Australia’s Macquarie Island

by Andrew Evans on

Have you ever had an obese, wild baby elephant seal drop its head in your lap and slobber nose love all over you? It melts a heart faster than a Snickers in a microwave, really.

Macquarie Island (pronounced mak-worry) is Australia’s southernmost point, a tiny spit of an island some 940 miles (1,500 km) southeast of Tasmania. For you mariners out there that’s a three-day sail from Hobart-past the roaring 40s and into the furious 50s. The island is only about twenty miles long and two miles across-a lonely scrap of sub-antarctic landscape consisting of pointed grassy slopes and rocky beaches where mist lingers all the day long.

Discovered in 1810 by wayward sealers, Macquarie was kept a secret in order that they get rich quick from the magnificent seal colonies living on the island. In 1811, the first ship to arrive in Sydney from Macquarie carried almost 57,000 seal skins. Today, the descendants of these piles of skins still tumble along the salt and pepper sand, bellowing out the unique throaty growl of the adult elephant seal. It’s quite a sight. Forget all your images of Australia’s man-eating crocodiles and creepy snakes and spiders. Here is a different kind of nature reserve where the local attraction grows to 20 feet long, weighs more than three tons, and spends most of the day sleeping on the beach.Macquarie is not your typical vacation destination–there is no permanent human population and there are no hotels or restaurants (though the chef at the Australian meteorological station bakes terrific scones). Also, it rains pretty much constantly and on most days, the wind blows hard enough to knock you down.

What Macquarie does have is wildlife and a lot of it. Thanks to extreme isolation, very little human contact and strict conservation rules, the animals on Macquarie harbor no fear of humans whatsoever. While guidelines instruct keeping at least 30 feet from any wild animal, the sheer abundance of living breathing cute cuddly things makes it impossible. You try hard not to touch or interfere, but if they come to you, then just let them. Sit down on the beach and the baby elephant seals will flop their way towards you, sniff you out, then curl up beside you begging to spoon. Likewise, brown fluffy balls of baby penguins come teetering up to check you out, then start screeching for mom and dad. The cuteness factor trumps a million sneezing panda vids.

Four kinds of penguin live on Macquarie. The largest and most vivid are the elegant King penguins who are the slightly smaller cousins to the iconic Emperor penguins (the ones you and your kids know and love from Happy Feet). As a self-certified, card-carrying member of the penguin craze, I went berserk on watching all the action that goes on in Macquarie’s penguin colony. Even more amusing were the royal penguins, who waddle to and from shore shaking their bushy yellow eyebrows. The species is only found on this island and number well over a million pairs.

We later traveled to Lusitania Bay, Australia’s largest protected penguin rookery. From out of the white fog, the shore appeared like a dream sequence. At first I saw nothing except a buzzing black and white screen beyond the mist. Suddenly our little boat lurched forward and the beach came into focus: not hundreds, not thousands, but a hundred thousand or more penguins. An unreal sight and an unreal sound, that of an infinite chorus of nasally seabirds calling out in almost-unison. Penguins were diving and swimming all around us as well, bulleting through the golden ripples of waves. I’ve never felt so outnumbered in my life.

In the distance, a pair of old-fashioned rusty steam cookers sat on the beach as an eerie reminder of the island’s exploitative past. Once upon a time, men gathered up penguins and threw them in the pot to boil up some penguin oil, used to make rope and twine back in the day. The penguins triumphed, thank goodness, and today the island is a vital breeding spot.

I sailed to Macquarie on the MV Orion, an Australian expedition ship which–in the spirit of Gadling’s motto, goes there–or in other words, goes to the places where few ships ever go. (If you’re going to travel to one of the least habitable islands in the world, it helps to be traveling on one of the world’s most habitable ships.) As tourist interest broadens, the government still limits visits to under twelve ships a year. Extraordinary bird life attracts all the gung ho bird nuts out there, while map nuts like me are eager to get to such a remote place and see what we can see.

I feel immensely lucky to have traveled to this forgotten map crumb of Australia. I loved the penguins and friendly elephant seals and the giant killer whales swimming in the shallows. The brown-green kelp and chunks of ice on the beach added an extra twinge of exoticism, however it was the island itself that attracted me-a rare and lonely place at the bottom of the world that few know and even fewer ever visit.%Gallery-79934%

Coming Attractions: Panama

by Andrew Evans on

Watch out world, ‘cuz here comes Panama–that skinny little land-bridge of a country that’s famous for straw hats, yellow-fever infestations and American meddling.

Just how skinny a country is it? From the time the pilot lowers the landing gear to the time your flight actually lands in Panama City, that’s how much. One minute you’re looking down at the turquoise Caribbean and exactly four and a half minutes later, you’ve landed on the other side of the country, where–if you can see past the skyscrapers–you’ll observe mammoth cargo ships lining up in the Pacific Ocean to enter the canal.

Imagine a 13-year old mixed-race girl from a broken home who spends her childhood in a reform school later to discover that her abusive deadbeat father left her a massive trust fund. That’s Panama: young and eager, a little messed up, filling out nicely . . . and ridiculously rich.

Now that Panama gets to keep the cash she earns from her famous canal, the country has gained the kind of newfound respectability that comes from having new clothes and holding democratic elections. Witnessing Panama’s overnight transition from banana republic to middle-class retirement haven is like watching the Univision version of Extreme Makeover: it feels so tacky but you can’t change channels because you just have to find out what happens next.What’s happening now is this: a LOT of money is flowing into Panama, some of it from legit investors and some of it from Colombian entrepreneurs (and such as). Until recently, dysfunction and dictators kept away the Bills and Carols from Oklahoma City so that Panama’s nature remained underappreciated and remarkably intact. Meanwhile, neighboring Costa Rica has turned into another Orlando but with ziplines and monkeys. Panama’s real estate boom threatens a repeat of that trend, but for now, the real nature lovers and hardcore birdwatchers are all heading down to Panama’s vast network of well-protected national parks. They quickly realize that this is a beautiful, safe and fun place to travel.

The time I spent in Panama was filled with virgin tropical rain forests that were packed with amazing wildlife but wonderfully devoid of annoying tourists. Also, the beaches are phenomenal: literally hundreds of miles of beautiful coastline line the Atlantic and Pacific. Yes, all you scuba divers-you can dive in both oceans on the same day and enjoy two completely separate experiences.

The great Panama Canal is an awesome attraction in and of itself. Canal cruises are exploding in popularity so that nearly every major cruise line now tries to work it into their annual itinerary. If you prefer to head off the beaten path, then check out the deepest darkest Darien region or the San Blas islands and the Caribbean homeland of the Kuna Indians-Panama’s indigenous population. The fascinating Kuna culture is definitely one of the more exotic elements that has fortunately begun to be included in the country’s growing tourist development.

As a former American colony, English is widely spoken alongside Spanish, so that in many ways, Panama is a bilingual country. Other benefits include relatively good roads, a surprising collection of fine hotels, and a greater degree of rule of law than your average Central American country.

But is it really so peachy in Panama? Pretty much. Obviously, there’s a bunch of shady stuff going down–when Panama City billboards advertise savings accounts in Russian, well then, that’s got dodgy written all over it. And yet this kind of minor-league, white-collar stuff actually encourages all the stuff tourists love: lower street crime, good restaurants, and broader acceptance of credit cards. The fact is that nobody really knows what’s going on in Panama–the important thing is that it’s going and the sign in the window says, “Open.”

Helpful hints
The worst thing about getting to Panama is that you might have to switch planes in Miami-a two-hour flight away. Better options include direct flights from Houston (2 hours), Washington, DC (4 hours) or Los Angeles (5 hours). Panama’s Tocumen International Airport feels like an upscale Orange County mall minus the skateboarders. If you go shopping, remember that real Panama hats are made in Ecuador, so check the label. Another quick tip: get out of Panama City. Other than the old city (a romantic, yet tumbledown cluster of Havana-like architecture), the city is trying its darndest to be the next Las Vegas. Better to trade the traffic jams for the nice villages and tropical landscape of the countryside.

Bowermaster’s Adventures — Overfishing the Galapagos Islands

by Jon Bowermaster on

The equation is straightforward: Too many people attempting to live permanently in the Galapagos + too few jobs to go around = a percentage are resorting to illegal economies to survive. Shark finning is one of those illegalities, and still growing. Financed by mafias based in mainland Ecuador, fins are taken – hacked off, the useless carcasses tossed overboard – and sent abroad for shark fin soup. Japanese are the biggest culprits though there are restaurants as far away as Norway and Germany, which sell the soup as well. The sad reality is that not only is it a complete waste of the shark but the fins have absolutely no taste, no nutritional value. It’s all about the show. If you can afford shark fin soup – at a business meeting, wedding, anniversary – it means you’ve got the bucks to spend on a frivolity.

You’ve seen the television ads recently promoting various shark weeks? Fear continues to sell mediocre TV, thus the boom of such shows. Another statistic: How many people are killed by sharks each year worldwide? On average, four or five. How many sharks does man kill each year, some for food, others for showy displays of money? More than seventy million. It’s the sharks that should be swimming away from us as fast as they can.
Over fishing around the globe is a huge problem. The over fishing of sharks, especially the big ones, known as “apex predators” (including the great white and reef sharks) is particularly damaging to the marine cycle since sharks maintain the populations of smaller fish that in turn feed on smaller fish that people consume commercially. Minus the predators, these sub-predators run rampant and decimate smaller fish stocks. While we may think there are unlimited numbers of fish in the sea, the more we rapaciously take the fewer species will live on into the coming decades. One more statistic? The World Wildlife Fund expects all of the fish that we know today to be gone by 2050. That’s what we should be scared of, not the very slim potential of becoming lunch while enjoying a sunny holiday at the beach. (To find a detailed chart and database of the world’s endangered sharks, visit the Shark Foundation.)

%Gallery-77072%Recent attempts to bolster international fishing laws may be getting an extra push in the U.S. pending the passage of legislation now being considered in the Senate (and recently passed in the House). The legislation is designed to close most of the loopholes in the current ban on shark finning in American waters. Hopefully other nations will follow suit.

In the Galapagos we spent time with Godfrey Merlen, who represents San Francisco-based Wild Aid there. A twenty-year resident, he leads the group’s local efforts against illegal wildlife trafficking. Small groups of paid informants keep him alert to who in the relatively small community are shark finning (as well as poaching sea cucumbers and other at-risk species). Unfortunately once the fins are back in mainland Ecuador, even when seized by officials they often end up back in the illegal markets. Corruption is a boom business in Ecuador too.
“Over fishing of a number species is a reality in the Galapagos and in some ways – for some species, like lobsters – it’s a little bit late to talk about. We also know that thousands and thousands of sea cucumbers are recovered from illegal fisheries every year, which has had a depressing effect on the remaining population and makes management of it near impossible.

Bowermaster’s Galapagos — Chapter V from gadling on Vimeo.

“Still, even though we know it’s going on, illegal sea cucumber gathering is an active component of the fisheries here and brings in considerable money. Just recently, at the end February, there was a capture of thirty sacks of cucumbers on the mainland, about 3,000 pounds, with an estimated value of about $200,000. This is a lot of money and a lot of sea cucumbers. Most of them came from right here in the Galapagos Marine Reserve. Local fishermen say, What are we supposed to do, what are we supposed to fish? Lobster and grouper are nearly gone. So they get into the illegal market very, very simply and easily. Though the national park has patrol boats and keeps up vigilance the area is enormous and enforcement is difficult. As a result it’s been extremely easy to export illegal produce from the Galapagos.

“It’s exactly the same with the shark fin. Sharking finning, the removal of the fins and leaving the bodies to rot either in the ocean or on the shoreline, has become very common in Galapagos. Again, the fishermen say, “I have a lot of debt, I need to buy a new motor for my boat, and I don’t have any money.” Then someone comes along and says, Well, okay, I’ll lend you money but what I want is sea cucumbers, shark fins, sea lion penises, seahorses, whatever is the going mode especially in the far eastern countries where money is not a problem. Huge sums of money can be poured into a place like the Galapagos to fuel an illegal fishery. In the long run of course things can only go from bad to worse for the fishery.

“As resources decline whether through legal or illegal fisheries the resource is the basis of the fisherman’s economy. As those resources decline, incomes decline too and the cost of living keeps going up. Sooner or later the price of fuel will jump back up; currently it’s a very false $1 a gallon for diesel. What the fishermen fail to understand is that ultimately all these illegal activities combined with the lack of a sufficiently strong fisheries management, at a certain point the fishing sector of the economy will collapse.

“At the moment the fisherman finds himself in a really hot spot, partially through his own failure to appreciate the risks he’s running. He may make money today but tomorrow he will not make money. He’s already discovered that with the sea cucumber. Basically the fishermen have very little money because the resource is disappearing.”

Bowermaster’s Adventures — The Charles Darwin Research Center

by Jon Bowermaster on

While in the Galapagos filming we ran into an American writer living in Puerto Ayora, the big town on the island of Santa Cruz, researching a book about exactly the same subject of our film – the current state of affairs across the archipelago.

Carol Ann Bassett’s book is just out, published by National Geographic, fittingly titled “Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists and Creationists Battle for Darwin’s Cradle of Evolution,” and it’s a fantastic tutorial for anyone curious about the natural and human health of the island state today.

I was particularly curious about her reportage on Darwin’s initial reaction to the islands that will forever be linked with his theory of evolution.

Like other biographers of Darwin – who first visited in 1835 as a curious but inexperienced 26-year-old, born the same day as Abraham Lincoln – she labels his role as evolutionary mystery solver as “one of the greatest myths of the history of science.” Citing a study by Harvard professor and MacArthur Foundation “genius” Frank Sulloway, the book details how little Darwin actually took away from the Galapagos after his five-week visit. He had “no eureka flashes of enlightenment,” she writes, “it would take decades before his final theory transcended his religious beliefs and his enduring doubts.”

In his book “Voyage of the Beagle” Darwin referenced the Galapagos sparingly; in his “On the Origin of Species,” published twenty years later, he never mentioned the finches – mistakenly thought by many to be the linchpin of his evolutionary theory – and which are named for him.

It took those twenty years between publications for the significance of the Galapagos to sink in on Darwin. For two decades he wrestled with the history of creationism and its relevance to species diversity. In the end, he came down on the right side of the argument (unless of course you are among those who continue to believe the planet is only 6,000 years old and that life as we know it was created in six days). That his name and theory are so inextricably linked with both evolution and the Galapagos is something Darwin could have never predicted. Nor could he have predicted the clash of economics and the environment, which so wrack the place today.

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The Charles Darwin Research Center sits atop a long hill climbing up from Puerto Ayora, on the big island of Santa Cruz. Part of the Charles Darwin Foundation established in 1959 – the lone international research and advisory institution dedicated to exclusively studying the Galapagos – the CDRS is both an archive of historical scientific study and site of various laboratories engaged in today’s most cutting-edge research in the islands. Many of the world’s most-expert Galapganian scientists either have worked here or still do and we’ve walked up the hill to visit with one, marine biologist Alex Hearn … who we find with his hands in a tank, coddling one of the darlings of local marine life, the sea cucumber.

Sitting on a second-story deck overlooking the blue ocean that is his backyard we talk about the impacts of over fishing here. Some highlights:

“You know the Galapagos has a history of over-exploitation that goes way back to the whalers of the sixteenth century. Ever since we’ve had successive waves of boom-bust fisheries. The latest being the sea cucumber which started in the early Nineties as a result of the resource collapsing on the continent followed by a sizable migration of fishers who had already successively depleted the sea cucumber along the coast of Ecuador moving to the islands and hammering the resource here. At the time it was unregulated and there was no way of stopping it because there was no Marine Reserve. By the time the Marine Reserve was created a lot of the damage had already been done. Sometimes we forget that the Marine Reserve management system inherited a lobster resource which had already collapsed in the Eighties, and a sea cucumber resource that had already been heavily fished for ten years ….”

“In terms of coastal fishing, the number of local fishermen — who are the only ones legally allowed to fish here — has nearly tripled during the Nineties, from about 400 to over 1,000. Fishing around the coast has increased dramatically and we haven’t been very successful in managing it. In part because it’s a group with a lot of political power as well as the perception of an immediate need. Since 1998 this local management system has failed to take into account the sustainability of both lobster and sea cucumber. The result is that both are suffering, badly ….”

“When you’re at university or when you’re studying a particular species biologically you’re focused on the species. When you’re looking at the fisheries, the actual biology of the species is the least important thing really, your job becomes more about managing people. Getting them, first of all, to trust that our advice is first and foremost because we are scientists and is focused on sustainability. Our motivation is not about eliminating or prohibiting fishermen. There is a big lack of trust here, partly due to the fact that we’re both a science and conservation organization and carry a fair amount of political power as well. As a result we vote on the system as a conservation sector but we also provide the technical advice, which may sometimes seen as a little bit suspect. Some locals, fishermen, will say ‘You’re providing the advice just to justify your position.’ It can get very complex. It’s about building trust and showing them that the long-term impacts of over fishing and are very difficult to prove but that we still need to make changes now ….”

“Working in Galapagos is like a rollercoaster. There are times when it’s immensely frustrating and there are times when it’s just paradise. To tell the truth, for me, as a young scientist coming to Galapagos straight out of university, to be able to develop lines of research, to be able to publish, to be able to take the research from the sea to the government and follow that entire process is something you really don’t get in many other places. On a personal level I am eternally grateful for Galapagos. Besides, Galapagos also gave me a wife and a baby. So what can I say?”

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Photo of the Day (10.31.09)

by Brenda Yun on

Believe it or not, our Photo of the Day was taken in Kentucky — at Mammoth Caves, to be exact. As Gadling photographer Peter Rivera explains, “A blast of arctic air flows up from the blackness. you go down concrete steps, lower and lower until the sunny August trees are left behind…” Peter aptly named this photo “descending into the abyss,” and for those of you intrepid travelers who are venturing into the cool Halloween evening, I hope you come back from the abyss safely!

If you have some great travel shots you’d like to share, be sure to upload them to the Gadling pool on Flickr. We might just pick one as our Photo of the Day!