Coincidence - Alan May [44]
The next morning, students and teachers went ashore to visit the Charles Darwin Research Station, just a one-mile walk from Puerto Ayora. Several Ecuadorian university students, there to receive hands-on training in science, education, and conservation, served as tour guides. After viewing a video that described the islands and explained the mission of the station, the Floaties were led down a winding path to see one of the tortoise corrals.
It took quite a while for the group to reach the corral. One Floatie after another halted suddenly in the middle of the gravel to marvel and to snap pictures.
“Look!” Kathy called out. “Lava lizards!”
“It looks like that one’s doing push-ups!” Trudy said.
And so it was, Luisa, their guide, told them.
“It’s a form of communication many lizards use, actually, to mark their territory and in mating rituals,” she said. “What’s really interesting about the Galápagos lava lizards is that the pattern of raising and lowering their bodies varies from island to island. You could think of it sort of like a whole-body regional accent.”
“Are those cactus plants?” Chris asked. “They’re gigantic!”
Luisa explained that several plants that had colonized on the islands had developed treelike forms.
“There are even ferns and sunflowers that grow as trees here,” she said.
The group now reached the pen that held the giant domed-shell tortoises.
“They like visitors,” Luisa said. “Some of them even like to have their necks scratched.”
The Floaties began clucking, whistling, murmuring “Here, Boy,” and making whatever other noises they imagined might entice a tortoise. Pierre simply stood still with his arm held out. It wasn’t long before one of the huge reptiles lumbered over to him and stretched its neck as far as possible up and out of its shell in sure anticipation of a nice long scratch. Pierre obliged as Melissa took snapshot after snapshot.
“I keep expecting him to purr!” she said.
“How do you know it’s a ‘him’?” Pierre asked.
Melissa answered that they all looked like old men to her, so that’s what she would call them, never mind the facts.
They traded places. By now several tortoises were enjoying neck massages. It was hard for the Floaties to leave their newfound friends, but they had much more to explore. Nancy took a final shot of Pierre and Melissa together stroking the “old man,” then off they went to the Breeding and Rearing Center to see newly hatched tortoises and land iguanas. The station collects eggs from several different islands, hatches them in incubators, and nurtures them for five years before repatriating them to their home islands.
The next day the students were given free time to go ashore and pursue their own activities, with the usual caveat that they remain in groups of at least four. Pierre and Melissa were torn between taking a bus up into the highlands and going on a boat tour. Most of the Floaties, including Nancy and Michael, decided on the highland tour.
This, they were told, would give them a sense of the whole gamut of vegetation found on all of the islands as the bus slowly wound its way through a cross-section of different climatic zones, from the arid coastal region through the agriculturalized middle elevations, with their coffee and banana plantations, to the lush green dampness of the scalesia zone higher up, and then the shrubby miconia zone at the top. The garúa, the mist that cloaks the higher elevations from June through December, supports the growth of epiphytic plants—including, Michael was elated to see, mistletoe, which clung to the branches of many of the trees. What could he possibly do, he asked himself, but kiss the girl sitting beside him every time the bus passed another clump?
As for Nancy, she was quickly losing sight of her boyfriend back in Boston.
As interesting as the bus trip sounded, Pierre and Melissa, after much hemming and hawing, had opted for the boat. Two Israeli soldiers they had met in Puerto Ayora, Asher and