Traveling Applejax

Well, tragedy struck yesterday: our computer crashed. Big time. Something about our hard-drive is seriously screwed up. Mike is in the process of trying to recover lost data, but we’re not sure how much of it he’ll be able to restore. Luckily, he’s been backing up his photos on his iPod pretty regularly. We may have lost a few, but I guess that gives us an excuse to go back to the Galapagos… I save all of my work on my jump drive, so no problems there, except that Word is kind of defunct now. I just have to come up with a less-flashy way of commenting on my students’ papers for the last assignment of the semester. I also saved most of the pictures I intended to put on the blog, so I’ll continue posting animal pictures. We might be short a few boobies, though, unless Mike still has them on his camera. Most of our programs are gone, which will make life kind of difficult for Mike in the next couple of weeks. He won’t be able to work on editing and uploading pictures much. We may still be able to fix things, but if not we’ll be settling in Trujillo for a while in a couple of weeks and we can get things sorted then. *Sigh*

On the upside, we’re on the road (and our bikes) again. We flew back to Guayaquil from the Galapagos on Thursday and stayed with Denis and his Aunt and Uncle for two more nights. They were so good to us! Tonight we’re in a town called Virgen de Fatima, and it should only be about 3 more days until we cross the border into Peru.

Just in case he can recover his marine iguana and booby pics in the next day or so, Mike asked me to showcase crabs in the meantime. Now, I know crabs don’t sound exciting, but the Sally Lightfoot Crab is a gorgeous creature. Take a look:

These crabs are so brightly colored with reds, oranges, and yellows. And to top things off (or bottom them out), their underbellies are often a brilliant greenish blue or turquoise.

These two Sallies are hanging out in a shallow tide pool.

I just love how the crabs look against the background of black rocks and bright green algae.

To be honest, we’re not really sure what’s going on here. Are they getting it on? I don’t think so, because I’m pretty sure the bottom one is dead. Is the one on top eating the one on bottom? Or is the bottom maybe his previous shell?

The crabs were very obvious when they covered the black rocks on the beaches, but they also found their way onto docks and boats and ropes.

Since this is a short post, I flesh it out a bit more with a few random pics that don’t fit in with the animals…

You probably can’t read this man’s nametag unless you click on the picture to enlarge it. It reads “Tripod Sherpa.” That’s right, this man came with one of the big expensive boats, and his job was to carry tripods for the zealous snap-happy tourists. I think I should get a nametag since I’m always carrying the backpack with all of Mike’s lenses in it.

This is a panoramic photo of the view from Bartolome island. I tried to upload it earlier, but the connection was too slow. You’ll be able to see it better if you click on it. Mike used a program that puts panoramas together for you, automatically. It’s not as perfect as it would have been had he done it himself, but it took about a sixteenth of the time.

…just in case you forgot where all of these pictures were taken. 🙂 I did a lot of sand writing so that Mike would have some good photos to sell online. Words like Relax, S.O.S., and Sand were featured. Hopefully he’ll be able to sell some of them if they survived the computer crash.

The end…for now. Happy December!

P.S. I’m convinced that this entire country is nearly deaf. Soon I will be too. They crank the volume on their TVs and radios so that you can hear every word 6 blocks away. The people outside of our hotel rooms shout back and forth at each other at 6:30 in the morning. I wear my earplugs to sleep more often than not anymore. Right now I am sitting in an Internet cafe next to someone who is playing his music so loud that I am getting a headache. And to top it off he’s singing too. What ever happened to using headphones in public places? Asshole.