85. 8 Days On a Boat (In the Galapagos Islands)

**Calvin Rosser** (0:03)
We're talking about the Galapagos Islands.

**Steph Smith** (0:07)
It just felt like a place we needed to go.

**Calvin Rosser** (0:10)
We went into the trip totally blind.

**Steph Smith** (0:13)
I also went blind.

**Calvin Rosser** (0:15)
Yeah, it was largely ignored because there was no gold, fresh waters not abundant.

**Steph Smith** (0:22)
You see endless fish, small sharks, sea lions that are spinning in ways you've never seen.

**Calvin Rosser** (0:29)
Dolphins going 15 feet in the air.

**Steph Smith** (0:32)
Penguins swimming faster than you could have ever imagined.

**Calvin Rosser** (0:35)
Turtles that were around when the US Civil War was happening in 1865

**Steph Smith** (0:41)
Cormorants barreling down to the bottom of the ocean.

**Calvin Rosser** (0:45)
The octopus that is no longer.

**Steph Smith** (0:48)
You know when you're on a tour and you see the tour guide be like, holy shit, this actually doesn't happen.

**Calvin Rosser** (0:56)
Welcome back to the Shit You Don't Learn in School podcast. This is Calvin Rosser.

**Steph Smith** (1:00)
And this is Steph Smith.

**Calvin Rosser** (1:01)
And today we're going to be talking about the only place I know where you can walk with animals born in the 1800s, swim with the world's only tropical penguins, and find dolphins surfing the wake of your boat every morning.

**Steph Smith** (1:15)
Wow.

**Calvin Rosser** (1:17)
That's right, we're talking about the Galapagos Islands.
So Steph, I'm gonna be honest. Until the beginning of this year, I had heard of the Galapagos Islands. I knew who Charles Darwin was. I contested his theory of evolution. Just kidding, just kidding. But I didn't know what the Galapagos was about. I didn't really know you could visit it or why you would. And I'm not really sure I could have pointed to it on a map. How did we end up in the Galapagos Islands in April of this year?

**Steph Smith** (1:57)
Well, I wish I had a better story, but all I remember is we had a discussion maybe a few months before about the prospect of having kids in the next few years and taking that seriously, and really thinking about all the places that we wanted to go and to really explore before we were introducing kids into our family. And a lot of places came up. Antarctica came up in my head, revisiting some of my favorite places in the world, new places like Africa, which we'll talk about in another episode. But for some reason, the Galapagos came up. I actually did not know anyone who had been there, and like you, I actually had no vision in my mind of what this place was, other than it seemed unique. I had heard of Darwin also, and it just felt like a place we needed to go.

**Calvin Rosser** (2:53)
Right, and so when you proposed it, I was like, nah, let's not do this.

**Steph Smith** (2:58)
You did actually say no. You originally wanted to go to Taiwan with my mom.

**Calvin Rosser** (3:04)
Oh yeah, that would have been cool too, but I am glad that we ended up going to the Galapagos, and I now know a little bit more about the place since we've been there, and I think actually a lot of people would enjoy going there.

**Steph Smith** (3:17)
Yeah, we've both traveled to about 50 countries, and I will say obviously every country has its own unique flavor and set of interesting things, but this trip felt different, maybe partially because we were on a boat for most of the time, maybe because it was a lot more immersed in nature. We'll talk about a bunch of those things, but I would say that it felt like if you were to graph our trips on some sort of plot, this one felt like it might be further away from just about anything we did, maybe except Africa, which came after.

**Calvin Rosser** (3:52)
Yeah, even the nature of being on a boat, which is something I wanted to talk about, which is like, how do you go to the Galapagos? What do you do there? There's various ways to do it, but we ended up spending eight days on a boat. Neither of us had been on a boat more than half a day for, I don't know, some sort of boat party or wakeboarding trip or something like that, so we really didn't know what it would be like to live on a boat. And I think that was one of the interesting pieces, is I knew I liked boat life and I liked it even more when we were learning about things, experiencing nature and getting the luxury that we had on the boat that we decided to go on.