This is the one where a sea lion takes umbrage with me

15 July 2006

The fourth day on the boat dawned and after breakfast, we headed to Gardner Bay on Hood Island. As usual, there were lots of sea lions waiting for us on the white sand beach. We walked the length of the beach, admiring the piles of marine iguanas strewn across the rocks. Mocking birds were running every which way, not afraid to come right up close to the visitors to their island.

Coming back down the beach, I took a photo of Suzy close to a group of sea lions. I went to give her my camera so that we could swap over, at which point I took a step too close for one sea lion’s liking. She got up and hauled herself towards me, having a bit of a grunt, but lay down again as soon as I took a step back. So, we found another group of sea lions for my picture.

While Suzy and a few others from our group went snorkelling I sat on the beach with the rest of the dry travellers and did a bit of diary catchup. I made myself comfortable on a big bit of driftwood as mocking birds danced about close by. A few feet in front of me, Suzanne sat with her husband Chuck as the mocking birds drank the fresh water she poured into her bottle lid for them.

I hadn’t been on board the boat very long on day one, before one of the crew saw me and asked what my name was. “Sarah,” I said. He told me he was José. A little later, we were officially welcomed aboard with a cocktail, introduced to the crew and then asked to introduce ourselves one by one. I, naturally, introduced myself to the group as “Sarah”. “Sarah” repeated the crew.

I think it may have been the next day that one of the crew, the chef, saw me on deck and said, “Ah, Sarita!” “Sarah,” I corrected him, wondering why people kept calling me that. There then followed what I took to be a pile of Spanish that I didn’t understand. I looked suitably blank, the Spanish was repeated, I looked blank again and said, “Sorry, I don’t understand.” I caught sight of José behind the bar nearby, looking amused. I discovered a little later that Mr Chef had simply been telling me his name: Virgy. I’m sorry, I don’t understand names.

As time went on, the crew kept calling me Sarita, but as our guide Enriqué only ever called me Sarah, I put it down to the boaty Ecuadorians simply not remembering my name … until, as he lifted me from the shore back into the panga on this fourth day, Enriqué called me Sarita having called me Sarah about 30 seconds before. This was now officially flummoxing.

After lunch on board, we set sail to Punta Suarez and while I idled in the cabin, Suzy wandered about, before being invited onto the bridge by José. There she took the helm for a while and talked to José about what she and I did at home. After José referred to me as Sarita once more, Suzy asked why I was being called that. Turns out that Sarita is the Spanish diminutive of Sarah. Suddenly it all made sense.

However, throughout my time on the boat, whenever I saw Antonio from the crew, he would greet me with a deep “Sariiiiiii”. I had no idea what this meant, but beaming wildly and saying “Hola!” seemed an appropriate response. It wasn’t until one of the last days of the holiday that he finally greeted me with “Sariiiiiii-taaaa”. Aha! Now I understood.

Suzy had enough Spanish that she would boldly throw herself into conversations with the crew. I had no Spanish to speak of and would thus simply call “Hola!” exuberantly and scurry away if Suzy was nowhere to be seen and a member of crew looked like they wanted to speak to me.

The sailors wanted to know what Suzy and I did back home and as Suzy explained with her limited vocabulary that I had my own company, with clients in Germany (she didn’t know how to say Austria in Spanish) and that she was also high up in a small company, selling jewelry all over the place, the Ecuadorians were forming the impression that the ladies in cabin 2 were multi-millionaire entrepreneurs. It took a few more stilted conversations, with much gesturing, a range of Spanish words from Suzy and a lot of fruitless searching in the phrasebook and slow simple English from me before the myth was dispelled. Meanwhile, Virgy was planning to come to England and get a job with me. We had many conversations with Virgy at our cabin door throughout the holiday and he would often appear to beg some of my after sun for his arms. He threatened to keep it as we could buy more for ourselves once we were back in England.

The landing at Punta Suarez was a dry one, among sea lions and marine iguanas. One sea lion did her best to get in our way, lying fatly on our path, but didn’t bat an eyelid as we all stepped carefully around her. As we came from the quay onto the beach, the galapagos hawk was waiting for us atop a monument and sat patiently as we all oohed and aahed and snapped away.

We set off along a very rocky path to see Nascar boobies and more mocking birds. We were tripping over lava lizards and marine iguanas the whole way. In one of the crazy “is this really real?” moments of the trip, we came across a few albatross. One pair were performing their courtship ritual, which consisted of wide open beaks and a lot of clacking their beaks together. As we all stood around photographing this fascinating and comical display, a lava lizard edged into the shot, occasionally being shooed away by an albatross before edging closer again to the feathered paramours.

Walking further on, we reached the top of a cliff from where we had a great view of the blowhole in the rock below. As the waves of the blue Pacific came crashing in, a big puff of spray would be forced out of this hole. Enrique offered to take a photo of me and Suzy as the blowhole did its thang in the background. Others then took their photos of each other, at which point the blowhole went on strike, barely blowing raspberries through the rocks.

The way back to the shore was exhausting, with sweat dripping everywhere. You’ll see a photo of the pile of rocks serving as a path in the photo set on Flickr. Difficult to walk over, but fortunately there was nothing much to look at around us, so we could concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other and not dying.

Once back at the quay we found that a fat sea lion was lying across the point where the panga needed to land. So once more we risked our ankles and made our way to the panga across the rocks you see below.

Later that day, we sailed to the island of San Cristobal, one of the few inhabited islands in the archipelago and finally docked in the dark. Sailing along the coast towards the port gave rise to the metaphor of the whole trip:

Sarah: “Look, there’s civilisation”
Suzy: “And we’re sailing right past”

It was wonderful to see the lights of civilisation again; I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed it. I could hear dogs barking and car alarms going off, music to my ears. I stood on the walkway outside our cabin in the dark and heard strains of the Spanish version of ABBA’s “Chiquitita” coming from one of the boats around us. I looked up and saw a big shooting star fly across the heavens above me.

Suzy and I sat in our cabin with our legs hanging out of the door and talked and looked at the photos we had taken. It was past 9.30pm and we weren’t ready for bed – very strange for us in this new life on the boat. The moon and stars in the sky were beautiful as the cloud cleared and we finally turned in for the night.