot for prime animal viewing above and below sea level. While we’d had plenty of chances to view land animals already, we spotted from the tour boat our first and only Galápagos penguin, plus a charming group of blue footed boobies. When it was time for snorkeling, I was a little nervous about June, who is not very confident in her swimming and has not wanted to use the snorkel mask we brought for her on other occasions due to the feeling of water being trapped around her nose. On the tour, though, with borrowed equipment and a hurried instruction to leap off the side of the boat (“Oh, and we will see some sharks!”), she plunged straight into the deep water and was alongside us the whole way as we fin-and-arm navigated through crevices and in choppy water, seeing some huge orange and purple parrot fish, and, at the end, swimming directly over a 6-foot-long, resting white tipped shark. “That was fun!” she said, when we climbed soaking up the ladder into the boat afterwards.
On our couple-day stop at the island of Santa Cruz between San Cristóbal and Isabela, our Airbnb host Rubén, a former guide, was saying that he believes the Galápagos should do what Machu Picchu has done and limit visitors to a certain quota, requiring reservation in advance. He explained that the large recent increase in tourists, and certain bad behaviors among them, like dangling iguanas by their tails as a photo op, is the reason why visitors are now required to go with a tour guide to see the tortoises at the reserves on Santa Cruz and Isabela. Since neither June nor I enjoys being in tour groups, this was disappointing. We had enjoyed wandering solo among the tortoises at the reserve on San Cristóbal. But, since we had so much time on Isabela and didn’t want to miss a main attraction—in fact, the whole name of the islands (galápago means tortoise)—we took a nice but long early morning walk one day to the Tortoise Breeding Center, on the way stopping to marvel at deep orange-pink flamingos in their natural lagoon habitat — so different and refreshing from seeing them in a zoo or as lawn ornaments!
At the Centro de Crianza Tortugas Gigantes Arnaldo Tupiza Chamaidan, like at the La Galapaguera reserve on San Cristóbal, the rangers are raising and protecting young tortoises before re-introducing them into the wild. Our guide told us there are about 35,000 tortoises currently living in the wild on Isabela, but that many of them are endangered due to introduced species: ants, donkeys, pigs, dogs, and June’s beloved cats. One group of tortoises we witnessed were rescued during a volcanic eruption and are estimated to be 150 years old! Some of the other adults we saw were in their 80s and 90s, and are expected to still live 60 years or more. Strikingly, after seeing a few of these ancient animals snap at one another, we learned that galápagos are usually solitary creatures, and so dislike having to live packed together as they must at the reserve.
Living somewhere out of place was something we could relate to during our month on the Galápagos. While it was really special to be able to revisit the islands, appreciate their unique landscape and creatures, and share them with my daughter, lacking the connections that form from daily purpose, plus, having a more mature viewpoint and noticing the challenges that galapagueños face, the place no longer seemed like paradise to me. After my years living in West Africa, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere in Latin America, I no longer idealized the notion of “simple living”—if such a thing really exists—all that much.
Before heading back to mainland Ecuador to begin our journey home, June and I spent a final night on San Cristóbal, splurging on sushi with rooftop seating overlooking the harbor. Was it cool to visit the Galápagos? I asked her. We agreed it was very cool. But unlike college-aged me, I no longer have fantasies about living there. For June’s part? She is extremely glad to be back home and says she doesn’t want to do any more traveling for a long while.
