Galapagos

The Galapagos marked a change in travel for me, or a beginning to said change, anyways. Adventure was apparently on its way out. Luxury was in. Backpacking was out, although I landed there with a backpack in tow. Dinner jackets were in. Early mornings were in. Late nights were out. There was sightseeing, wildlife sightings. There was neither scuba diving nor white-water rafting. Sipping wine and scotch replaced guzzling flagons of beer. My travel companions were older now, and sadly that meant that Europals were out.

I miss that aspect of travel more than anything, those spontaneous meetings, those fortuitous temporary friendships. I don’t miss the nights of excess, although I do miss the nights. The nights were fun. The nights were the most memorable of times. I mostly miss those earnest conversations over coffee or drinks, the sun bearing down, the heat, the closeness of the nights. I miss hanging out, listening as the tropical breeze rustled foliage, as the surf rolled in and crashed onto jagged shorelines. I miss the cabanas, the bamboo huts, and the songs of cicadas. Mostly I miss the people I whiled the hours away with. The discovery.

This is not to say there was no discovery in the Galapagos; there was. There were finches and penguins and sea lions and seals. There were pink and red flamingos balanced on impossibly tall and thin legs, iguanas that snorted viscose brines as they purged the salt from their bodies. I climbed steep hills, leapt from jagged rock to jagged rock under the spray of coastal geysers, scaled jet black dunes and strolled rust red beaches as rich as PEI’s soils.

I walked in Darwin’s footsteps on the brown sands of the isthmus of Bartolome Island Beach, watching as cormorants and boobies whirled about the spearhead obelisk that pierced the Pacific. I lay an arm’s length away from disinterested seals. I raced a Giant Tortoise; okay, it wasn’t so much a race as a stroll, at least until the tortoise stopped and growled a breathy gasp, releasing a gallon of urine in defiance of my presence.

But I did it alone (metaphorically, that is). And it was all very strictly monitored. I suppose most of my adventures were strictly monitored. I’ve been treated to instructions to not take flash photos here, do not approach that frieze; do not stray here, do not touch that. Keep together. Do not lag. It was much the same there: do not stray from the path; it is okay for the seals to touch you but not for you to touch the seals. Respect the tenaciously tough and fragile ecosystem. I was okay with all that. I was there to see, not to destroy.

But it was all so very comfortable. Course after course of gourmet foods followed one after another. There were perfectly paired wines. There were Egyptian cottons. There was air-conditioning. There were pleasant middle-aged companions who shared my table at meals, who asked me what I’d seen, what had captivated me, who showed me their wonderful pictures, and on this occasion and that, shared my excursions, trekking up trails and crouching next to this animal or that. They were wonderful people. They just weren’t my age. They had mortgages; they had children; they’d paid off their mortgages; they’d retired. They gardened. They cruised. They bird watched. They checked off their lists, consulted one another on the species they’d chased down and captured with camera. They showed me those pictures so that I too could marvel over their conquests. They discussed whether to get into RV’ing, or did RV’ing mean the end of cruising. They went to bed early.

There were no mosquito nets. No bowls below lights to capture the moths as they fluttered about the lights. There were no late-night cocktails under the stars. No deep conversations of self, unrealized expectations, and unexpected regrets. There was no leafing through one another’s CDs, discussions on whether Oasis was as good as Radiohead, or flirtations.

That all sounds shallow, but there’s an ambiance to backpacking, roughing it a little, and hanging out with people who happen to be in the same metaphorical place as you.

There was one couple of near like age as me. They were almost ten years younger than me, but as I was sharing time with people about twenty years older than me, I was forever hoping to fall in with them. I did not. We rarely found ourselves in the same groups as we made our way ashore. We did not share meals. They sat second seating, I sat first. We did meet for drinks a few times after we finally crossed paths long enough to say more than “hey” to one another.

We crossed paths for the first time on the Bartolome isthmus. We were not in the same group on that day either, but all groups ended their day’s touring on the isthmus; so, when they spied me sitting on the beach, watching cormorants and boobies circle the spire, they approached me and said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said with more enthusiasm that I wished to gush forth.

They sat, pressing their toes into the cool sand beneath the hot, much as I had.

“How’s your tour?” he asked in a thick southern accent

“Good,” I said.

My “good” must have been less enthusiastic than intended because we all laughed.

“Where you two from?” rushed out of me. I’d never come across so thick a southern accent and was very curious to place it.

He gave me a pause before saying, “Man,” he drawled, “y’all talk funny. Where you from?” He spoke slowly, slower than anyone I’d ever spoken with. His words flowed forth as though accustomed to sultry heat and a conservation of energy.

“I talk funny?” I said, clearly astonished by his having said what he did. Then I too paused.
We laughed again.

“I’m from Ontario, like way north Ontario,” I said. “You?”

“Nawlins,” he said.

“Nawlins?”

New Orleans. His girlfriend was from up “north,” he said, which I assumed meant somewhere north of Nawlins, if way South of what I considered North.

“How are you finding this trip?” I asked.

It was alright, they said, but not what they were accustomed to doing. Which was? Backpacking. Thumbin’ it. I had to listen hard to cut through his drawl and suss out what he was saying, but I began to get the cadence of it in a little while. Her accent was less thick than his, even if she talked less. They were there doing what I was, checking off an item on the bucket list.

It took them a little while to cut through my accent, too, it seems, or so they said.

Funny, I never thought of myself as having an accent until then.