A Good Place With Many Things To Offer

Lava Fields of San Cristobal Island

Today was the first field trip with our Marine Biology class. Our professor organized a day trip where we would travel by boat to a series of places along San Cristobal, which were being considered for eco-tourism development. During this trip several national park officials and scientists accompanied us. This project was developed by the people of San Cristobal as a means to distribute visitors throughout the island opposed to confining them to only a few spots. This increase in visitor sites is also appetizing to the locals a way to boost the local economy which is completely based upon tourism and fishing. San Cristobal is the oldest island in the whole archipelago and is one of the least developed. Since being here there has been construction on the main boardwalk of the town to make it prettier to attract more tourist. The most developed island, Santa Cruz, is one of the central islands and the first one to get an airport. With these attributes and many natural attractions, Santa Cruz is one of the more favored of the tourist islands, I think because it attempts to give a more home like feel for the tourists. On the other hand people visit San Cristobal and gain a small town feel and always prefer it as one of their favorite for that reason. So my stance on this whole San Cristobal development is that they shouldn’t work to replicate the feel of Santa Cruz but they should try and preserve the small Ecuadorian town sense, this way they can diversify the Galapagos experience and attract a wider variety of visitors. Well now that I’ve written this little blurb I might as well use it in my report for class.

Our field trip started out with a visit to a nice little site where there were extensive tide pools. These tide pools could possible be used as a basic hands on intertidal marine biology class (for tourists). We walked around the beach for a bit and found that the beach was host to a sea turtle nesting area, which would need to be set as a restricted area for tourists. As a class we went for a snorkeling and identified fish for a class assignment then moved on to the next site. The second area was a coastal mangrove area, which also involved a walk on a volcanic lava field, which was about 200 years old. It was amazing to walk on the lava flows and see the wrinkles in the stone. There were also a few colonizing cactus on the lava flow which were fun to photograph. The mangrove area was interesting and was used as a supplement to our lecture on coastal ecosystems. We wrapped the day up with some more snorkeling in the area then a long sleepy boat ride back to town. I will be posting new pictures to Flickr tonight. Enjoy life.