Michael Creasy's Blog

We arrived on Floreana with a wet landing on a darky sandy beach.  Close inspection of the "sand" showed that it wasn't sand as we'd know it, but volcanic ash and a variety of different coloured stones.  Pausing only to put our shoes on we headed into the interior. 

The first stop was a large, but shallow lake of brakish water.  At first it appeared empty of any bird life, but then in the middle of the lake a few flamingos could be seen standing on one leg.  Edwin pointed out some of the plant life around us.  Unlike Espanola, Floreana has abundant plant life, with a few variety of trees.  One he particularly pointed out was an effective mosquito repelant, he encouraged us to rub a small piece of the bark with our fingers and smell the result.  I can confirm it would repel most animals if applied in sufficient quantities.

Continuing the trail around the lake we saw a few more flamingos, but they mostly kept to the centre of the lake were they are safe from any preditors.  The trail then lead us to a white coral sand beach, with signs warning us to keep away from nesting locations...

On the beach we could clearly see the trail of a sea turtle that in the last few days had laid eggs in the sand and crawled back in to the sea.  Walking up and down the shoreline I soon saw why we'd been warned to be careful where we stepped, there were sting rays hiding in the sand and one bad step would soon result in a lot of pain and the end of the trip.

The real highlight of the beach though were the sea turtles.  They're hard to see from the water, with only their heads occasionaly breaking the surface and by the time you see one it's already gone before you've had a chance to raise a camera.  Luckly though a pair were engaged in other activities and didn't notice the small crowd watching from the beach or the small penguin dashing through the waves.

Leaving the beach and returning on the trail we'd used before we got back on the pangas and back to our boat to quickly change before going snorkelling.  Our destination: Devil's Crown - a volcanic cone poking out of the sea just off the coast of Floreana.  The exterior of the crown is surrounded by strong currents and a number of rocks and areas of coral hidden just below the surface which makes for difficult swimming.  We slid in to the cold water from the panga and instantly felt the tug of the current pulling us along, we swam against it to maintain our position and watch the multitude of fish beneath us.  Suddenly I saw Edwin frantically pointing beneath us.  Shark.  Elegantly swimming beneath us was a adult white tipped reef shark.  Six or seven foot long it was no danger to us and with a flick of it's tail it disappeared out of sight.  It was fantastic to be so close to one though, sharks have an undeserved reputation, they are quite magnificant to see in the water. 

The current swept us around the crown and I swam hard against it to avoid being swept into sharp rocks and coral.  Quickly reaching the other side of the crown the current calmed down and we able to explore and watch even more colourful fish and a wide variety of starfish in the fantastically clear water.

After lunch on our boat we sailed to the other side of Floreana to visit Post Office Bay.  For many hundreds of years passing mariners would leave their post in a barrel on Floreana for mariners passing in the other direction to collect and one day deliver.  Today the tradition lives on with passing tourists deposition post cards and letters without stamps and collecting ones for their next destination.  The system appears to work pretty well with most of the letters only a couple of weeks old.

Having left our post cards and collecting a few to deliver ourselves we headed towards the interior of the island to descend into a large lava cave.  The caves/tubes/tunnels are formed when the outer layer of a lava flow cools and hardens while the interior continues to flow.  Eventually the lava stops flowing leaving huge tunnels and caves for tourists to explore.  We descended slowly into the cavern down steep steps into pitch darkness, the only light coming from our feeble torches which did nothing to penetrate the darkness and allowed us to see little more than the next step ahead.  Carefully holding on to a rope and stepping sideways to avoid sliding into the darkness we climbed along the cave.  When we stopped we could no longer see the way we'd came and could only barely see the cavern surrounding us.  We didn't even see the pool of water in front of us until Edwin cast a stone into it sending echos around the cave and ripples on the surface of the water.  The pool had been so still and so clear that once the ripples died away the pool appeared invisible again.  This isn't a place you'd want to explore without a guide and we were glad to return to the bright sunlight and warmth of the surface as the interior was several degrees cooler.

Next stop: Santa Cruz.

After what felt like a long night on the boat we arrived at Espanola Island.  The boat hadn't set sail until midnight; the sound of the engines starting up woke me from my bunk at the top of the boat and once we started moving the up and down motion of the boat kept me awake. 

Landing on Espanola Island should have been a dry landing, but the tide was against us, which made getting the panga up to the steps built in the rocks in one of the bays just about impossible.  We climbed carefully out of the rocking panga on to the wet rocks and slowly made our way to the path, while trying to avoid the numerous crabs that were scurrying around.

Landings on the islands are either wet or dry.  In a dry landing you can expect to step from the panga on to ground or a dock of some sort.  On wet landings the panga gets as close to the beach as possible and you have to wade ashore, normally only a step or two, but not something you want to do in a good pair of walking shoes.  A decent pair of walking sandals is therefore ideal, as they dry quickly, but still provide sufficient support for climbing over rocks on rough trails.

Standing on the beach we watched the sally lightfoot crab climbing around the rocks and began to spy marine iguanas sunning themselves on the rocks.  With their dark skin they blend in to the rocks, making them difficult to see at first.  As we set off walking though we quickly saw plenty more lazily lying in the sand to keep warm. 

The iguanas looked positively prehistoric, with the larger ones approaching two feet long and the obviously large claws that they used to hang on the rocks we kept our distance to being with.  It soon became clear that they weren't the least bit bothered by our presence and we ventured closer for a better look.  At which point one of them loudy spat in our direction, causing the group to jump back in alarm.  Edwin explained though, that the spitting was just a way for them to cool down and it wasn't an aggressive action.

We started walking on the trail, being carefull to remain inside trail (marked by black and white stakes in the ground) at all times.  It may seem that staying inside the trail is overly restrictive, but the trails have been designed to keep people from walking through the middle of nesting areas and disturbing the wildlife.  The trails have also been cleared of much of the plant life, making it easy to walk along them; trying to walk outside of the trail at some points would have been very difficult. 

Espanola Island is most famous for the birds that inhabit it.  The blue-footed booby, perhaps the most famous of the birds found on the islands is easily spotted, along with the waved albatross which only nests on this island.  The firsts birds we saw though were the masked booby, so called because of the black area around thier eyes, which looks not unlike a mask.  I was surprised just how close to the birds we could get.  They weren't threatened by us standing watching them at all and in many cases, we could walk within a foot of a sitting booby and it wouldn't fly away.

While we all interested to look at the masked boobies, that wasn't what we really wanted to see.  It wasn't long before we spotted a lone blue footed booby standing on a rock, with his sky blue feet in sharp contrast with the rocks.  The boobies are magnificantly comical, from their facial expressions to their waddling walk and blue feet it's really hard not to like them.

It's easy to spend a long time watching the antics of the birds as it's rare to be able to get so close to wildlife and not have it fly/run away. 

The waved albatross was the next bird to make an appearance.  The albatross is large compare to the small boobies, but is actually one of the smaller albatross species.  It was fun to watch two albatrosses knock their beaks against eachother in what I assume is a mating ritual.  In this picture below notice the blue-footed booby in the foreground...  The mating ritual of the blue-footed booby involves raising one foot in the air and shaking it at a potential mate.  It's hysterical to watch.

The last "sight" on the island is the blowhole, at the bottom of a cliff is an underwater cave with a whole in the roof, when a large wave comes in, water is forced up and out of the blowhole creating a tremendous site and a welcome refreshing spray.

In the afternoon we visited Garner Bay for some snorkelling.  The natural bay is fairly deep and gave us a great opportunity to snorkel and we quickly saw large amounts of brightly coloured fish swimming beneath us.  It wasn't long before the first sting ray was spotted on the bottom and with the memory of Steven Irwin, we all kept our distance.  That wasn't going to be enough though as a small sting ray started floating up through the water towards which caused us to scatter in all directions, although unlikely to be dangerous nobody really wanted to satisfy the small sting ray's curiosity.  I was amazed at the wide variety of fish and the many bright colours, from oranges and purples, to blues and yellows, everywhere I looked there was a different kind of fish and I had little chance of identifying any of them.

Getting to the Galapagos Islands was harder that I expected.  First an overnight flight on an aging Delta 757 to Atlanta on which I got little to no sleep, what little I got was interrupted by the child next to me poking me with his elbow and then falling asleep on me.  His mother was of course oblivious.  There is nothing to do at Atlanta airport at 5:30 in the morning.  Nothing is open.  I finally managed to get some coffee and a paper to kill some time before any of the breakfast places were open - the fast food joints were open and looked like an invitation to food poisoning.  One would have expected more from an airport which claims to be the world's busiest.  After an expensive but filling breakfast I caught a train to down town Atlanta with the goal of heading to the aquarium.  It wasn't that obvious how to get to it once I got to the nearest train station so I found a Starbucks to get some tea and ask directions.  Directions were supplied which got me to the right place but by a fairly indirect route.  I wasn't exactly in a rush anyway.

The aquarium is said to be the world's largest and is very busy, I'd booked my timed-entry ticket weeks in advance, but didn't really expect it to be busy at 9a.m. on a Saturday morning.  I was wrong, the line of advance ticket holders was already long at 8:45a.m.  The obligatory security checks were performed although they didn't bother checking my rather large camera bag because they "were busy" and apparently trusted me when I said there was only camera gear inside.  If you're going to inconvenience people with security checks, at least actually do something.

The aquarium was very large with an impressive entry feature a wall of fish.  I worked around the various exhibits in an anti-clockwise direction as most people were going clockwise and so I got to see the first few locations without too many people around.  As a whole the aquarium is much like any other in it's content, but it's the size that really sets it apart.  The first thing I saw was a large wall sized tank of jellyfish.  The display was backlit causing the jellyfish to almost glow and made for some interesting photos.  The highlight of the aquarium is without a doubt the whale sharks.  Housed in a huge tank that can be viewed first from a tunnel underneath and then again from an ampitheatre style viewing area.  The sharks were flown in from Taiwan by UPS by 747 in custom built tanks.  The sharks themselves are fabulous creatures and I spent a long time watching them swim around.  They can grow up to 20m long, but eat little more than plankton.

Leaving the aquarium I wandered around the streets of Atlanta in a daze and somehow found myself at the CNN Center.  The behind-the-scenes tour did not look that interesting and so I returned to the airport, got a boarding pass for my flight to Quito, Ecuador, confirmed my bag was still checked through and then found a cozy corner at the gate (which was over a mile's walk from the security checkpoint (there's a train, but I wasn't in a rush)) to watch Doctor Who (convered from DVR-MS to WMV and reduced in resolution) on my Zune.  Interesting point about the flight was the Delta personnel announcing the flight first in Spanish and then in English - surely it's not too much to expect a US carrier in a US airport to make announcements in English first?  The flight itself was even worse than the first one, it was an even older 757, with the only entertainment being TV screens mounted in the aisles (glad I had my Zune so I could watch an episode of House that I'd recorded), the movie shown was only ten years old and hardly a blockbuster anyway.

On arriving in Quito I filled in the immigration forms which were in Spanish, guessing what the questions were and ignoring the ones I couldn't understand which didn't seem to bother the immigration staff, although it still took ages to get through immigration and customs.  One strange thing was the passport stamp, it wasn't a stamp, instead they used a dot-matrix printer to print the information on a page in my passport.  I've never been anywhere that does that before.  I'd arranged a transfer to my hotel in advance and once I cleared customs I was greated by a man with my name on a board who didn't speak any English (and I only speak very limited Spanish - hello, yes, no, goodbye, a beer please), but he got me to the hotel without any problem.  Much to my surprise the hotel was actually rather good and surprisingly large.  Most of the time when I travel I end up in small basic hotels, so I don't expect much from them.

In the morning after a breakfast on fruit, scrambled eggs and unidenifiable meat in a strange sauce I got a taxi and headed out of the city to the Equator.  The Ecuadorian government sometime ago realised that the Equator could be a tourist attaction and so built a large monument to attract visitors.  Unfortunately they didn't do a very good job of checking the location of the monument and it's actually not on the equator, but at 00'00"07.  There are a few things to see at that site, but the "ethnic" museum inside the monument is really not worth visiting, I walked through it just to see the unimpressive view from the top of the monument and then quickly left.  Just down the road is another museum, this time not run by the government and it actually is on the equator.  I walked up the dirt trail, over a small wooden bridge and found the small collection of buildings that house the musuem.  There's no ticket office, you just have to loiter and eventually a staff member appears, collects the $3 and assigns you a guide.  I was the only English speaking visitor at the time and so had a guide to myself.  She showed me thier reconstructions of various houses of native tribes living in Ecuador which was actually pretty interesting and she appeared knowledgeable on the subject.  Really though I was only there because of the equator, but I let her run through her talk.  I'm glad I did as the highlight was a genuine shrunken head...  We've all heard stories about head shrinkers, but I wasn't convinced it was actually real.  She explained the process of boiling the head, removing the contents (brain, skull etc...) and how the eventual result is a tiny barely recongnisable shrunken head.  The reason for doing this wasn't entirely clear (and apparently it's now only practiced with monkey heads), but the specimen itself was a little creepy, sitting there rotating in it's glass case.

The tour moved on to the equator and the various proofs that it really was the equator.  First was a physical demonstration.  Standing off the equator I was asked to clasp my hands together and raise them above my head, my guide would then try and pull them down as I resisted.  She wasn't able to.  Stepping on the equator we tried the same thing again, but this time she easily was able to pull my hands down.  I don't understand why and I was surprised at that result.  Stepping off the equator again I was asked to hold the tips of my thumb and index finger together and she would try and pull them apart.  Once again she could not.  Yet, when standing on the equator she could easily.  Perhaps standing on the equator gives Ecuadorian females super-human strength.  The next "proof" was the oft-repeated story that water will swirl down a drain in different directions on each side of the equator.  Starting with a basin of water directly over the equator I watched the plug removed and the water flowing straight down - no swirling at all.  The basin was moved to one side of the equator, the experiment repeated and then to other side and repeated again.  The water swirled in a different direction each time.  Same basin, same water, same plug, but one time the water when clockwise and the other time anti-clockwise.  Some people say it's faked, but I don't see how it's possible.  The last experiment was showing that it's easier to balance a fresh egg on a nail on the equator (pointy end of the egg facing up), after a few attempts I blanced the egg, but couldn't do it off the equator at all.  For my efforts I got a very formal looking certificate making me a "citizen of the equator".

Mid-afternoon back at the hotel I met my roommate for the trip.  I should explain that I'd booked a trip with Intrepid Travel (although the trip is actually run by their partners GAP) and it's normal for travelers traveling on their own to be partnered with another single travel of the same gender.  This keeps the costs down and can actually be quite fun as it encourages you to talk to the other people on the trip.  I've traveled with Intrepid and GAP several times and very much like their style and philosophy.  At the start of every trip is a briefing where everyone gets to meet eachother, sort out their paperwork and meet the group leader (normally each group is accompanied by an experienced leader, who will get them from place to place and any other arrangements, they're not a tour guide - local people are employed as guides at different stages of the trip), or in this case the GAP representative who'd get us to our flight to the islands the next morning.  I headed out to dinner with a couple of the other people on the trip so we could get to know eachother.  We ignored Lonely Planet's advice to get a taxi everywhere and never walk anywhere as it's too dangerous.  Didn't seem that dangerous to us.

The next morning and half-past too-early we got to the airport and cleared the non-existant security check point.  Bags were x-rayed, but nobody was looking at the x-ray screen.  The gates at the airport was just a large room, with no information about which flight was going from which gate.  Naturally the gate specified on the boarding pass was wrong.  The flight itself was rather boring, I finished the book I was reading and there was no other entertainment on the plane.  After a brief stop at Guayaquil we arrived at the airport on San Cristobel islands.  The airport is a wooden structure which is mostly open to the air.  It might be best described as a large wooden hut.  To be permitted to stay on the Galapagos Islands national park, a fee of $100 is required which has to be paid on arrival in cash.  In return you get a ticket which I was told to hold on to as I'd need it when leaving the islands to avoid having to pay the fee again.  Baggage claim was an interesting experience.  The bags were offloaded from the plane by hand, no conveyer belts here, and then one by one placed on the floor behind a rope.  The rope was lifited and a mad scrabble to grab the bags was the result.  Waiting outside the hut was our friendly guide Edwin, a level III naturalist employed by the park.  He'd be our guide while on the islands and would lead us on walks, snorkelling trips and be available to answer any questions we had.  Our boat, was waiting for us in the harbour...

On board we were introduced to the crew and served lunch, given time to examine our cozy cabins and relax a little before our first outing.  We climbed into the dingys (a.k.a. pangas) and set off for the dock, watching the sea lions sleeping on the fishing boats on the way and then to a bus to La Loberia - a beach that had been claimed by the sea lions.  This was to be our first experience with the sea lions who were completely indifferent to our prescence.  Standing just a few feet from them they didn't react to us being there.  Meanwhile in the water, the dominant male (bull) sea lion was barking and swimming up and down patrolling his stretch of shoreline.  A bull will dominate a section of shortline for weeks at a time, seeing off other males who try and take it from him.  Eventually though he'll lose a fight and retire to a section of shoreline inhabited by bachelor sea lions where he can rest and recover before going and challenging another bull to their section of shoreline.  Atlhough we wouldn't be swimming at this beach we were warned to be carefull around the bull sea lions, from the shoreline and out to a few meters is their teritory and they will aggresively defend it; people get attacked by them every year.  When entering the water, quickly moving away from the shoreline is relatively safe and the bull will ignore, but if you hang around in the shallow water the bull will see you as a threat and you don't want that to happen as they have pretty big teeth.  We spent a lot of time watching the sea lions sleeping and the younger ones playing with eachother.  It was great to be able to get so close to them without disturbing them.

After a little shopping in the small town on San Cristobel we were back on the boat for dinner, a briefing on our next day and quickly to bed, the sea air had really got us all tired and we wanted to be asleep before the boat started sailing to the next island.

We just posted the new Windows Media Center SDK for Windows Vista.

That was the last thing I had to get done before moving to work full time on Zune.  First though I'm taking some time off to go to the Galapagos Islands.

I created a Zune themed colour scheme for my smartphone.  I can't post a screenshot at the moment, but the scheme features the Zune logo, a dark brown background and uses the orange and pink colours from the Zune logo as highlights. 

To install extract the files from the .zip file and copy to the "my documents" folder on your phone, then go to Settings/Home Screen and select "Zune" in the colour scheme drop down list.  Note that this is a colour scheme and not a home screen layout, so whatever homescreen layout you were using will stay the same, but the colours and background will be updated.

I'll try and post a screenshot later, but in the meantime, if anyone tries it and can send me a screenshot I'd appreciate it.

I got my Zune last night.  I've got the black model, which was my first preference for colour, although I've not actually seen a brown one yet, someone around here must have one.  As probably everyone knows by now, the finish on the device has a soft, rubberised feel to it, quite unlike that of the iPod.  The first thing you notice other than the size of the screen is how the device feels.  It feels nice in the hand and doesn't have the slippery feel on the iPod.

I'm still in the process of syncing my ripped music to the device, but I've got the marketplace up and running and playing music.

More thoughts on Tuesday after the official release.

It's been a long time coming, but today we announced that Windows Vista has shipped. 

I'm very pleased with Vista, all my machines are now running the RTM build (or really close to it).  Of course my Media Center PC has been running Vista from quite some time now and I'm very happy with the stability and improvements we've made.  Digital Cable support is excellent, especially for HD content.  We improved how galleries of media are displayed and optomised around widescreen displays.  I love the look and feel and when I occasionaly have to use Media Center 2005 I see just how far we've come.  The experience using a Media Center Extender is first rate - my Xbox 360 drives my TV and is the only way I interact with Media Center at home.

Now we're just counting down to retail availability.  I'm looking forward to seeing how the OEMs package Vista, what new PC designs they come up with and what the whole end-to-end experience is like.