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UNITED STATES – Sometimes it's a fortuitous statement that makes you angry. "..Neve never seen the North Star .." wow. It has been a week since I was sailing in Ecuador, in the Galapagos Islands, where I see incredible things, but this observation stopped me from falling.
It came from the mouth of our charming and hardworking naturalist. It seemed so irrelevant because for a week he had been leading our group in the fields of geology, topography, animal behavior, conservation and weather, while traveling the Galapagos. Evan (pronounced Yvonne in Spanish), is from Galapageño. He was born and still lives on the island of San Cristobal, one of the four inhabited Galapagos Islands. Like other locals, he travels to Ecuador and South America, but has never traveled further north than 10 degrees.
Being on board the 20-passenger yacht, the Flamingo 1 offered us the luxury of having 2 naturalists for ourselves. We could ask question after question to Evan and his naturalist colleague Renny (pronounced Ren-ay) passionate about the ecological importance of islands and the role they play in understanding nature. Darwin spent 22 days on the islands collecting his samples. It took 6 days at sea to travel from one island to another. We managed this distance between dinner and sunrise.
We dragged Evan to the terrace after one of the many amazingly delicious dinners to watch the stars. I had tried to hunt Southern Cross by myself … no cell phones, no Skyview app to help you. During my research during a previous night, at 23 hours. the horizon was covered with a row of clouds, at 4:30, the moon was lying and I could not tell from north to north. Yet I was determined.
The Big Dipper is almost unrecognizable. He returned near the horizon and looks like a dry frying pan. There were missing a few stars that remained under the horizon. I've always thought that the last star at the end of the neck was the North Star. False. Even though Evan never saw the North Star, he trained me well enough to get home, Bingo!
But we were on deck to find the elusive, for us, the northern hemisphere, Southern Cross. Put the big frying pan on our shoulders told us the general direction. The Southern Cross is a "pointer" to the south. I expected it to be bigger than life and the configuration of Jesus on the cross, like the ones you see in the churches. Still wrong! Damn. Six bright stars, four of them on an inclined cross, as if Jesus carried his cross on Via Dolorosa. Take the distance between the two stars on the right, multiply by 4.5, then go down to the horizon and you have located "South".
The Galapagos Islands, located 300 km off the coast of Ecuador, form a National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a Biosphere Reserve. I flew and I moved away from home, but until I found myself in the middle of the sea, no less than on Ecuador, the search for the Southern Cross m & # 39; made me feel how far I was from home.
When Evan started talking about celestial navigation, I imagined Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki experiment. pae-pae (visit of the Polar Museum, Tromso) reed cane that sailed from Guayaquil (Ecuador) to the island of Floreana (Galapagos) (1953) or from Charles Darwin's trip on the HMS Beagle, a 5-year trip, including 22 days collecting land samples at the Galapagos in 1835 route for HMS Beagle. (The first settlers from Floreana arrived three years ago and are described in turn as soldiers who participated in a failed coup d'état attempt on the mainland or convicts.) The islands had to be really amazing. How did they manage this celestial navigation business?
As Evan says, "it's the small events of the Galapagos that touch you deeply." Darwin took a while (until 1857) to settle everything he had learned while traveling on the Beagle. I always digest everything.
With Ecoventura and its three comfortable yachts, including my Flamingo 1, these vacations have been an incredible adventure.
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