Friday 8th November 2013
Las Bachas
Today was the last day of the cruise. We had the earliest start of the week with a wet landing at 6am on Las Bachas, a beach on the north west coast of Isla Santa Cruz. It’s one of the sea turtles’ favourite nesting beaches and, I have to say, the turtles have excellent taste. The beach had velvety soft white sand like I’ve never felt before. It felt amazing under my feet. We walked along the beach from one lagoon to the next in search of flamingos, the first had none, the second had one. As we were walking to the third, we saw two flamingos flying from the lagoon we were heading to, towards the two we had just left! Still how often does one see flamingos flying? At the third lagoon there were four flamingos. We took our photos and headed back for our last breakfast on the boat.
Both Ismael and I were ready to leave the boat today. It was a great experience, but I was looking forward to having our time back to ourselves. No more itinerary, no more regimental meal times and, while it was fascinating, at this point I felt I had seen enough wild life for a while. The week of wondering through lava fields had not helped my swankle. Sad as it may sound, I was looking forward to having wifi, sat by the pier, sipping on some cheap and strong caipirinhas (unlike those on the boat). I was also looking forward to a good night of sleep back on terra firma.
Puerto Ayora
We had not booked our hotel for the next few nights and just turned up to one Ismael had found with relatively cheap private rooms, hoping for the best. It seemed to work out fine. We paid, went to the room, dumped our bags and I had a shower. I had noticed there were more tiny bugs wondering around the room than I was happy with, but when I mentioned it to Ismael he told me about some place he stayed in Mozambique with a rat running around the thatched roof and said he was not bothered with such small creatures (Ismael has asked me to add that he was bothered by the rat, in anycase that’s a story for another day).
After spending the afternoon out as planned we headed back to the room at which point for some reason I decided to inspect the bed. The bugs were everywhere, on the covers, under the covers, on the walls, on the furniture. At this point I freaked. The room is cheap but come on, surely when they say you get what you pay for, this is not what they mean?!
I went down to reception and tried to explain with hand gestures that there were small bugs crawling all over the room. What is Spanish for bugs and crawling? Michele Thomas hadn’t explained how to say those words. The lady came up to the room to look. On inspection, she said “oh, something didas”, squashed a couple with her fingers and said “I’ll see if we can change the sheets or if we have another room available” at which point I said with a look of dread on my face “another room please”.
I had already decided that I was not staying in that room. If there wasn’t another we would get our money back and go to the place we stayed before the cruise. Sharing a room with other people was preferable to sleeping in that bug-infested hole. Ismael said she must have read the Trip Advisor review written on my face, because when she returned she said she had upgraded us to a suite free of charge and apologised saying she felt really bad.
We took our stuff to the new room which was indeed much nicer. I inspected for bugs, the bed, the walls, the bathroom, the furniture – all clear. I noticed there were bugs crawling all over our things. I killed a few, there were too many. I went down to ask for bug spray for our bags, praying they had not settled inside them. We sprayed our things until we ran out of the stuff and afterwards sat down for 20 minutes trying to recover from the whole experience. Why were we travelling again? Was this normal? What if we had slept there and not noticed, they would have crawled right up into our nose, mouth, ears and… Ismael was laying down on the bed the whole time I was in the shower. Would we return to London with dreadlocks and headlice? What was the point of this trip anyway? What would it be like for me in the jungle?!
We decided to head back out to get some air. We went to the supermarket picked up some things and got an early night.
Ramblers Rumblings 