Burgold in the Galapagos (Pics start at around the tenth post)

[Burgold]

Just returned from an amazing trip to the Galapagos. Really saw and did everything I could have imagined from trekking up to the summit of the world's second highest caldera to snorkeling and swimming within inches of sea lions and giant sea turtles. It was mind blowing. Even the birds which don't startle when you approach were phenomenal. Some were as big as a pterodactyl others as small as a finch.

 

In any case, there was one rainy day and I slipped on some lava rocks. I didn't notice that the display monitor on the underwater camera got cracked until the camera started glitching underwater. When I tried to download the photos this morning, my fear was realized. The SD card couldn't even be recognized by my reader/computer. I tried some free downloadable software and called up some retrieval companies. The two I spoke with wanted about a thousand dollars to recover my vacation photos. Clearly, that is way too much (well, maybe not clearly, but to me that is a nonstarter.) 

 

So, I'm turning to my ES family who has always fielded amazing and surprising expertise. Anyone have any ideas or the ability to help? I am willing to pay, but not a price over the moon

 

Thanks in advance.

Fingers crossed.

 

P.S. All was not totally lost as I still have some photos on my cell phone. Still... frustrated.

[The Evil Genius]

SD cards are usually pretty rugged. It could be something as simple as a bit of moisture is still trapped in the card. I'd try the bag (probably sandwich size) of uncooked rice trick. Leave it overnight or even a few days to pull out any of the remaining moisture. 

[Burgold]

Bang may have come up with a solution. It looks like I can access the pics!

 

[Popeman38]

1 minute ago, Burgold said:

Bang may have come up with a solution. It looks like I can access the pics!

And you haven’t posted any for us to enjoy?!?

 

Seriously, glad to hear the pics weren’t lost, that sounds like an amazing, once in a lifetime, trip. 

[Burgold]

3 minutes ago, Popeman38 said:

And you haven’t posted any for us to enjoy?!?

 

Seriously, glad to hear the pics weren’t lost, that sounds like an amazing, once in a lifetime, trip. 

Incredible trip. Phenomenal group too.

 

I went with a company called Intrepid. Our tour guide was a local named Isabela. Highly. HIghly recommend. If anyone wants to go try to get her if at all possible. She was amazing... even more so for a guy who used to suffer from hydrophobia. She took care of me out in the middle of the ocean.

[LD0506]

8 minutes ago, Popeman38 said:

And you haven’t posted any for us to enjoy?!?

 

This was just his way of rubbing our noses in his Galapagoing..............😄

[Spaceman Spiff]

25 minutes ago, Burgold said:

Incredible trip. Phenomenal group too.

 

I went with a company called Intrepid. Our tour guide was a local named Isabela. Highly. HIghly recommend. If anyone wants to go try to get her if at all possible. She was amazing... even more so for a guy who used to suffer from hydrophobia. She took care of me out in the middle of the ocean.

 

Pics or it didn't happen. 

[TheGreatBuzz]

1 hour ago, Burgold said:

Incredible trip. Phenomenal group too.

 

I went with a company called Intrepid. Our tour guide was a local named Isabela. Highly. HIghly recommend. If anyone wants to go try to get her if at all possible. She was amazing... even more so for a guy who used to suffer from hydrophobia. She took care of me out in the middle of the ocean.

Can you post a link or some more info?  I really want to go.  And if you dont mind, roughly how much coin did you drop on it?

[Cooked Crack]

2 hours ago, The Evil Genius said:

SD cards are usually pretty rugged. It could be something as simple as a bit of moisture is still trapped in the card. I'd try the bag (probably sandwich size) of uncooked rice trick. Leave it overnight or even a few days to pull out any of the remaining moisture. 

Rice it turns out doesn't really do anything. Just leaving it alone helps it dry 

 

https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/14/9326035/can-rice-actually-save-your-wet-phone

[DCSaints_fan]

56 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

Can you post a link or some more info?  I really want to go.  And if you dont mind, roughly how much coin did you drop on it?

 

Quick google search found this:

 

https://www.travelchannel.com/destinations/south-and-central-america/articles/the-galapagos-islands-guide-what-you-should-know

 

Looks like you fly into Ecuador first

 

If you want to stay inside the US, the Farralon Islands off the coast of California are another option.    I think the cruise was about $750 last I checked.  If you have SCUBA experience, you can also do a cage dive encounter with a great white shark that frequent the area.  

[China]

Glad you got to see stuff before it's gone:

 

Galapágos menaced by tourist invasion

 

Tourism will wreck the wonders of the Galápagos – where animal and plant life is being wiped out by the arrival of aggressive new species – unless action is taken soon

 

Opening what looks like the drawer of an office filing cabinet, Gustavo Jimenez, a scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation on the Galápagos, reaches inside, rummages around for a bit, and then pulls out not a report or a file, but a massive stuffed albatross. It's about the size of a toddler, just one of hundreds of stuffed birds and animals in the foundation's vertebrate collection.

 

We have already seen a stuffed Baltra Island iguana, a 4ft-long, scaly, dragon-like creature that was successfully brought back from near-extinction in the 1930s, but has the misfortune to live on one of the two islands that have an airport. About once a month, Jimenez receives a body that has been flattened by a bus or landed on by an aircraft.

Then there are the finches, the songbirds that inspired Charles Darwin to formulate the theory of evolution. It was the differing length of their beaks that helped lead him to the notion that they had evolved differently according to their environment. Now they are roadkill. "There are now so many people living in the highlands," says Jimenez. "So many cars. It's impossible to estimate how many are run over a year, but at least 10,000." To put this in context, there are only just over 100 left of the most endangered type, the mangrove finch.

 

In the filing cabinets of life on these islands, the waved albatross – the only albatross to live in the tropics – is just another Galápagan hard-luck story: regularly caught up in fishing nets, it's on the critically endangered species list with a "high risk of extinction in the wild".

 

The collection is supposed to be a catalogue of life, but increasingly it looks more like one of death. Of species threatened. Disappearing. Missing. Of an entire ecosystem under threat. Because there is nowhere quite like the Galápagos. In every sense. For its profound isolation in the Pacific Ocean, its unique biodiversity – home to hundreds of endemic species – and for its pristine, untouched environment.

 

Except, as even a glance around the harbour of Puerto Ayora, the main town on the island of Santa Cruz, will show you, it's no longer pristine. A filmy slick of oil shines on the surface of the water where hundreds of boats wait to receive the next intake of tourists. And beyond is a large town, a mess of shanty suburbs and half-finished hotels. The ground water is contaminated and there's no proper sewerage. Dozens and dozens of Toyota pickups wait to ferry the tourists around.

 

What many people don't realise is that the Galápagos, as well as being one of the most fragile environments on Earth, is also is one of the fastest-growing economies in South America. Per capita income is higher here than anywhere else in Ecuador. Nearly 40,000 people have made their home here, drawn by tourism, and with them have come hundreds of introduced species, invasive plants and an infrastructure that simply can't cope.

 

For anyone who grew up watching David Attenborough and giant tortoises on Life on Earth, it's a shock. This isn't what Charles Darwin's earthly paradise is meant to look like, although Noemi D'Ozouville, an earth scientist who lives in Puerto Ayora and studies freshwater dynamics, sighs when I say this. "That's the thing with the stories about the Galápagos: it's either paradise or paradise in crisis."

 

The problem with this is that it is in crisis. In the bowels of the Charles Darwin Foundation, Henri Herrera, an entomologist, pulls out drawers of preserved ants. They're his specialist field – he points out that Darwin studied them too – but new types of ants keep arriving all the time. In aircraft, on boats, in the bags of tourists, in cargo shipments. "I sampled two boats and found 600 different species of insects in my traps. If you look at graphs of tourism and invasive species, they go absolutely together."

 

It's not difficult to understand the threat. He pulls out a drawer of native endemic ants and then a recent introduction, a bigheaded ant. It's not just its head that is bigger. "The thing is that invertebrates are crucial to the ecosystem. If you destroy them, you destroy the ecosystem; it's at the base of it all."

 

It's this conflict between man and nature that's at the heart of a new exhibition on the Galápagos at the Bluecoat arts centre in Liverpool. It's the result of a initiative by the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Galápagos Conservation Trust.

 

"It's unsustainable," says Felipe Cruz, the director of technical assistance at the Charles Darwin Foundation. "There's constantly more, more, more. More flights, more hotels, more cars. It's uncontrolled. We talk about ecotourism but in reality it's already showing signs of being mass tourism. People aren't even coming for the wildlife any more. They just come for a vacation."

 

Everywhere there are signs of stress. On Isabela Island, Maximilian Martin takes us on a tour of the rubbish dump where feral cats roam and of a defunct sewerage plant. "An international organisation spent something like £485,000 on it, but the local people didn't know how to use it. So now the waste is just going into the ground untreated. Technically, the problems are solved. The expertise is here. The problem is social."

 

Click on the link for the full article

[TheGreatBuzz]

1 hour ago, DCSaints_fan said:

If you have SCUBA experience, you can also do a cage dive encounter with a great white shark that frequent the area. 

**** yea!!!

[Burgold]

3 hours ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

Can you post a link or some more info?  I really want to go.  And if you dont mind, roughly how much coin did you drop on it?

So, the tour wasn't cheap, but wasn't outrageous considering... It was 10 days 2 in Quito and 8 in the Galapagos. The tour price was about 3,100. They may charge a single supplement if you go alone. They were going to do that for me, but said they couldn't arrange it and said I would have a room mate. Somehow though on the trip that didn't happen and I wound up getting a solo room the whole trip without paying the extra fee. That doesn't include airfare to Quito and back home. It also doesn't include alcohol, but does include a daily breakfast about six lunches and I think three dinners.

 

I'm just beginning to go through the photos. Man, I took a ton (probably 3-400. I've just begun the process of culling. I'll ping you guys on some or send you a link. I don't want to flood the thread.

 

As for the ecological aspect, Intrepid worked hard to be friendly. We weren't even allowed bottled water. No plastics. In addition, the Galapagos tours are all run by Galapagos natives and numbers are pretty controlled. Still, there is a dangerous because humans are stupid and not always a good citizen. A secondary danger is the introduction of nonindigenous plants and critters. They are trying very hard to keep them out and not always winning.

 

For example, some of the tortoises became endangered because the growing goat population wound up eating too much of the vegetation. The solution wound up being hiring Australian hunters in helicopters. 

 

https://www.intrepidtravel.com/us/ecuador/best-galapagos-116641

 

[TheGreatBuzz]

23 minutes ago, Burgold said:

I don't want to flood the thread.

Why not?  Your card works now.  Change the name of the thread to Burgold goes the the Galapagos and rub it in all our faces.  It's what I'd do.

[Burgold]

1 hour ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

Why not?  Your card works now.  Change the name of the thread to Burgold goes the the Galapagos and rub it in all our faces.  It's what I'd do.

I'll let a mod chime in. I might also need instruction on how to upload smaller pics. I don't quite know how to size them in ES

 

I just finished an aggressive culling of photos. I am down to 272 shots.

[TheGreatBuzz]

1 hour ago, Burgold said:

I'll let a mod chime in.

And all this time I could have swore you were a mod.

[Burgold]

Just now, TheGreatBuzz said:

And all this time I could have swore you were a mod.

Ringo Starr was once asked if he was a mod or a rocker. He answered--

 

"I'm a mocker."

 

Nah, I was never asked. I think they're too afraid if they gave me the keys to the kingdom that I'd start a thousand threads a day... all of them about ME!

[Elessar78]

21 hours ago, The Evil Genius said:

SD cards are usually pretty rugged. It could be something as simple as a bit of moisture is still trapped in the card. I'd try the bag (probably sandwich size) of uncooked rice trick. Leave it overnight or even a few days to pull out any of the remaining moisture. 

 

Rice it turns out doesn't really do anything. Just leaving it alone helps it dry 

 

https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/14/9326035/can-rice-actually-save-your-wet-phone

How this really works is that the rice attracts Asians who then fix your card/electronics. 

 

Source: am Asian

[tshile]

15 hours ago, Burgold said:

I'll let a mod chime in.

 

Why? Afraid they won’t approve of how it may disrupt the various trump threads dominating the top of the page?

 

post the pics! Sounds awesome!

 

(glad you were able to recover your pics without spending 1k$  )

[Burgold]

23 minutes ago, tshile said:

 

 

 

(glad you were able to recover your pics without spending 1k$  )

Me too! Besides, I'm far too cheap to spend a thousand bucks to recover vacation photos!

 

I've managed to cut the photos I like down from 272 to 80. I'm keeping the 272, but still trying to trim down a bit. I figure 20-30 is the right overly excessive number to share.

[Burgold]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Burgold]

 

 

This farming village is nestled in the crater of Vucan Pululahua which is an active volcano!

 

 

Tortuga Bay

 

This is a volcanic vent from what I was told was the second largest caldera in the world.

 

 

 

 

This is actually a posed shot. It's in a tortoise reserve. The tortoise started well to the left of me and I hoped we could get a shot. Then, it decided to march right on by. One of my tour group got a video of the whole thing.

 

 

 

This is Quito Ecuador. The statue of the Madonna is huge.

This was an alpha male sea lion. Bugger chased me for about a 100 meters before giving up. It was funny as hell and one of the highlights for the whole group. Possibly the only grumpy sea lion in the whole of the Galapagos.

 

 

 

[LadySkinsFan]

Outstanding!

[tshile]

Awesome!!! Thanks for the pics. Best thread on ES in a while  

[Burgold]

16 minutes ago, tshile said:

Awesome!!! Thanks for the pics. Best thread on ES in a while  

Isn't it crazy how good smart phones and point and shoots have become. Those are pretty much all raw photos. Maybe just some minor cropping on two or three.