AFTER ROGER AND SUZANNE’S CRUISE: AN UPDATE ON THE GALAPAGOS ISLANDS

           For those of you who have already read The Origin of Murder, here’s an update on events in the Galapagos Islands at a couple of places Suzanne and Roger visited in the book.  Life seems to be imitating art here, or maybe it’s vice-versa.  The Galapagos Tortoise whose photo adorns the cover of the novel probably started his/her life at the Darwin Research Station.  For those of you who haven’t read the book yet, you should.  It’s really very good as you can tell from the reviews on the Amazon book page*.

           The Charles Darwin Research Station is threatened with closure because the Station and Santa Cruz Island seem to be having a fight over the money coming into the gift shop of the Charles Darwin Foundation, which has supported the Station financially since shortly after World War II.  There were complaints from local shop owners that the gift shop, in Santa Cruz’s “big city” of Puerto Ayora, takes away business from them.  This past summer officials on Santa Cruz Island ordered the Foundation to shut the gift shop.  According to the Foundation, that’s a loss of something like $8,000 (US dollars) per week, or as much as $200,000 for the second half of 2014.  This Research Station is the facility that breeds Galapagos Tortoises to release back to the island chain, and is essential for ensuring survival of the population of these huge tortoises in the wild.  It's also a base for visiting scientists studying the biology and geology of the Galapagos Islands, so hosts a lot of academic scientists from all over the world as part of its mission.

            Even though the gift shop provides just 10% of the foundation’s revenue, its closure threatens the continuing existence of the facility.  Donations to the Foundation are down, salaries aren’t being paid, research projects have been slowed or shut down, and staff members are resigning.

            A substantial amount of Ecuador’s tourist income comes from the Galapagos Islands, so it is likely the Ecuadorian Government will step in and stabilize the research station’s operations.  In the meantime, there’s a lot of drama occurring these days 600 miles west of Guayaquil, in the Pacific Ocean.

*A couple of quotes from reviewers: 

(1) “A fast-paced, exciting mystery I didn't want to set aside till finished... A great continuation of the series!”

(2)  “When a luxury cruise ship full of hard-to-predict eco-tourists is confronted with a murdered passenger, survival of the fittest takes on a whole new meaning.”

http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Murder-Suzanne-American-Mystery-ebook/dp/B00K4KDL3O/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399322637&sr=1-6&keywords=the+origin+of+murder

UK link:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Origin-Murder-Suzanne-American-Mystery-ebook/dp/B00K4KDL3O/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399265823&sr=1-7&keywords=origin+of+murder

SOUTH AMERICAN MUSEUMS AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

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One of the things we never learned about when I went to school was the history of South America before the Spanish Conquest.  There was (and still is) a rich history, much of which we know about in some detail, culminating with the ascendency of the Incan Empire in the 15^th Century.  One of the benefits of wandering through Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador is getting exposed to this rich and fascinating history of pre-Colombian South America.

QUIRKY EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AMERICA, IV: GENDER-SPECIFIC ROOMS IN ARGENTINE HOTELS, AND MORE

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On 2 April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands.  The United Kingdom sent an expeditionary force to retake the islands. After naval and air battles, the British forces landed on The Falklands May 21st, and had surrounded Stanley by June 11th. The Argentine forces surrendered on Monday, June 14, 1982.  To celebrate the 31^st anniversary of the occasion, I give you Episode IV of this series.

When I first lived in Montevideo in 1982, military dictatorships ruled both Uruguay and Argentina.  They were very different places than they are now.   The small colony of Fulbrighters in Uruguay did a lot of things together, so we got to know one another pretty well despite our many differences.  Several quirky things happened when a couple of us spent June 15-16^th visiting Buenos Aires, almost directly across the Rio de la Plata from Montevideo.   

QUIRKY EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AMERICA, III: INTERNATIONAL CUISINE IN URUGUAY MEANS WHAT THEY EAT IN ARGENTINA

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            I’ve mentioned before that in general, Uruguayans don’t like spicy foods.  Meat is salted, but not marinated, before roasting or broiling over the fire.  When we lived in Montevideo in 1999, one obvious manifestation of this generalization was that there weren’t any Mexican restaurants in this city of almost 3 million inhabitants.  According to a Google search on the Internet, there are at least two Mexican restaurants in town now.  Roma-Tijuana seems to serve Italian-Mexican fusion cuisine according to a review (2009) I found.  Apparently, the fusion is heavily biased to the Italian-Uruguayan palate.  The salsa was described as “slightly spicy ketchup” and the enchiladas did not include enchilada sauce < http://www.exploringuruguay.com/2009/07/07/mexican-food-in-uruguay/>.  La Lupita in Punta Carretas had real Mexican food with real, if mild, salsa. “Salsa mas picante” can be requested, and it tasted like the real thing for the native San Diegans who wrote this review on the same web site as the previous restaurant review.

            After Elaine and I spent a couple of months on a steady diet of beef with more or less salt, with a tiny portion of chimichurri as a side dish if we were very lucky, the craving for a Tex-Mex dinner was becoming overwhelming.  Fortunately we had by then made friends with several USA expatriates living and working in 1999 Montevideo.   One of them, Luke, burst out laughing when we admitted to craving Mexican food.  When he finally stopped laughing, he invited us for dinner on Saturday at his apartment, which turned out to be the local Mexican food outlet for gringos with palates that craved more than the bland local cuisine.  “Yes,” he told us, “I've smuggled chilis, enchilada sauce, and other goodies into Uruguay”.  He hosted weekly home-cooked Mexican dinners as his contribution to spice-starved gringos living in Montevideo, which earned him pride of place at the top of the list of who you wanted to cultivate as a friend in the large expatriate community.

QUIRKY EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AMERICA, II: DON’T WHINE ABOUT THE WINE UNLESS YOU’VE TASTED IT

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A few years ago, I visited Mendoza, the wine production capital of Argentina, accompanied by a colleague from my University's Viticulture and Enology Department who is a V.I.P. in wine tasting circles.  We were invited to taste the better wines from several of the local wineries, two or three tours per day, which was where I first fell in love with Malbec wine as a varietal.  There are a few quirky things I remember from this experience.

QUIRKY EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AMERICA, I: FLYING IN ARGENTINA

I thought I'd start a new series of posts about off the wall topics as they come up.  I'll be flying to Montevideo in July, so thought of a few memorable moments in Argentine airports for my first entry in this series.

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I don’t know what the current situation is like since I haven’t flown any of the regional airlines in Argentina in a few years, but going back a bit things were, shall we say, different than California where I live.  Between 1999 and 2010, however, when I was flying between some of the major cities in Argentina, things could be very quirky.  Let me share a few notable examples.

TOURISM IN SOUTH AMERICA

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OK, you're ready to visit some of the places I've described in my South American mystery stories.  What should you do next?  Most of South America, especially in the poorer and less developed countries, has a much more complicated system and infrastructure to support tourism than we are accustomed to in the United States and Western Europe.  Banking systems are less reliable, currency values are less stable, and credit cards have not yet replaced cash in many transactions as they have in North America, especially for international visitors.  So, if you want to go from where you are to a different major tourist attraction it takes some planning.   You don’t go on-line and make plane and hotel reservations, nor do you hop on a flight with stand-by tickets and find a hotel when you arrive at your destination.   

LA PAZ AND EL ALTO

We flew from Santa Cruz de Bolivia to La Paz on the usual pre-dawn flight that seemed to be the norm for flying in South America.  With a 5 AM pick-up Elaine and I were in the air early en route to a remarkable landing experience.  We were told that only a few pilots were qualified to make this landing, and that they spent entire careers flying in and out of the airport in El Alto.  As we approached the landing we could look up to see snow capped peaks.  Yes, we entered through a valley and flew under the highest peaks.  We were close enough to the mountains themselves to see the textures and impressions in the snow.  The El Alto airport runway is at 14,000+ feet, and I can personally certify that the air is pretty thin at that altitude.  It takes a long time for the plane to slow down and stop after it lands and the runway is just long enough to make the landing work.  A certain amount of faith in the pilot is required at white-knuckle time; several of the passengers were noticeably crossing themselves and praying as we landed.  El Alto, once part of La Paz, is now a city in its own right.  It spills over the top of the ridgeline that defines the end of the La Paz Valley and sprawls out onto the high plain above the city.  La Paz itself is built vertically into the side of the mountain.

A Prequel to the Galapagos Islands

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Before we visited the Galapagos Islands several years ago, Elaine and I traveled from Salta, Argentina, the setting for my first novel The Empanada Affair, to Santa Cruz, deep in the Bolivian jungles, to Quito, Ecuador, which is high in the Andes.  Along the way we went to La Paz and Lake Titicaca and then on to Cuzco and Machu Picchu, which became the setting for part of one of my earlier novels, “The Surreal Killer”.  From there we went on to Quito, Ecuador and The Galapagos.  A current Work In Progress (WIP) brings Roger and Suzanne to the The Galapagos Islands, so I thought it might be fun for Jerry and Elaine to share a few of the spots in between the places where Roger and Suzanne have already solved multiple murders and one of the current WIPs.