"The Ferris Family Explores the Equator"
Quito, the Galapagos Islands, the Rain Forrest, and Setback

Just as essential supplies started to run out in the Southern of the Americas, the Ferris family arrived to fortify our toiletries, our bodies, and our hearts with the familiar comforts of home!! On June 10, Jon´s brother Pete, his wife Tammy, and Jon´s parents Anne and Mike arrived in Quito, Ecuador for the family vacation and a much needed visit all rolled into one. Jon, his younger brother Daniel(who had been traveling with us for a month), and I met the rest of the family at the airport--jon and dan were sporting the famous ecuadorian hat called the Panama hat (really, this is no joke, go figure) and island shirts in an attempt to begin the family vacation with a little flash.

Jon, Dan, and I started the trip a day earlier than everyone else by checking into the Marriott in Quito. After three months of Hostals that often were just barely scraping by the line of adequate, we were like kids on Christmas morning checking into a hotel/resort with much missed items like predictable hot showers WITH water pressure, clean pillows and toilets that you can put toilet paper in! The best surprise didn´t come until that night though, when we got turn down service in our rooms with free AMAZING chocolates (every night after we found the turndown cart and helped ourselves to some extra chocolates).

The morning after everyone arrived, we traveled just 40 minutes outside the city of Quito to the official equator line. Interestingly, there are two equator lines within 400 meters of one another in this particular location. The French mistakenly drew the line in the wrong place when they were initially exploring, and it remained there until the advent of GPS, when it was moved to its correct location 400 meters away. We started at the real equator line, where we learned that toilets DO flush the opposite way in the Southern Hemisphere. We also can now say that we experienced winter and summer at the same time, with a foot in each hemisphere. If you look carefully at the pic below, you can see that Mike, Anne, Dan, and Peter are in the middle of summer, while Jon, Kristen, and Tammy are stuck in Winter.


The day after our visit to the middle of the earth, we left the haven of the Marriott early for our flight to the birthplace of the theory of evolution, the Galapagos Islands. Despite the fact that flight schedules seemed to operate on island time, our travels were uneventful. We were tramping through snoozing sea lions to board our boat, Santa Cruz, which was to be our home for the next week, by mid-afternoon. That afternoon, we disembarked via pangas (spanish word for Dingy) to visit an island that was home to the closest thing i´ve ever seen to a dinosaur--pictures below. There were two different kinds of lizards on this island, and many other islands in the galapagos. The first has adapted a very good disguise for his home on the lava rocks. The one in the pic is crawling up from a swim to find a rock to sun on. Their body temp drops as much as 20 degrees during their swims!

Day two in the Galapagos we hiked to a lookout--the view in the pic does not quite capture what we saw. The landscape behind us looked like what you might find if you dropped the Carribean ocean onto the moon--an arid volcanic landscape surrounded by vivid blue waters. All of the islands were formed by volcanoes, but they are so old that the land formed by active volcanoes has actually moved from the geologic hotspot that spurred the initial eruptions. All the species indemic to the islands (there and nowhere else) floated there over a million years ago (on the boats they built...haha) and began to adapt to their new environments, which is what made it such an interesting place for Darwin who arrived to find species like those in Ecuador and South America but not quite the same.... After finishing the morning snorkeling among the creatures of the sea like sea lions, giant parrot fish, skates and...Tammy saw a Shark, we spent the afternoon hiking around on the volcanic rocks on a new island (as you may have noticed, none of us can remember any of the names of the islands!). In addition to more sea lions and lizards, on this island we found Darwin´s toilet--a giant hole in the volcanic rock where cool critter like giant sea tortoises like to hang out---cooool. The evening of day two we began a tradition which changed the future of free moments on our trip--we began an epic tournament of the Ferris family favorite card game, setback.



Day three was a day for the birds.....we visited an island that was home to the guys below. The first is the freakin´ friggit, who is a pirate bird, living by swooping in and stealing the food of other birds as they regurgitate--yummy!! And, the second little guy was the instigator of one of most exciting moments of the trip--Dan was able to finally see his very first booby.....thanks to the red footed one inhabiting the island! In other exciting moments, during lunch of this afternoon, the captain called everyone to the windows of the dining room to look out to see something amazing--he then announced that if you looked at the bottom of the ocean you could see the equator line painted in red, as we were passing over it as he spoke. Of course, none of us fell for it....

Day four we met the namesake of the Galapagos Islands, the Galapagos Tortoise. The hombres of this species weigh up to 500 lbs. and live for 150-200 years!! They are so big and have such a slow metabolism that it takes them a month to move 8 miles (although they really prefer not to move at all). Talk about obesity issues.

After returning from the Galapagos, we traveled 3 very curvy hours by car to a resort in the rain forrest. The highlight of this two day trip was a hike to the waterfall below. On the way we saw cacao trees, coffee trees, banana trees, sugar cane, and all sorts of unique flowers like birds of paradise. After swimming in the waterfall (and in the cave underneath it with bats) we returned to the resort to make sugarcan juice from the sugar cane and lemons we had picked AND chocolate from the cacao beans (which we put over fresh bananas--mmmm). The chocolate was almost as good as the marriott chocolate! Unfortunately for Jon and I, the local rum was all you can drink at the resort where were staying. We have become such bargain hunters on the trip that the last night at the resort we felt incredibly pressured to make the most of our money. This made for an uncomfortable curvy trip back to Quito the next day.

Through the car rides, the boobies, the toilets (the Marriott´s and Darwin´s), the freakin´ friggits, and the card games, we shared a lot of laughs and learned many incredible things about the world in which we live. Although you may not have to go all the way to the middle of the earth for an experience like ours, it certainly wasn´t a bad place to have a family vacation!!