Day 16

From some reason I have been looking forward to this day more than any other one. Alfonso had promised to take me to El Junco today. El Junco is one of the oldest craters here and the only one that produces spring water in the Galapagos. We met up with 3 other guys we met last night at church named Robert, Alex, and Jimmy. After climbing for about 10 minutes, we had reached the top and it was…foggy.

So foggy you could barely even tell it was a crater. Alfonso apologized and said it’s usually amazing looking.

(Robert, Jimmy, Alex, Me, Alfonso)

I forgot all about El Junco when we made our next stop. We drove over to the highlands and found a lookout over all of San Cristobal.

After doing our sight seeing I told Alfonso I wanted some time to be alone, so I went to the beach for about 2 hours. These islands are the perfect place to allow you to think in peace and tranquility. I realized this when I wondered over to the Centro de Interpretation where it explained the history of the islands. What entertained me was how much more history there was to these archipelagos than just Charles Darwin. When Ecuador first claimed the Galapagos in 1832 they voted a guy named Villamil to be governor of the Floreana Island. But when Villamil tried to settle the town with prisoners in exchange for their work in the community it caused nothing but problems between the citizens and prisoners. So much that it eventually created a concentration camp and up until the 1960’s the police were so corrupt that they would arrest innocent people for being out in the streets past midnight.

After my history lesson Alfonso and I met with Alex and Jimmy at the church. When I told them I played the batteria’s (drums) they told me to get behind the drum set in the church. Although we had no way of speaking to each other we were able to communicate thru music by playing together for about an hour.

Afterwards I was in shock when they said they had never heard of Led Zeppelin or The Who. The acted the same way when I said I had never heard of Louie and the F-String Band. They gave me a history lesson of Latin music and I gave them a history lesson of Rock N’ Roll.

Alfonso and I got back to the house around 10pm. I had promised him that I would help him with a PowerPoint English project on phrasal verbs for school that was due tomorrow morning. It wasn’t until I opened PowerPoint on my laptop that I noticed the free edition expired 2 years ago.

Alfonso had helped me speak Spanish all week so I knew I couldn’t let him down. Luckily since Wilson was in Santa Cruz we had the scooter all to ourselves.
Tomorrow I leave for Guayaquil.