San Cristóbal was the first island that Darwin visited in 1835; today local residents of the island’s largest town, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, take an evening stroll along the waterfront and are amused to find Darwin pondering the contours of their archipelago in a water fountain.
Darwin checks out the view from the volcanic crest of Bartolomé Island, an extinct volcano that provides an extraordinary view of surrounding islands.
In his notes, Darwin referred to marine iguana’s with relative revulsion. “The black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2-3 ft), disgusting clumsy Lizards. They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl & seek their prey from the Sea. I call them ‘imps of darkness’. They assuredly well become the land they inhabit.”
The cold-blooded reptiles are the only lizard that has evolved the ability to live and forage in the sea.
On Darwin’s 1835 visit to Galapagos, it was his identification of three distinct species of mockingbird that initially led him to question the stability of species. On this trip, he comes face-to-face with a fourth species: the Hood mockingbird. This one, by far the most aggressive of an already curious species, will explore almost anything in search of the most rare commodity on the islands: fresh water. This one examines an abandoned albatross egg along with Darwin.
On Española, Darwin comes face to face with a juvenile waved albatross. These endangered birds have the largest wingspan of any bird, up to 11 feet. This one is nearing the day when it will awkwardly waddle about 200 feet from its nest to a cliff overlooking the ocean, to leap over the edge into it’s first flight.
Over the eons of time, the shifting currents of the Galapagos made immigration to the islands a difficult and rare occurrence. Today, visitors from all over the world splash ashore hourly. Visits to unpopulated islands such as Bartolomé Island, however, are strictly regulated by the national park service of Ecuador, which manages 97.5 percent of the Galapagos Archipelago.
Bartolomé Island is one of the few places left in the Galapagos where penguins can still be found, and we saw just one lonely looking penguin standing on the edge of the bay beneath Pinnacle Point.
A sea lion pup spots Darwin coming ashore, and flops over to properly welcome him to South Plaza Island, a small, crescent shaped island that is less than 500 feet wide. Today about 1,000 sea lions make the island their home.
Darwin landed on just four islands during his visit to the Galapagos aboard the HMS Beagle in 1835.
I’m back from an extraordinary holiday voyage around the Galapagos archipelago. My traveling companion on the journey was none other than Charles Darwin, who spoke to me from a shelf at Archie McPhee, expressing a keen desire to make a return trip to the islands he visited 175 years ago, to “see how things have evolved.”
We had many adventures together. During the rest of this month, I’ll be posting a new photo every day from our visit to the Enchanted Isles that rocked the world.
I’m also cutting a short film shot during the trip on my Canon 60D and lovely little Canon S95 with Ikelite underwater housing, which I’ll post later this month. Enjoy.
Did you hear that big thunderclap that split the sky over Seattle last Wednesday morning? That was our first day of shooting on my first feature-length film, a participatory doc called Beyond Naked. I like to think of that moment as the film gods yelling “Action!” Herzog has his day-one, gaffer-tape-over-the-heart routine – I’ve got my thunder. I like where this is going!
Follow our progress on the film’s website at http://www.beyondnakedfilm.com, a WordPress blog that I’ll be updating frequently with stills, clips, and much more.
Here’s a few frame grabs that will give you a taste of the gloomy vibe we’re choosing to open the film with (this is Seattle in December, after all):
I met Vincent Moon a few months ago when Northwest Film Forum brought him to Seattle for screenings of his films and a one-day workshop. I was blown away by the raw emotional power of his work, despite the fact that he breaks every rule in the filmmaking book (no narrative structure, out-of-focus subjects, made with crappy camcorders, etc.)
Moon faces the same problem faced by lots of filmmakers doing interesting (but not commercially viable) work: how to fund it. Moon has made an art of the small exchange (exchanging, for example, lodging in a foreign city for a short film about the place). But that can only take one so far. So now he’s experimenting with Kickstarter to fund the Columbia project. I’m backing it, not only because I want to see what he comes back with, but also because I’d like to understand by participating how this type of funding can work, for supporters as well as filmmakers.