Day 5 - Charles Darwin Research Station

Today we went to the Charles Darwin Research Station. There they are trying to restore the Tortoise population after humans slaughtered them for oil and introduced species that compete for the same food as the Tortoises. Tortoise eggs are incubated, and then juvenile tortoises are raised until they ready to be released into the wild. There were tortoises of so many different sizes at the station. I read that the tortoises only move .16 miles/hour. It appeared that the babies moved faster than the older tortoises!

Then a representative from the station talked to use about what exactly the Charles Darwin Foundation does and then answered our questions. Later in the afternoon we talked to city officials about how they maintain the town.

In the evening we went to a very sketchy ferris wheel, which was a complete surprise, I never would have thought that there would be a ferris wheel there! But looking back, I could picture the headlines "30 MIT STUDENTS DIE ON FERRIS WHEEL IN 3RD WORLD COUNTRY". The ferris wheel used horribly smelling diesel fuel, rotated on a normal care tire, and was powered by an ordinary-looking engine. A bunch of us got on the ferris wheel, 3 to a tea cup (which was the theme of the seats), it got through one rotation and stopped working. The tea cups also happened to spin, so everyone started spinning around in their tea cups, and you could just see the metal structure of the ferris wheel shaking side to side. We were stuck up at the top of the ferris wheel for 10 minutes, which was nice because we got to see a high-up view of the town. Also to get to the ferris wheel we had to walk through the more residential part of town which was a nice change. When the ferris wheel started running again, it rotated quickly, and when I got off I was dizzy from all the spinning and overwhelming diesel smell.