FEBRUARY 14, 2000
It’s Valentine’s Day, and Jack Nelson’s cozied up with a late-evening scotch and a week-old Wall Street Journal left by one of the guests who checked out this morning. Romy and Audrey have drifted off to bed. Jack will be joining them soon, but right now it’s time to relax. He’s got Billie Holiday cued up on the stereo, the lamps are turned low, no one else is around. If it weren’t for the palm and the muyuyo tree framing the view out the lobby’s rear window, the twinkling deck lights of those cruise ships anchored out in the harbor could pass for the Manhattan skyline. Or, muses Jack, an oil refinery.
He’s finally leaving tomorrow to get his father in Thailand. And, truth be told, it will be a relief to get out of here for a while. It’s been a long week, one thing after another, beginning with a yacht sinking over at San Cristobal.
It happened last Sunday. Jack was asleep when the VHF radio he keeps tuned by his bedside to an open marine frequency crackled to life with an emergency transmission at about three A.M. The voice was frenetic, shouting in Spanish, calling for help from the waters off Cristobal.
It was hard for Jack to hear clearly over the static. San Cristobal is at the extreme edge of his radio’s range. Closer to home, on Puerto Ayora’s local frequencies, you can hear everything—and you will, if you listen in long enough. There are people in town who keep these radios on day and night, for sheer entertainment, eavesdropping and sometimes joining in with whatever comes over the air. Some people like to get on and make obscene sounds or tell dirty jokes. Some set up their radios in their bedrooms and broadcast the noise of their lovemaking. But for Jack, this is business, part of his job as the islands’ U.S. consulate warden. And what came across his radio last Sunday woke him up in a hurry.
Apparently, a yacht had run aground at the south end of Cristobal, hitting a reef in the dead of the night. The boat, apparently American, had gone down with two men on board. There may have been a fatality; Jack couldn’t be sure. The voice on the radio came from an Ecuadorian naval speedboat racing from the site of the sinking back to Puerto Baquerizo. It was calling for oxygen and medical supplies to be ready when it arrived. A victim, seriously injured, was aboard, bleeding heavily from the head.
This was all Jack could gather from the radio. By sunrise, he’d spoken with the comandante of the naval base in San Cristobal. The sunken boat was indeed American—the Pacific Star, out of San Diego. A father and son were aboard: a retired doctor named Vernon Koepsel, in his eighties, and Koepsel’s fifty-year-old son, Edward. The father was apparently at the helm when the boat hit the reef. The sea was calm at the time, so weather had not been a factor. The old man may have dozed off, figured Jack. Or he may have had a heart attack. There’s no telling.
In any event, the son was asleep down below when the boat hit the rocks. The father was thrown over the side by the impact, which broke open the hull. The ship went down almost immediately, leaving the father dead and the son fighting for his life, buck naked in the roil of the sea breaking over the reefs. “No money,” says Jack. “No documents. Not even any clothes.”
The son suffered only mild injuries. A young Ecuadorian naval lieutenant, however, was hurt badly during the rescue. The radio alert Jack had overheard was for him. By late morning, there was concern the lieutenant might die.
The younger Koepsel had by then been stabilized, somewhat in shock, but other than that, doing fine. The primary problem was how to deal with the father’s body—a question Jack discussed at length during the day in a series of phone conversations with the U.S. Consulate’s office in Guayaquil. The issue, in nuts-and-bolts terms, was how to keep the corpse from rotting on this remote tropical island.
“Look,” Jack told the government official on the other end of the line, a woman named Carla. “This man is already fourteen hours dead. It’s hot here, and there’s no place on that island to keep the body. No morgue. No freezer space.”
There would have to be an autopsy, he told her. “So you’re going to have this body cut up. And there’s no embalming, nothing like a professional mortuary.”
A coffin would have to be found for shipping the body to the mainland, and a mere wooden box would not do. “You can’t just ship a dead body in a wooden box,” Jack explained, “certainly not by air. You have to get an air-transport casket, a large, hermetically sealed, aluminum casket.”
In the last of several phone calls to and from Carla and her colleagues—who by late afternoon had spoken by phone with the younger Koepsel himself—Jack summed things up. “They’ll probably find somebody over there with a large enough freezer to keep that body for four or five days while everybody gets their act together,” he said. “After that, you’re gonna have a stinker on your hands.”
By that evening, the navy personnel on San Cristobal had managed to find a makeshift holding facility for the elder Koepsel’s body—in the base’s small movie theater. As for the lieutenant, he was still alive, but just barely. It looked like he’d have to be medevaced to the mainland.
Any flight to the mainland has now become dicey, with the nation still reeling from the coup just two weeks ago. The Indians have refused to recognize the new president, Noboa, after he announced his intention to carry through with the dollarization changeover begun by Mahuad. Indio leaders have told Noboa he has three to six months to change his mind about that. They’ve presented a list of demands: increased spending on education for their children; bilingual training; prosecution of bankers and politicians who had profited from the nation’s most recent economic crisis; and an end to this dollarization nonsense, which the Indios point out will penalize poor, rural Indians who’ve never seen a dollar in their lives. If these demands are not met, warn the Indios, there will be real revolt, even a civil war. Those are the very words they are now using—“civil war.”
“This time it was peaceful, the next time blood will be spilled,” one Quechua was quoted in newspapers this week.
“The situation is still hot,” agreed Indio spokesman Antonio Vargas. “The next uprising could be much more radical, much more hard-line.”
Michael Bliemsreider would not argue with that. The Galápagos INGALA director just got back last week from the mainland, from Cuenca, where he happened to be the day the mob seized the presidential palace. He spent the ensuing thirty-six hours with a telephone pressed to his ear, talking with government officials as the pieces on the Ecuadorian political chessboard were madly rearranged. On the night of the coup alone, Bliemsreider figures, he spent at least three million sucres on cellular phone calls.
“It has been crazy, like a frenzy,” he said last Monday morning, the day after the Pacific Star sinking. Vernon Koepsel’s body was still on San Cristobal. Ed Koepsel was there as well, waiting while Navy and government officials figured out what to do with his father. Meanwhile, the injured lieutenant had been sent to a Guayaquil hospital, where a day later he died.
In the shade of a palm at the edge of Pelican Bay, Bliemsreider assessed the typhoon of events swirling over the mainland and blowing through these islands. He is not a man who is easily ruffled. At thirty-three he’s a seasoned political player here in the Galápagos, having run everything from the National Park to INGALA. His father is German; hence the last name. But he’s all Ecuadorian, born and raised in Guayaquil, like his mother. Trim, tall, and athletic, he could pass for a professional soccer player in this country where, as in all South America, soccer is a religion.
Bliemsreider is that rarest of creatures, a bureaucrat who actually gets something done, a man respected by most Galápagans as part of the glue that has held these islands together in the face of the onslaught they’ve faced in recent years. It’s people like Bliemsreider who have fed information and advice to the Ecuadorian government for years now, helping shape such legislation as the recent Special Law.
Bliemsreider knows as well as anyone how difficult it is to get such statutes passed. He also knows how, in the hands of this new Ecuadorian presidential administration, the laws may be changed or even erased in the bat of an eye. The way things have shaken themselves out since the coup, he’s afraid that’s exactly what might happen. He looked so relaxed, leaning against that palm tree with his arms crossed on his chest and a smile on his face as soft as the fronds waving over his head, but his words were severe.
“Let’s see,” he said, glancing out at the harbor. “This new government took office on a Saturday. By Sunday, Noboa had scratched the Ministry of Environment. This was one of the first things he did. That’s a pretty clear signal.
“Just look at the new ministers he has named,” he continued. “They’re all industrial people—fishing, mining, forestry. Noboa’s son-in-law is Gustavo Gonzales. He owns several ships in Manta. It’s pretty obvious that environmental protection is not this government’s priority.”
In fact, said Bliemsreider, it is only because of outside pressure—most notably from the United States—that things are not worse. The flurry of phone calls Bliemsreider made while in Cuenca included several to Ecuadorian ministers in Quito, who told him that the U.S. Ambassador herself, a woman named Gwen Clare (who stepped into this ambassadorship just five months ago), had laid it on the line with Noboa.
“What’s that typical U.S. Embassy phrase?” Bliemsreider asked. “‘Lo veriamos con buenos ojos…’, or ‘It would be nice if…’ It’s a diplomatic way of putting it, but it means: ‘You better watch out.’ That’s how I was told that she said it to him. That no matter what happened, the Park here in the Galápagos needed to be left alone.”
Apparently, Noboa got the message. “He issued a statement privately to the local politicians here in the Galápagos,” said Bliemsreider, “that the Park is not to be touched.”
Everything else, though, is apparently up for grabs. Including, Bliemsreider said with that smile and a shrug of his shoulders, his job. Fanny Uribe, it seems, has been out to get him for some time. The congresswoman hasn’t forgotten that Bliemsreider was with Mathias Espinosa in that raid on her house, the one where they shot the video footage of the pepinos up on her roof.
“That woman just hates me,” Bliemsreider said. “She has been a pain in my ass from the beginning. But I always had the government on the mainland behind me. Now I have no political support at all.”
Bliemsreider knows his days are numbered, but until he’s replaced he intends to show up at the INGALA headquarters each morning, if for no other reason than to make sure the building’s furniture and equipment are not looted. It’s no joke, he says. Right now his job is that basic. “I’m just watching over the office so no one carries anything away.”
The next morning, Tuesday, thin plumes of oily smoke could be seen coiling up from the waterfront near the wharf. The intersection outside Sarah Darling’s art studio had been blocked off with a crude barricade of black lava rocks, and a pile of truck tires had been set afire by a small, angry crowd. The same scene was transpiring at the north end of town, where traffic from Bellavista and Baltra—trucks, taxis, buses—was backed up by protesters refusing to allow any vehicles into the village. Bewildered tourists were unloading their luggage from the buses and taxis and were hiking from there into town.
It turned out that TAME had raised its airfare for islanders in the wake of the sudden shutdown of Saeta airlines the weekend before. Saeta had been struggling lately, not just financially, but in terms of literally keeping its planes in the air. A number of near-accidents in recent months had prompted the government to ground a large portion of the airline’s fleet for mechanical inspections. One of its planes bound for San Cristobal just a few weeks ago had lost an engine and plunged several thousand feet toward the sea before the pilot was able to pull out of the dive. Another had been forced by mechanical problems to turn back to the mainland just a half-hour before landing at Puerto Baquerizo. With half its planes now on the ground, Saeta finally decided to throw in the towel, which left TAME in business by itself. And so came this price increase. A ticket to Quito, which until this week had cost 700,000 sucres—$28—was now 1,700,000, an increase of $40. Airfare to Guayaquil had been raised the same way, and the townspeople were furious.
While groups of men and young boys manned the barricades at both ends of town, a crowd of two dozen women—some of them TAME employees—had gathered in front of the airline’s downtown offices on Darwin Avenue. They were seated on long wooden benches they’d pulled into the street. They laughed and joked, sipping bottles of soda and munching bags of potato chips, chatting with friends passing by while a van parked at the curb blared a pop song from a pair of speakers mounted on its roof.
“Believe me when I say how much I love you,
believe me when I say how much I care….”
It was the mayor who had called for the people of Puerto Ayora to boycott TAME. The voice of the town’s comisario, the mayor’s chief lieutenant, barked from a radio held by one of the women. The comisario was urging the people to protest. Word was that a small caravan of protesters was speeding toward Baltra to set up barricades there.
“They won’t get too far,” said Jack that afternoon. He was out on his hotel’s back patio, in the shade of a rough wooden arbor, dabbing some paint on a mobile of fish designs he’d cut out from old copper mesh window screens salvaged from the U.S. barracks at Baltra. The radio in his office was tuned to the local station. News of that morning’s strike rattled out through the window.
Jack could understand the people’s anger at this rate increase, but this barricade nonsense made no sense at all, he said. The town’s bread and butter is those tourists, who couldn’t be too happy lugging their own baggage by foot into town, sweating like sherpas. They couldn’t be too impressed by that flaming pile of tires or the unsettling sight of townspeople protesting in the streets. These tourists didn’t pay thousands of dollars apiece to be caught up in the theatrics of some third-rate banana republic.
The mayor should know better, said Jack. He should know the townspeople are harming only themselves with this so-called boycott. But what does the mayor care? He’s out to get votes, said Jack. He wants the people to know he’s on their side, by God. The next election is less than two months away, and the mayor is seizing the moment, preying on fear and emotions for political capital, as all good populists do. Bucaram did it. The presidents before and after him did it. And the mayor is doing it right now.
“That’s the way populism works,” said Jack. “You don’t do what’s effective. You don’t do what’s right. You don’t do what will truly produce positive change. You do what’s popular. You shoot for the lowest common denominator, and, as in this case, you almost always wind up shooting yourself in the foot.”
That caravan headed toward Baltra? They’re running on sheer emotion, said Jack. They’re not even thinking about the reality of the situation, he said, about what awaits them at the airport. But they’ll find out soon enough, the same way they did last year when they tried the same thing after a similar airline-rate increase. Baltra is a military base, for God’s sake. There are soldiers armed with automatic weapons. These yahoos in their Hondas won’t get any farther than the canal, said Jack. The soldiers on the other side will see to that. There will be a lot of shouting and posturing. Then everyone will get hot. And they’ll get tired. And then they’ll get bored. And then they’ll finally turn around and come home.
Jack was right. By that evening, the protesters were back in their homes watching television. The next day the barricades were pulled away and traffic began flowing as usual. The TAME rate hike remained in effect. And it was on a TAME airliner that Vernon Koepsel’s body was finally flown back midweek to the mainland in an air-transport casket shipped from Guayaquil.
So Jack is now able to leave for his trip in relative peace. The next morning, he’ll take a cab to the airport, where he’ll catch the day’s first flight to the mainland. Then it will be on to California. Then, finally, to Thailand.
Even as Jack is on his way up to Baltra the following morning, a small crowd has gathered outside the police station jail. Inside are six boys, all teenagers, arrested on charges of possible murder.
The details are sketchy right now, mostly rumors. There was apparently some trouble late last night, at a small weekend rodeo up at Bellavista. Someone was killed. No one’s sure if there’s been one death or two. Word is the police have drawn a pair of chalk outlines of bodies on the road near the turnoff to Quatro y Media.
The crowd at the jail are families and friends of the boys in the cell. There are about two dozen people, mostly women. They’re chattering at the kids, passing them food and bottles of soda through the door’s bars. A rusted white pickup truck—hauled in, it turns out, with the suspects—is parked outside the chief’s office. But the chief is not here, says a police lieutenant, who is happy to share what he knows.
A body was found this morning about six A.M., on the road near Bellavista. “It was destroyed,” says the lieutenant. “The head, the legs, everything.”
The boys in the cell, says the lieutenant, were among the last to leave the rodeo last evening, at about four A.M. They hitched a ride in the back of a pickup. An older man also hitched a ride in the same truck, a fisherman from San Cristobal who had come over this week to see his daughter graduate from school.
The man had been drinking, says the lieutenant. The boys got into some kind of argument with him. Then they decided to rob him. They beat him, then pushed him out of the truck, leaving him on the road. One of the kids said that they threw rocks at the man’s body as the truck drove away, but the lieutenant says he can’t be sure of this. In fact, he’s not certain of anything here. He says the people at the hospital would know more, at least about the dead man.
They do. Max Parédes has been in his office for hours doing the paperwork on this…incident. He says the body was brought in by the police early this morning, at about a quarter to eight. Parédes was not here at that time, but he heard that the body was in pretty bad shape.
“Part of the brain was gone,” says Parédes. “The head was—“Parédes stops himself and sends for the doctor who was on duty when the body was brought in. Her name is Paola Vargas. Parédes gives her the seat at his desk. She’s young, twenty-seven, small-framed, with thick, dark, shoulder-length hair. She’s calm and straightforward, peering over the tops of her eyeglasses whenever she’s making a point.
She was at the end of a twenty-four-hour shift, she explains, that began yesterday morning at eight A.M. She was exhausted, ready to head home when the hospital doors burst open and the police brought in this body, found on the road up near Bellavista just after dawn by a man driving in to work in Puerto Ayora. The body had been run over sometime during the night, Vargas says, crushed badly by an oncoming vehicle.
“The head looked like a coconut split in half,” she says. “There was no brain. It was empty. And the legs, one was not there.” This was the first autopsy she has ever done, says Vargas. Her finding, she says briskly (the cause of death, as she has reported it), is “a transport accident.” That’s it. No more details. Parédes dismisses the doctor and excuses himself.
By the next afternoon, candles have been lit outside the house of the dead fisherman’s relatives, up in the village. Black crepe paper hangs from the home’s door and windows as the family observes the velorio, the wake.
Meanwhile, Police Chief Proáno will answer no questions, not yet. “The investigation,” he says, “is continuing.”
The next day is the same. And the next. Finally, on Friday, the chief is ready to talk. All but one of the six boys have been released. Still behind bars is an eighteen-year-old, the “leader” of the group.
“Let me summarize the accident,” says the chief, settling behind his desk and opening a thick folder. “It’s just another one of so many accidents. What has magnified it is the fact that this group of kids is underage.”
The kids ranged in age from twelve to eighteen. “The victim,” says the chief, “was totally drunk” when he began walking home from the rodeo at about 3:30 A.M. The kids were walking as well and fell into step with the victim. “He started offering drinks to the older ones,” says the chief. “The younger ones noticed. ‘Ah, he’s got some money.’”
It was the eighteen-year-old who “tried to rob the man,” says the chief. None of the other boys took part in the attempted robbery, he says. “They felt bad and were afraid and felt sorry for him.”
The victim wrestled himself away, says the chief, and “ran into the vegetation” in the darkness of night. The kids kept on walking and were soon picked up by a passing truck. The victim says the chief, then rushed out of the bushes, desperate. “He asked the driver for help from this assault,” says the chief.
The victim climbed into the cab. “He started misbehaving,” the chief says. “Just a typical drunk. Very excited and loud.” The driver grew tired of the man and stopped the truck. “He made him get out and told him to ride in the back.”
The man had no idea the boys were back there, says the chief. Before he could flee, the boys attacked him and heaved him out of the truck.
“The older one,” says the chief, nodding toward the cell where the eighteen-year-old is still being held, “he kicked him in the face.”
The group has sworn that the victim was conscious when they drove away. The eighteen-year-old swears it. “He said, ‘Okay, I kicked him in the face,’” says the chief. “‘But when we left,’ he said, ‘he was standing up.’”
The chief unfolds a large map on his desk. It shows the road south of Bellavista. The shapes of two human figures are drawn on the map, just as the two chalk outlines were drawn by the chief’s investigators on the actual blacktop road. The outlines show the position of the body before and after it was struck by whatever vehicle ran over it.
“You see,” says the chief, pointing at the drawings. “It crashed into him here and dragged him 3.37 meters, to there.” This, says the chief, is why it was rumored at first around town that there had been two deaths. Two chalk outlines, two deaths. An easy assumption to make, says the chief, if you don’t have all the information.
The vehicle that ran over the victim has not yet been found, says the chief, and he holds out little hope that his men will ever find it. “I would very much like to know where it is,” he says, “but it is not an easy thing, not with the body lying down as it was. If he were hit standing up, it would be entirely different. There would be visible damage to the vehicle that we could look for. But with this, at most this might have damaged the suspension, and that could easily be repaired somewhere up in the highlands.”
What the chief is left with is a charge of “attempted assault” against the eighteen-year-old. What bothers him about all this, he says, is the absence of information from the hospital. He can’t do his job, he says, if they don’t do theirs. And in this case, he says, they didn’t do theirs.
“The autopsy report was of no use to me,” he says. “It is no good because it doesn’t specify if this man died before he was run over or after. It doesn’t tell me how long he had been dead. It doesn’t tell me anything.”
The chief folds up his map and sticks it back in the folder. “It’s amazing, just incredible,” he says, “not to have the right kind of doctors to give a specific, professional autopsy.”
He doesn’t blame Dr. Vargas, though. “It’s not her fault. There are doctors with a lot of experience here. Why didn’t they do it? If I, as a police officer, don’t do my job the way they didn’t do theirs, then we’re all screwed.”
To hear Michael Bliemsreider tell it, these islands are screwed, at least at the moment. Just yesterday morning, Bliemsreider resigned from his INGALA position, as he had said just last week he would. But he doesn’t seem too upset, not about that. He’s certain he’ll land on his feet. He always has. What bothers him is what’s going to happen to this town and these islands with virtually everything but the Park up for grabs and with people like the mayor and Fanny Uribe and their lot smelling opportunity and power and all that comes with it. Just a few months ago, Bliemsreider had several international agencies with a special interest in the future of the Galápagos lined up to spend millions of dollars on improving the town’s school system, its water, sewage, and social services. But with the coup and the unrest that has followed, those millions are all on hold.
And Bliemsreider doesn’t hold much hope that that money will be seen here anytime soon. “We were getting there,” he says, “but now it’s scratched, back to zero. The Park is the only keyhole of hope right now, not just for the islands, but for the people on these islands. The Park is going to be okay, but the town now is a mess. And it’s going to be worse with the upcoming election.”
There have been rumors around town the last several days that a gambling casino is about to open in the basement of the Hotel Palmeras, the hotel owned by the mayor’s family. “Oh really?” says Bliemsreider. “That’s the first I’ve heard of that. But I’ll tell you this,” he says with a chuckle. “I wouldn’t play there if I was you.”
He’s not sure if the casino is anything more than mere gossip. But the luxury resort that a local entrepreneur named Furio Valbonesi is said to be building up in those hills above Bellavista—Bliemsreider has seen that project with his own eyes. It’s far from finished, but it’s definitely taking shape, he says. And he has mixed feelings about it.
“On the one hand, this can be a good thing,” he says. “If Furio succeeds in filling this hotel, it will bring new boats, big boats, which will stay a while, which is not necessarily bad. That would be a lot of money for the Park. And in terms of the other businesses that exist in this town, I don’t think this will do any harm. The people who want to spend $1,200 a night for one of Furio’s rooms—none of these people would stay at the other places that exist here right now. The other hotels will not be hurt by the competition, because this is not competition. If anything, it may raise the standards in town.
“However,” he says, “I don’t know if that is what the Galápagos wants to become. This is supposed to be a natural environment in which you learn about an incredible legacy. It’s not necessarily supposed to be a rich person’s playground, like in the Caribbean.”
Through Furio Valbonesi’s eyes, that is precisely what the Galápagos is supposed to be: a playground for the rich. Furio is unabashed about this, sitting up on the veranda of his open-air restaurant, among the peaks of the highlands. A glass of chilled white wine is in his hand, and a dish of gnocchi sits on the table before him. Pavarotti is piped through the sound system, the strains of “Come Back to Sorrento” floating out into the afternoon mist.
Furio surveys the ocean far below. The Galapagos Explorer II is in port, and a man named Felipé Dégel, an officer on the Explorer, is up here, wearing his white crew member’s uniform but speaking and acting like Furio’s right-hand man. Dégel’s own glass of wine is almost finished, and he wants to know if the boss is going to drive up to the work site in his own car, or if he needs Felipé to take him.
“I’ll drive myself,” says Furio, lighting a cigarette as a young Ecuadorian woman removes his lunch plate. A small tour group has just left, after finishing their own lunch—$14 apiece—and are taking a tour of the lava tunnel located just a short hike uphill from here. The “tunnel visit,” as priced on the restaurant’s menu, costs $4 a person, which the guests here at Mutiny, which is what Furio calls his restaurant, are happy to pay.
“Mutiny,” says Furio, in clipped English laced with an Italian lilt, “is a very good hotel-discotheque in Coconut Grove, in Miami. I like the place. I like the name. So I use it here.”
Furio looks like he belongs in Miami, perhaps playing golf. He’s wearing an electric-blue Lacoste sportshirt and plaid shorts. And deck shoes, no socks. A pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses dangles from a cord looped around his neck. He’s slim, tanned, bald. To hear him tell it, he’s always been quite the bon vivant. He’s had his share of lovers, for example, but he’s never been married.
“Hey, I’m crazy,” he says, “but I’m not stupid.” That’s one of his favorite lines. He uses it often. “There are three billion women in this world,” he says. “That speaks for itself. There is always another one nicer than the one you are with, and that nicer one always comes along.”
Ask him about his background, and Furio hardly knows where to begin. He’s fifty-four, he says, born in Tuscany, into a family whose fortune has seen him through more than a few failed business ventures. He studied medicine, he says, in Paris, and worked for a time as a doctor in the early 1970s in New York. He traded steel for a while in Quito he says. He owned a shipyard in Brazil with a partner who he says wound up betraying him. “He had the know-how,” says Furio, “and I had the money. Then he disappeared. Now he has the money, and I have the know-how.”
It was in the mid-1970s, says Furio, that he first visited the Galápagos and bought this property, about two hundred acres. “No matter what has happened to me, I have always had this land,” he says. “In the worst of situations, I have never sold it.”
According to Furio, there have been some bad situations over the years. He owned a couple of tour boats here in the 1980s, but “they tended to sink.” By 1990, he says, “I’d had it with tourists.” Or at least he’d had it with tourists on boats. So he moved up here and opened this restaurant, which, three years ago, burned to the ground.
“People were thinking I must have done it for the insurance,” he says. “But I had no insurance.” He was able to rebuild this place, he says, only because the Franciscans in town allowed him to live in one of their church’s outbuildings while he pulled things together. “I lived the monk’s life,” he says, smiling and sipping his wine. “I can be realistic when I need to be.”
And he apparently can seize an opportunity when it presents itself, which is how he fell into the money both to resurrect this restaurant and to finally begin building his personal Xanadu up in a 400-acre section of forest at the top of this property. He has “a very rich friend” who made a fortune publishing a magazine called Auto Trader in England. The friend, says Furio, gave him the rights to publish the same magazine in Latin America and Malaysia.
“Both were big successes,” he says, grabbing a couple of issues from behind the bar. The magazines are replete with photos and descriptions of used cars and trucks for sale by their owners. It’s not rocket science, says Furio, but it’s lucrative. So much so that he not only was able to reopen this restaurant two years ago, but late last spring he finally broke ground for his dream palace, which, though it’s still more than a year from opening, has reached a point where he can show it to visitors.
“Let’s go take a look,” he says, climbing behind the wheel of a late-model Jeep Grand Cherokee. He settles into the soft leather seat, flips the air conditioner on high, and heads up a dirt road toward the hotel. A couple of copies of Architectural Digest are tossed in the backseat. One features Frank Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs. The other displays David Bowie’s lagoon-side estate on an island in Bali.
Furio’s hotel right now has no name, he says. “The Nameless Hotel, I call it,” he chuckles, downshifting as the rock-rutted road becomes steeper. “I will give one thousand dollars to someone who gives me the right name.”
A thousand dollars, he says smiling, would not mean much to the kind of clientele he expects to fill his hotel’s rooms. “They’re successful, young-to-middle-aged people, full of energy, but they don’t want to be wearing a backpack. If they ride a horse, someone is there to take care of that horse for them. If they have a picnic, someone is there to lay it out.
“You get the adventure,” he says, “but you get all the comfort and luxury, too. You get your wine, your caviar, your smoked salmon, whatever. Successful, achieving people, but not with the intention of sweat,” he says. “That is who this experience is for. Soft adventure, that is what this is.”
As the road levels off in a grove of crimson-leafed cinchona trees—an introduced species that has become a nightmarish pest for surrounding farmers—the hotel grounds appear up ahead, terraced and sodded, bedecked with flowers and ferns. More than fifty workers, all Ecuadorian, scramble in and out of half-finished buildings like aroused ants, in a meticulously bucolic setting as carefully manicured as a botanic garden.
A waterfall tumbles down an arrangement of boulders, cascading into a grottolike swimming pool. A tennis court has been cleared in the woods to the left. To the right is where the golf course and airstrip will sit. Up the tree-shaded slope to the rear are the guest quarters themselves, each its own private residence, each built in a distinctive, exotic, “indigenous” style designed by Furio’s architect.
The bungalows are cozy, stuccoed, painted bright peach, each with a cone-shaped thatched roof. “Authentic, indigenous,” Furio says of the roofs. “The Indians from the mainland, we brought them out to do the weaving.”
The “cabins” boast fireplaces, private Jacuzzis, copper bathroom fixtures from a metalsmith in Cuenca, hand-forged iron door fittings with massive medieval keys from antique shops in Guayaquil, ceramic-tiled floors, and hardwood beams and rafters. “The best of everything,” says Furio.
“Is exquisite, no?” he asks. Rooms and rates range from the “Imperial” suite, at $1,200 per evening, to what Furio calls the “Victor Hugo” rooms—two of them—which go for a mere $150 per person per night. “They are for the ‘miserables,’ get it?” he says.
He’s proud of the rooms, but Furio is even prouder of the resort’s central complex of buildings—thatch-roofed as well—where the guests can dine, drink, play, and be pampered. There is a gymnasium—“With the big mirrors, you know?”—and a spa, Turkish bath, dry sauna, and massage room. There is a library with leather sofas and chairs, a wet bar, a computer and fax machine. “And a printer,” says Furio smiling, “so you can work.”
There is no air-conditioning, “except for the cigars and the wine.” But there is an observatory, which will soon have its computerized telescope installed. “So you can take the picture of the star if you’d like,” says Furio, his voice echoing off the tiled floor of the dome-ceilinged room, as a worker by the doorway slaps paint on the wall.
There is a chapel—“multidenominational, of course,” says Furio. There is an underground art museum where three wooden crates of pre-Colombian pieces have already arrived. “I have several contacts,” Furio says of his source for the artwork.
There is a rooftop terrace with a sweeping view of the ocean and of Isabela Island on the western horizon. And there will soon be a helipad, not far from the swimming pool, “so you can come in on your boat with the helicopter and then fly straight up here,” Furio says. The clientele he’s prepared for would just as soon not be bothered with the “hassle,” as he puts it, of making their way up through the town. “That is not how people like this travel,” he says. “They are accustomed to comfort. From the boat to here, that’s what they want. If they want to see the town, they can go see the town, but that should be their choice.”
The hotel has seventeen rooms for thirty-four guests at most. Furio’s staff—“Maids, cooks, bartenders, reception people, massage girls, everything”—will number forty-five. And they will all be kept busy by what Furio has no doubt will be a booked-up hotel from the first day it opens, which he hopes will be by the end of 2001.
Furio steps out onto the central lodge’s rooftop terrace. The air is cool. The sounds of the forest—the insects and birds and the swish of the wind through the leaves of the trees—drift down from above, from the peaks to the east. Furio is flush with the mood of the moment. He is a philosopher, he says, even a poet, as much as he is a doctor and a hotelier. He has mused about many things, and right now he is considering the fate of such places as Bali, the Greek Islands, Belize, and, yes, the Galápagos. “In Europe, in the States, in the Caribbean,” he says with a sigh, “you see everything being changed and destroyed. So fast.”
Felipé Dégel appears, in case Furio needs something. The boss waves him away and continues his thought. “Here in these islands, things change not so much,” he says, lighting a cigarette. “Especially up here.”
He stops, leans on a rail, and looks out over the hillside that slopes to the sea. “I knew down there would become what it has,” he says, tossing his head in the direction of Puerto Ayora. “But up here is still different.”
Down there, in the harbor, the empress of the Galápagos tour fleet sits at anchor. White as milk from bow to stern, it’s as long as a football field and tall as a six-story building, with a warshiplike array of radar beacons and antennae on its top deck. It dwarfs the yachts and tour boats around it, boats like Bico Rosero’s Symbol. It makes them look like mere toys. In every respect, with its piano lounge, five-level elevator, and VCRs in each room, the Galápagos Explorer II aims to impress.
And it does. Shoppers and strollers down by the waterfront stop and pull out their cameras. Sure, there are a few locals—like Christy Gallardo, for example—who turn their backs, even pull their windowshades at the sight of the thing. They look at that black smoke curling from the Explorer’s massive twin funnels, and they know full well it comes from the bunker fuel that feeds the ship’s engines. They know that at night, while its passengers are sleeping and it moves in the dark from one island to the next, the Explorer’s crew sometimes dumps the waste from its toilets straight into the sea—or so some of the crew say.
But the tourists don’t know this, or maybe they don’t want to know. This is supposed to be a richer, more environmentally intimate experience than the traditional cruises vacationers book to the Greek Islands or the Bahamas or Alaska. This is ecotouring. Roughing it a bit. Hiking with backpacks and water bottles. Getting your feet wet when you climb from those wave-tossed dinghies onto the slick, shoreline rocks of these islands. Granted, if you’re on the Explorer, you’ve got all the shipboard comforts you could desire. But it’s an honest-to-god adventure you’re getting here as well, communing with the plants, animals, and fish in this natural setting.
It’s Felipé Dégel’s job to see that the Explorer’s guests get it all—the roughness and the comfort. He’s the ship’s “expedition leader,” the head honcho in charge of the Explorer’s battalion of guides. Right now his troops are ashore, shepherding their groups to the Research Station. After that, they’ll stop at some shops, buy a few souvenirs, then maybe grab a bite or a drink at a restaurant.
The Explorer’s brochure, a glossy pamphlet filled with color photographs, features quite prominently the ship’s many amenities. Images of the islands and animals are almost an aside to the wide-angle shots of the vessel’s lavish cabins, its sumptuous meals, its piano lounge’s gleaming brass fittings, recessed lighting, and gold brocade curtains.
The Explorer II was built in Italy nine years ago for Mediterranean cruising, which it did until the company that owned it went bankrupt. Nearly two years ago, after the first Explorer ran aground at Wreck Bay, the Conodros corporation, the largest ecotour company in Ecuador, leased this vessel and named it the Explorer II.
Conodros had already made somewhat of a name for itself back in 1996 by launching an “ecolodge” resort deep in the Amazonian rain forest in southeast Ecuador. The compound, called Kapawi—designed and built by the same architect who created Furio Valbonesi’s place—was built with the agreement and cooperation of the local, indigenous Achuar Indian tribe, to whom ownership of the land and lodge will revert in 2011. Until then, for a fee of $2,000 a month, which Conodros pays the Achuars, the company is permitted to fly in up to forty tourists at a time—each paying Conodros $1,260 for a one-week stay.
The guests arrive in small planes at a private landing strip in the jungle. The lodge compound consists of twenty lushly furnished, thatch-roofed cabins built on stilts and overlooking a jungle lagoon. “Isolation from the rest of the world doesn’t mean a lack of comfort,” reads the company’s brochure, “at least not in Kapawi.” Each room has a private bath with electricity and a hot shower. Meals are served in an open-air veranda. The bar is open till midnight. Canoe trips and hikes are led by Achuar guides, accompanied by Ecuadorian translators, and include a visit to a nearby Achuar village, which has aroused some controversy among those who consider such activity an intrusion.
No such controversy exists here in the Galápagos. The Explorer’s guests expect the best, and they get it. They pay top dollar for the ship’s choicest suites ($525 per person per night at the height of the season, which it is at the moment).
They are ferried ashore twice a day with military precision. The outboard launches that carry the guests in small groups to each island’s landing site are code-named Alpha and Delta and are dispatched in half-hour intervals. Each morning, the Alpha groups hit the shore while the Delta groups tour the coastline from the water. In the afternoon, they rotate. “That way,” explains one of the guides, “everybody gets to do both things, and it’s not too crowded.”
It’s midafternoon now, and there’s some commotion out on the deck. The Explorer II’s guests are returning from town, three pangas full, and the crew is taking their places to greet them—help them up the ladder, hose off their feet if need be, remove their life vests, and let them know dinner will be served at six.
“There are not that many people today,” says a woman watching the guests climb aboard. She is young, in her twenties, short and stout with a tight ponytail. She wears an officer’s uniform: white blouse, white shorts, white shoes. Her name is Camila Aroseména, the Explorer’s director of public relations.
“We have only twenty-three passengers right now,” she says. “Friday we pick up ninety-one, a charter group of Americans. I think they are flying up from Easter Island.”
About seventy percent of the Explorer’s business is American, says Camila. “Then comes probably the Germans,” she says. “Then the Japanese and the Netherlands. And Switzerland. Switzerland is coming on strong.” The average guest’s age on this ship is about sixty, says Camila. “It makes sense,” she says. “It is mostly older people who have the wealth.”
The ship’s crew, says Camila, numbers seventy, and all, like herself, are Ecuadorian. There is, she says, pressure to hire Galápagans. That was part of the deal when the boat was first brought here, she says. That’s part of the deal with almost all business enterprises here on the islands—that jobs should be provided to locals whenever possible. But it’s been tough, says Camila, who is from Guayaquil.
“The problem,” she says, “is if people are not educated enough, it is difficult to do this work where you are dealing with tourists. So many people from the Galápagos hardly speak English and are culturally deprived. They haven’t been exposed to the computer, to the Internet, to TV. These things are all new to them. I was born with these things. They were not.”
The result is a caste system among the Explorer’s crew that literally follows the waterline: The higher one climbs on this vessel, the fewer Galápagan employees one finds. The men steering the ship’s fleet of motor launches are almost all islanders. Down in the heat and grease of the engine room, a few local mechanics can be found as well. But up here on deck, except for the guides, everyone hails from Guayaquil, Cuenca, or Quito. The maids, the waiters, the cooks, the bartenders, the front desk staff, and of course, the ship’s officers, are all from the mainland.
That’s where Giovanni Celi, the Explorer II’s captain, is from. Heads turn as he enters the dining room for dinner, and rightfully so. He’s a dashing man, with a sly smile and a neatly trimmed, salt-and-pepper goatee. His uniform, with four bright gold braids on each sleeve, only makes him look more swashbuckling. It was, in fact, the sailor’s uniform that first drew Celi to dream of the sea.
“From the time I was a boy, always I liked the uniform,” he says, settling into his seat at the table of honor. Each evening, several of the Explorer’s passengers share their meal with the captain as guests at his table. This night, the chosen include Don and Abby, a husband and wife from Atlanta. Don’s a pilot with Delta; Abby’s an internist with the Centers for Disease Control. They’re young for this crowd, in their thirties, newlyweds, married just nine months ago. They had planned to make this trip for their honeymoon, but the ship was in dry-dock at the time. “So we went to Tahiti,” says Don. Now they’re finally here, and they’re loving it, says Abby. “He’s the water guy, the diver,” she says nodding at Don. “I’m the bird-watcher.”
Don is peppering the captain with questions, which Celi gracefully answers as the waiters silently move among the tables, the silverware tinkles, and soft, piped-in music floats through the air.
“My father is from Florence,” says the captain, explaining his surname. “But I was born and raised, like my mother, in Quito.” He entered Ecuador’s Naval Academy as a teen in the late ’70s, then spent seventeen years in the merchant marines. “It is interesting,” he says as the waiter removes his soup, “that most of the people in our country’s navy come from the highlands, from the mountains, not from the coast. Highland people in Ecuador tend to obey more easily than those from the coast.”
He now lives in Guayaquil with his third wife and children. “It is very difficult,” he says, “for a seaman to keep a marriage. You are away so long.” It was normal, says Celi, to be gone for more than two years at a time when he was sailing cargo and container ships around the globe. That’s why he leaped at Conodros’ offer in early 1998 to bring the Explorer II from Istanbul to the Galápagos and to stay on as its captain. “Now I am home much more often,” he says.
But these past two years have been strange times in Ecuador, says Celi, both here in the islands and back on the mainland. “All the animals were dying when I came here,” he says, “because of El Niño. Then came the crisis with the dollars. Then the volcanoes. And then this coup.”
He shakes his head at the current state of his nation. “We never go all the way to the bottom because we are so rich in the things we have,” he says. “In much of our country, you need an orange, you reach up and there is an orange. You put a hook in the water, there is a fish. So we do not really know what deprivation is.”
He takes a bite of his salad. “But with people moving so much to the cities, we are learning. The people want what they see on TV. And they are angry when they don’t have it.”
What, asks Don, does the captain think can be done?
“Well,” he says, “maybe something like how Pinochet did in Chile.”
Don can’t believe the captain has invoked a despot like Pinochet. But the captain is unruffled, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “Look at Chile today.” Celi smiles. “It is one of the best countries in South America. It is doing much better than Ecuador.”
He leans back while the waiter sets down the main course. “Our democracy is not like your democracy. Sometimes”—he shrugs—“is necessary to die innocent people along with the guilty.”
After dinner, the guests move to the bar or out onto the deck to look at the stars. Then they head to their staterooms and beds. While they are sleeping, the ship lifts its anchor and moves to the north side of the island, off a spot called Cerro Dragon. The next morning’s 6:30 A.M. wake-up call comes in the form of gentle whale cries and dolphin trills drifting down from bedroom-wall-mounted speakers. Breakfast is a buffet, with a chef cooking custom-made omelets, and an array of every imaginable fresh fruit except for bananas piled high on the table beside him.
“I can’t believe they are out of bananas,” says a wife to her husband. “Out of bananas in Ecuador?”
Breakfast is brisk, then the guests file onto the deck, where they split off into small groups of seven or eight, each with a guide who helps them into their life jackets. Don and Abby’s group includes a couple, Marcelle and Sibylle, from Luxembourg; a thirty-two-year-old financial consultant from Connecticut named Sylvia; and a seventy-four-year-old retired cardiologist from Pasadena, Robert Peck, who, with his wife Ruth, is making his second trip to the islands.
Dr. Peck has been all over the world, he says, but not as a typical traveler. He’s more what one might call a witness to history. He went to Zimbabwe just after the revolt in Rhodesia. “It was wonderful,” he says. “Uplifting.” He visited Nicaragua when the Sandinistas finally, as he puts it, “had the contras on the run.” He was in Berlin when the Wall came down—“to cheer them on.”
“I’m a human liberationist,” explains Peck. “I like to go where the fires are.” He’s been that way all his life, he says, from his days as a self-described leftist premed student at USC in the ’40s (“We formed a club called We Are One, which allowed the only four Negro students on campus to have lunch on a regular basis with some goodhearted white kids”); to his stint in the ’50s as a resident at the University of Chicago hospital, where he refused to sign a McCarthy-era “loyalty oath.” In the ‘60s, he treated poor coal miners in West Virginia, spent the “Mississippi summer” of 1964 caring for poor blacks in that state, and worked with war-injured Vietnamese children toward the end of the decade. Even now, he’s still active with Physicians for Social Responsibility, of which he’s been a member since the group was started.
“I’m no utopian,” he says. “But I do believe that every act we do, and everything we are as human beings, either makes things in this world better or worse.” That’s why, Peck explains, he has always vacationed as he does, either in a place where people are changing the world for what he believes is the better or in a place where man is dwarfed by the power of nature and time.
“To go someplace and get away from the technology, from the settings of our modern lives, and just feel the magnificence of the Sierras, or share the reverence of a Navajo guide or an old Hopi woman, to be in touch with the ancestry and eternal flow of man and nature,” he says. “There’s nothing that compares to that kind of experience.”
That, says Dr. Peck, is what’s great about the Galápagos. “It’s a natural. Darwin. The theory of evolution. The sense of time before time. It’s a powerful place.”
It’s time now to go ashore. Don and Abby’s group’s guide, an elfish young woman named Colette, ushers them into a dinghy and in a matter of minutes they’re on land, following Colette up a narrow trail that winds through cactus and shrubs to a muddy lagoon. Don has his video camera out, taping the scenery with a running commentary of jokes and asides.
“Shh,” says Colette, stopping and pointing. There, halfway out in the broad, shallow pond, stands a flamingo.
“It’s not very pink,” says Marcelle.
“Like the ones in the zoo?” says Colette with a wink. “They feed carotene to the ones in the zoo, to bring out the pink.”
The group moves on as Colette leads the way. While the guests all wear hiking boots or tennis shoes, Colette walks barefoot as she climbs over rocks and tree roots. “You get used to it,” she says, giving Sibylle a hand up a steep section of stones.
Colette Moine is one of Puerto Ayora’s more colorful residents, pedaling around town on her unicycle. She’s got a tightrope as well, a trapeze, and a well-worn set of juggling pins, all from the two years she spent as a young teenager at a circus school in her native Paris. She left there eight years ago, at age fourteen, to join her father in Quito. Her parents had split up when Colette was two, and her father had moved to South America. Colette came to the Galápagos to stay six years ago, moving in with one of her father’s three ex-wives. The woman, an Italian named Sylvana, ran a popular waterfront restaurant called The Four Lanterns. Colette worked there as a waitress, but soon found herself managing the place when Sylvana suddenly took off for Tahiti.
“‘Good-bye, I’m going.’ Just like that, I was in charge,” says Colette with a heavy French accent. “I was sixteen,” she says, smiling and shaking her head. Since then the restaurant has closed, and Colette has become a certified naturalist guide and a dive master. Her friends are pushing her to become the Galápagos’ first female tour boat captain, but she’s not sure if she’s ready for that, at least not yet. “I’d like to get on a sailing boat—the right boat,” she says, “and go anywhere in the world and see what’s happening.”
At the moment, however, Colette is here, guiding the group up a bluff overlooking the sea. The view below broadens as the trail climbs higher. The ocean spreads out, bright-blue and sparkling. A dirt-orange land iguana the size of a terrier stands motionless under a tangle of brush. At an outcrop of rocks, the group takes a break, kicking back in the blaze of the midmorning sun. The coolness of the breeze on their sweat-soaked skin, the tweets and whistles of birds in the foliage around them, the soft whoosh of the surf far below: It’s a transportive moment.
Until Don begins talking about the price he paid for a chateaubriand dinner with wine at a hotel in Quito. He wonders aloud if his and Abby’s flight home on Friday will be leaving on time. When he asks if anyone here knows that David Letterman just had a heart attack the other day, Dr. Peck has finally had enough.
“Colette,” the doctor says gently. “There’s an old saying: Seize the day. Can we stop this talk about airplanes and schedules? Let’s move back into this island.”
And they do. Marcelle takes a hit in the arm from the thorns of a cactus. Dr. Peck struggles a bit with one of the trail’s rockier stretches. But all in all, it’s a magical morning. When the group gets back to the ship, lunch is ready, a lavish spread served outside by the pool.
That afternoon the group does Seymour Island, where the foliage is thick with a colony of male fragatas (frigate birds) displaying their lust-inflated, ruby-red throat sacs to the females soaring overhead. The boobies are here, too, doing their odd, little courtship dance among the low-lying shrubs and stones, oblivious to the camera-clicking humans.
The day winds down leisurely as smooth sets of translucent, green waves roll in from the west, backlit by the setting sun. Outlined against the flame-orange sunset are the rugged contours of Daphne Major, the island where Peter and Rosemary Grant are still at it after thirty years, continuing the ornithological research described in The Beak of the Finch. As a dinghy waits to return the group to the ship, Sibylle hangs back. Mesmerized by the vista from a cliff overlooking the waves, she’s silhouetted by the last of the day’s sunlight.
That evening, Dr. Peck and his wife join the group at the captain’s table. The conversation wends its way to the captain’s vision of his own future.
“My dream,” he says, “is to have a sailboat and just go on it, go around the world, alone or with my son.”
What about his wife? someone asks.
He frowns and shakes his head. “The woman on board is bad luck,” he says. “The Greeks, if they had a woman on board, they would throw her over.”
It’s hard to tell if the captain is joking. No one presses the point. The evening moves on.
The next day the sun rises over Española Island, where the ship has now dropped anchor. The morning is spent in a motor launch, puttering along the island’s wave-washed cliffs. Colette points out the bird life, the blood-red barnacles, and the bright-orange Sally Lightfoot crabs scuttling over the rocks. After lunch, the group goes ashore for a two-hour hike along the crests of those cliffs.
That evening, it’s time for farewells. The ship’s “master musician”—the same pianist tinkling Beatles tunes in the bar two nights earlier—plays “The Shadow of Your Smile” on the lounge’s piano as the captain, flanked by Camila and the rest of the Explorer’s officers in full dress uniforms, raises a toast to the guests.
“We salute you,” he says.
The lights dim, the chairs and tables are pulled back, the disco ball in the ceiling starts spinning, and taped salsa music begins thumping from the room’s speakers. But it’s late. No one feels much like dancing. Camila and one of her shipmates give it a whirl, but within a half-hour the party is over and the room empties out. A half-hour later, the chairs and tables have been moved back into place, ready for the next day, when this load of passengers will check out and the charter tour of Americans will check in.