I just watched my last Galapagos sunset. Tomorrow morning I will board a plane to Quito where I will spend the night and the next day before flying back to New Mexico. Once there I will be able to eat green chile burritos instead of rice, talk in English instead of stutter in Spanish, and walk the streets without getting whistled at by every guy that passes. But all I can think about is how much I will miss Galapagos. I will miss the people I have met here, local...

Last week I took a trip to Santa Cruz. The main village, Puerto Ayora, is the Galapagos tourist hot-spot. I hadn’t seen so many gringos in months. While Santa Cruz has its beauty marks, I was turned off by the mass amounts of tourists, and after 4 days there was glad to begin my boat trip. The one thing I did really enjoyed was Las Grietas, a deep, narrow brackish pond that we I found despite almost breaking my ankle on the lava hike there. Living on the &l...

Just returned from a trip to Isabela, by far my favorite island thus far. The group stayed there for 4 days, just enough time to fall in love before I had to go. It reminds me a lot of the Big Island, being the biggest in the archipelago and equipped with 5 volcanoes, it is the most active of all the islands. It looks like what the Big Island must have looked like before all of us came, long expanses of beach with no one in sight, and way too much to see for a 4 ...

On my first day of school in Quito some guy from the U.S. embassy told all the visiting foreign students that there are three phases of any long-term stay in another country. The first phase, the honeymoon phase, consists of loving every single thing about the place your in. The food tastes great, the people are wonderful, and you see all the countries weird little quirks as an example of the beautiful culture. The second phase, “I’m an American phase...

So as of yesterday I'm officially a Galapagos resident (at least according to customs). Landed last night in the surreal landscape of Isla San Cristobal. My last night in Quito I got pick-pocketed by a five year old and lost one of my favorite earings. It's good to be out of the Mariscal. The town I'm living in has 6,000 people. I live with a small family in a pretty ghetto part of town. My moms name is Monica and she is 6 months pregnant. My dads name in Lenin...