Sacajawea and Disrespecting the Jungle

Today we leave for the Galapagos. It should be a great time on an 8 day cruise. Before we go I just wanted to write a few things more about Ecuador as I'm not sure if we will have internet access on the boat.

First of all, as Stefani has already mentioned, Ecuador seems to be the most Americanized country we have visited so far. The first noticeable instance of this is the fact that they use the US dollar as their currency. Like every country we've been in down here, they still have trouble making change for almost any purchase you make. Normally you might think you could give someone a 10 for something that cost a few dollars and everything would be ok. That's not the case here. If you did that here, you would wait for a long time while the clerk talked to everyone around to see if they had any change and eventually, after confirming that no one had change, they would leave to go get change somewhere else. When they finally returned you would get a handful of change in coins. The most common of which here are 50 cent pieces and Sacajawea dollar coins. You probably remember the short lived Sacajawea coins in the US. They were everywhere for about 3 days several years ago. I still get them from stamp machines at the post office, but I always wondered what happened to all of them. Now I know. They were all shipped down to Ecuador. I can see this deal going down. "OK we'll pay you an extra half a cent per kilo of bananas so that you can afford to buy shoes and feed your children, but we will have to pay you in Sacajawea coins. Take it or leave it."

Another instance of Americanization here is related to the Coriolis effect. Everywhere in South America, water has swirled clockwise as it drained from sinks as opposed to the normal American way of counterclockwise. Here in Guayaquil, however, we are still in the southern hemisphere and the water is swirling counterclockwise, as it would in the northern hemisphere. Some of you out there might be thinking, isn't this guy supposed to be an ocean engineer. Doesn't he know that the Coriolis force is so small that it doesn't really effect the way water flows out of a sink. That may be so, but here in Guayaquil the myth of Coriolis is alive and well, and it is effecting the way water drains from the sinks in Hotel Ecuador.

I'm running out of time and battery juice for my computer so I just want to leave you with a story about dirty hippies and the jungle. I hope to go into the jungle from Quito after we return from the Galapagos. There are several places that offer 4 or 5 day trips where you travel first by plane and then by boat to lodges in the Amazon. Depending on where you go, you spend time checking out the wildlife, going on hikes through the jungle and possibly meeting some of the indigenous people that still live out there. While we were in Nazca, Peru there was a dirty hippy talking on the phone presumably to a travel agent of some sort. The guy was wearing pink long johns and a flannel shirt and looked like he hadn't bathed in a while even though he was staying in a hotel that had showers. Based on what I overheard of his phone conversation, I'm guessing that he hadn't showered because he didn't want to disrespect the desert by using it's water. Basically, he was telling the person on the other side of the phone conversation that he wanted to go to the jungle, but that it was extremely important that he not enter the jungle via airplane for spiritual purposes. At least three times he said something along the lines of, "it would just be so disrespectful to enter by plane. I really need to enter the jungle by boat. Do you understand?" You probably had to be there to truly appreciate what a piece of work this guy was, but hopefully you get some understanding from what is written here. I mean...to each his own, but this guy was a turd.

Right now I'm going to go disrespect the Galapagos by flying to the islands and then cruising around in a fuel burning motor boat.