South America was on my “bucket list” of places I wanted to visit. I saw a kosher tour organized by Zvi Lapian to the Amazon rainforests, Galapagos Islands, and Peru, including the legendary Machu Picchu, Lost City of the Incas. It sounded exotic and exciting, so I decided to sign up. Little did I realize how strenuous this trip would be. If you’re looking to relax, don’t look here! But if you are seeking to explore the world and learn a lot, by all means go ahead! The remote Galapagos Islands, in particular, are fascinating not only because of the unusual and abundant wildlife but also because of their connection to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has had such profound effects on Western civilization.
I flew from Tel Aviv to Madrid with Air Europa. The flight from Madrid to Ecuador was delayed by five hours, which meant that I had to spend the whole night at the Madrid airport. There were long lines waiting at all the eateries and food stands, and I had to wait a long time just to drink some cold water. (On the way back to Madrid, they had no kosher meal for me to keep me going for the 11-hour flight – even though it was confirmed weeks before by the travel agent. Traveler, beware!)
At 5:30 in the morning, a huge line of angry people was waiting to board the plane. There was a shouting match with the staff of Air Europa. I guess the Spanish, like the South American Latinos, are emotional people.
Despite this unpropitious start, however, I found myself, 11 hours later, in the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, a city of one million residents nestled in the Andes Mountains. Unfortunately, my initial impression was of a mishmash of buildings that lacked in aesthetics. To add to the eyesore, slums seemed to creep up the beautiful mountains that envelop the city.
Quito must be the hairdresser capital of the world. While walking on Shabbos near the Marriott Hotel where we were staying, I counted at least four hairdressers and four tattoo shops per block. To my surprise, the local currency is the almighty U.S. dollar. No need to exchange money here! It’s a poor country. There were some nice buildings and shopping malls, but it was not uncommon to see a woman sitting in a store by herself waiting all day for someone to buy an apple or banana. And if that were not enough, there were beggars, jugglers, fruit sellers, and squeegee men hawking their services at the red lights – they are the poorest of the poor, Venezuelan refugees who fled the social chaos in their country. There are a few hundred Jews here but nothing to write home about. A local Chabad is trying to salvage what’s left of this rapidly assimilating community.
The Not-So-Amazing Amazon
Ecuador, which lies in the northwest part of South America, level with the equator, has four distinct ecological regions: the coastal plain, the Andes Mountains, the Amazon rainforest, which lies to the east of the Andes, and the Galapagos Islands.
The drive to the Amazon took us up, over, and down the other side of the Andes. Our original group of 14 (another four joined later) traveled in two minivans. The road was bumpy, full of potholes, and very windy. It took us, including the stops, almost five hours to reach our destination. I would have suffered from motion sickness had I not taken medication for it.
We came to the Napo River (total length: 668 miles) in the Amazon forest, where we got onto rowboats powered by a motor board. Sitting on the rim of the boat, with our luggage towed by other boats, we made our way to an island that housed our hotel. (It was founded by a former Coca Cola executive who happened to be Swiss.) It is wintertime south of the equator, but the temperature was in the eighties, and the humidity was dreadful. Baltimore in the summer is like a desert compared to this place!
Over the next three days we hiked in the jungle and went rubber tubing and kayaking along the river. Tall rubber boots to protect against the mud are a necessity and were provided by the hotel. My assessment: You can get the same thrill at Harper’s Ferry without all the travel and humidity.
The rainforest we were in was sanitized of four-legged, terrestrial wildlife. We did see some animals in cages at an “animal refuge/hospital” but not in the wild. You can get a much better rainforest experience – with monkeys swinging on vines right over your head – with less humidity in Costa Rica. (I wrote about my trip there in a previous issue of the Where What When.) You don’t need to go to the Amazon! The heat and humidity just knocked me out, and I was out of commission in the afternoons. The hotel did not have air-conditioning, but the ceiling fan did provide quite a bit of comfort. Special yellow bulbs that repel mosquitoes illuminated the doors of the rooms and the walkways to the center of the hotel complex.
The most amazing things I found in the Amazon were not the exotic plants, insects, or animals but the people who were part of our group. There was a fellow in his seventies with a big black yarmulke perched on his head and wearing suspenders, who looked like the proprietor of a small dry goods store in the Lower East Side. In reality, he was the retired superintendent of all the public schools in one of New York’s boroughs! His sheitel-wearing wife, besides being a bubbe, holds a doctorate in education.
There was a remarkable lady in her eighties named Rose Ruth, with her second husband, Alan. One of the activities was tubing down the Napo River. This small, frail lady lay down in the tube by herself, letting the current bring her downriver, where she would be later picked up by a boat crew. What was even more remarkable was that she had been traumatized by the drowning accident that killed her first husband, but she was determined not to let that stop her from taking the plunge. “I can’t let that incident control me for the rest of my life,” she told me. “I have decided to face it and overcome it.” When she and her husband left our group later in the tour to return to Israel, where they currently reside, they told us that they were making one stop along the way – in Tanzania! This elderly frum couple had donated to Innovative Africa, a nonprofit organization that provides solar panels to produce electricity in remote villages. They were on their way to one of these villages, where their money had financed the introduction of electricity to power the lights of a school for 1,000 pupils! Some people are forever young.
From the Amazon, we returned to Quito. From Quito we took a 5:30 a.m. flight (after getting up at 3:30 a.m. Forget about this being a leisure tour!) to the Galapagos Islands, which was the main reason for my signing onto this tour.
Go, Go, Galapagos
The Galapagos Islands! Unspoiled land of giant tortoises, iguanas, birds, and sea lions! Where is this remote place?
The Galapagos are an archipelago of volcanic islands about 563 miles west of Ecuador. They are famous for the visit of Charles Darwin during the second voyage of the HMS Beagle. His observations and collections of the islands’ numerous endemic species played a large part in Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
The flight took two hours, taking us eastward over the Pacific Ocean. We landed in Baltra, one of a few cities. (The total population of the islands is 25,000.) This was the first time I experienced having the contents of my luggage examined after going through passport control to leave the airport. And we are not talking about customs! It’s the ecology, stupid. The islands’ fragile ecology is strictly monitored. They were checking for seeds, plants, and animals. We were also not allowed to bring any food items.
After the luggage inspection, we boarded buses that took us to a pier. Then we put on life jackets and boarded – 12 people at a time – small boats that were outfitted with inflated tubing on the outer rim, where we sat, holding tightly to handles in order not to tip over.
We arrived at a 99-passenger ship, the Legend, where I was assigned to a cabin on the second level of the ship. I thought the ship was going to transport us to a hotel on one of the islands. But walking into the room, I saw two twin beds, a large window that spanned the room, a small bathroom with a shower, and a closet, plus a small area to put the luggage. I suddenly realized that this was going to be our hotel! I should have read the itinerary! I never slept on a boat before.
Our tour group had lunch in its own kosher dining room. The main waiter for our kosher group was a fellow from Columbia (the country) who was taking the time off from his law studies to make a few bucks. The mashgiach (who seemed to be missing when he was needed most) was a Spanish-speaking fellow who now lives in Israel.
The ship’s 99 passengers were divided into six groups, each named after some critter on the Galapagos, like the iguanas, the porpoises, etc. My group was the frigates, a kind of bird. Each group consisted of 12 people, the number that could be seated in a small motorboat. There were two planned activities per day – one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We had to listen to every announcement over the intercom, which could be heard in every room, because you never knew when your group is about to leave the ship.
We were told that there are two kinds of landings: “wet,” where you get off the boats and have to wade through the water to get to shore (and need shoes that can get wet) and “dry” landings, where we get off on some kind of platform.
We got a briefing by an official Galapagos guide. They were very concerned that the ecology of the islands not be contaminated. No bringing of food, seeds, etc., and we were not allowed to get closer than two meters to a creature. There are no bathrooms. If we needed one, we had to tell the guide, who would have us whisked off the island!
Soon enough, the intercom called the Frigates. We went down to the lowest tier of the ship, where we found a large open hatch. A big husky man waited as a motorboat approached. Then one by one, we were heaved onboard the tiny boat, holding on to straps for dear life as we sat on the boat’s rim. We sped through the waters for about 10 minutes until we reached our destination: Santa Cruz Island.
A bus took us on a half-hour ride to a “ranch.” We got off the bus and started walking. One by one we spotted them – giant tortoises. Galapagos tortoises are the world’s largest tortoises. They can reach four feet in length and 475 pounds in weight, and can live to the age of 100! When the first Spanish sailors arrived at the island, they spotted a large number of them, and since a tortoise is galapago in Spanish, the whole island system was named Galapagos.
Following a path, we came to a large “watering hole,” where we saw perhaps 12 to 14 of the creatures sitting around, most of them with their heads inside their shells. Occasionally, a tortoise would stick its neck out and start lumbering around. They did not seem afraid of us, which was true for other species, too, as we would soon find out.
As we returned by bus to the pier and our little boat ferried us back to the mother ship, we saw a magnificent sunset. The waters were orange, reflecting the sky. We ate supper, and then the official rabbi of our tour, Rabbi Heshie Billet of the Young Israel of Woodmere, gave us the first of two lectures/shiurim on whether Darwinism (evolution) was compatible with Judaism. It was on the Galapagos that Charles Darwin developed his famous theory. Here, he found mockingbirds like those he saw in Chile but differing from island to island. He heard that slight variations in the shape of tortoise shells showed which island they came from. Each island was ecologically different, and the same species seemed to have slight variations from island to island – adapting to the unique conditions of that island.
Over the course of the next two days, we ferried back and forth to various islands. Here is one entry from my travel journal:
The island we are cruising by juts up vertically from the depths of the Pacific. The jagged rocks reveal layer upon layer of different lava flows. (All the islands were created from volcanic eruptions.) The waters are darkish gray. Scores of birds soar overhead. With their wings spread out, they look like fighter squadrons. On top of this giant rock-island grow hundreds of trees. They are bare, for we are below the equator and it is now winter. They are waiting for the spring rains, when they will bloom. It all looks so pristine; I feel as if I am revisiting Creation.
The richness of the wildlife was truly wonderful. We saw sea lions, bright red crabs, four-foot-long iguanas, pelicans, flamingos, Nazca boobies (a type of bird), red-footed boobies, mockingbirds, and finches. We spotted an owl. The large birds and the sea lions were not at all afraid of humans! Some scampered right up to us, although, officially, we were not allowed to go closer than two meters from them. It felt a little like the Garden of Eden before the fall of Adam and Eve, or the messianic era, about which the prophet Isaiah (chapter 1) declares:
And a wolf shall live with a lamb, and a leopard shall lie with a kid; and a calf and a lion cub and a fatling [shall lie] together, and a small child shall lead them. And a cow and a bear shall graze together, their children shall lie; and a lion, like cattle, shall eat straw. And an infant shall play over the hole of an old snake and over the eyeball of an adder, a weaned child shall stretch forth his hand. They shall neither harm nor destroy on all My holy mount, for the land shall be full of knowledge of the Lord as water covers the seabed.
Listening to the lecture, I was wondering when we will have a world where children are not traumatized by war, their teachers, peers, or even their parents and siblings.
Sometimes the ship that was our temporary home was still, other times it was rocking and swaying. I nearly used up my Travamine pills to combat motion sickness. Sometimes we traveled all night, as we made a sub arc from south to north of the archipelago. Every day I returned to my room to find a little bookmark card on my bed with quotes from guess who? Charles Darwin. One quote goes something like this: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
That quote made me think of the difference between the Orthodox and the Reform Jews in the United States. Each denomination had a different idea of what “adaptation” meant. One group, however, adapted so well, that it nearly disappeared!
Lost City in the Sky
We eventually took leave of Shangri La and sailed back to the island of Baltra, where we took a plane to Guayaquil, Ecuador’s second largest city, which was a stopover until we boarded a plane for Lima, Peru. There is a kosher restaurant there, started by an expat Israeli. As you can imagine, most of the clientele are not Jewish, but they certainly enjoy the hummus!
While we were eating, unbeknownst to us, four men at a table in the corner of the restaurant were watching us intently. Halfway through the meal, one of our group noticed a carry-on piece of luggage next to him which he did not recognize. Afraid of a suspicious object, he went around asking all of us if it was ours. We all said no. He returned to his seat and suddenly realized that his carry-on was missing.
Eventually, someone had the guts to open the carry-on, only to find it filled with empty bottles. What did our friend have in his missing carry-on? His tallis, tefilin, and he and his wife’s British passports. Looks like the Frito bandito struck again! What a cruel and heartless thing to do to a tourist far away from home! Police were called, and they filled out a report. This man and his wife, instead of continuing with us to Lima, had to fly back to Quito and spend Shabbos there, because the Brits only issue new passports in the capital city. Chabad in Quito lent him a tallis and pair of tefilin, and they eventually reunited with us in Lima. The moral of the story: Tourist, be on constant guard! Leave your carry-on in the tour bus!
In Peru we toured Lima and saw the Inca pyramids. On Shabbos, we davened in the local shul. We flew to Cusco: altitude 3,400 meters, 11,155 feet! By contrast, Jerusalem is only 790 meters or 2,592 feet! It took some of us a while to get used to the altitude – even with the special pills we were taking.
Cusco has an active Chabad center and a dining room that feeds hundreds of people a week. From that figure, you can guess at the numbers of general tourists who visit Machu Picchu: an astounding 3.5 million in 2018. We took a bus and train to the 15th century Inca citadel. A mysterious city, built on a mountain at the height of the Inca empire, it features perfectly hewn stone walls, constructed with no mortar, as well as houses, temples, and hundreds of terraces that were used to grow food. The city was suddenly abandoned by the Incas 100 years after it was built and was discovered by Hiram Bingham in 1911. It was beautiful and magnificent but would have been nicer if we had not had to get up at 3:30 in the morning.
So, what is my advice after this grand trek? If I were you, I would ask the tour operator if you can just go to Galapagos and leave out the rest. The islands win by a mile, in my opinion. But that’s only if you prefer sea lions over architecture.
Sam Finkel grew up in Baltimore and now lives in Yerushalayim. He is the author of Rebels in the Holyland: Matzkeret Batya, an Early Battleground for the Soul of Israel.
