Nov 17th, 2009 at 9:00AM:
Fernando Ortiz grew up on mainland Ecuador and has lived in the Galapagos the past twenty years. His career path has led him from tour guide to dive guide and eventually dive company manager. Along the route he decided that talking to tourists about conservation was not enough, so he made the leap to fulltime environmentalist. Today he runs Conservation International's office in Puerto Ayora. ...Click on a label to read posts from that part of the world.
bowermastersadventures posts
Bowermaster's Adventures -- Conservation International on the Galapagos Islands
Nov 17th, 2009 at 9:00AM:
Fernando Ortiz grew up on mainland Ecuador and has lived in the Galapagos the past twenty years. His career path has led him from tour guide to dive guide and eventually dive company manager. Along the route he decided that talking to tourists about conservation was not enough, so he made the leap to fulltime environmentalist. Today he runs Conservation International's office in Puerto Ayora. ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Tourism's impact on the Galapagos
Nov 10th, 2009 at 11:00AM: It would be wrong on its face to say that tourism is the biggest problem facing the Galapagos today. Simultaneously, it is accurate to say that the growth in tourism in the one-of-a-kind archipelago is the primary reason the islands are "in danger." Those are not my words, but UNESCO's, in 2007 ... the same year Ecuador's new president claimed the islands were at "great risk" and signed a decree ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- The Charles Darwin Research Center
Nov 6th, 2009 at 10:00AM: While in the Galapagos filming we ran into an American writer living in Puerto Ayora, the big town on the island of Santa Cruz, researching a book about exactly the same subject of our film – the current state of affairs across the archipelago.
Carol Ann Bassett's book is just out, published by National Geographic, fittingly titled "Galapagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Welcome to the Galapagos!
Nov 3rd, 2009 at 11:00AM:
Often by the time the mainstream media runs big stories about an environmental battle it's often too late. I've seen it up-close dozens of times during the past couple decades and have reported so many David-versus-Goliath stories – usually positing good-hearted indigenous peoples and international environmental groups against greedy, monolithic utility companies and strong-arming ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Kamchatka v. Kodiak, What a Difference 225 Years Makes
Sep 1st, 2009 at 9:00AM: We sailed into Kodiak on a somewhat rarified day for this part of the world, one filled with sunshine rather than rain. The weekend just past had been its annual Crab Fest, an event dampened by typical summer weather: horizontal rain and temperatures just above freezing. But on a big, blue, sun-shiny day you'd be hard-pressed to imagine a more beautiful place, the entirety of Kodiak Island and ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Dutch Harbor
Aug 28th, 2009 at 9:00AM: Birthplace of the Winds, 10 Years After During the past decade I've been to Dutch Harbor on the island of Unalaska – one of America's last frontiers, potentially the planet's next Singapore, home base for the loved-and-hated "Deadliest Catch" - seven times. Much has changed during the years, for me and for the place. I first came this far west with close friends (Barry Tessman, Sean ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Russia's nuclear legacy
Aug 24th, 2009 at 9:00AM: Just around the corner from Petropavlovsk, ten miles by land or sea, located across Avachinskaya Bay on a small peninsula called Krasheninnikova sits Russia's largest nuclear submarine base. It is off limits to outsiders and a shell of what it was during the Soviet Union's heyday. Today – judging by a simple Google map search – there are just a half-dozen active nuclear subs sitting at ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Kamchatka, Russia
Aug 21st, 2009 at 9:00AM: This land of volcanoes and earthquakes -- the western frontier of the literary "Ring of Fire" -- is still a month away from true spring. Dirty, crusted snow lies beneath the leafless trees and in the gutters along Petropavlovsk's main streets, which already look pretty grim, lined as they are by Soviet-era buildings. The only hints of color in town are the red-and-yellow hot dog-beer-and-coffee ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Welcome to squid city!
Aug 18th, 2009 at 9:30AM: For the past couple nights I've dreamed about being attacked by giant calamari; not the fried variety, but the long, gelatinous species, which wrap me up in big squid rings and push me into the sea. Which I'm sure has everything to do with spending the day in Hakodate, on the big island of Hokkaido, Japan's squid capital. The streets leading to the morning market are heavy with restaurants, each ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Going Going Gone! The World's Biggest Tuna Auction
Aug 14th, 2009 at 9:00AM: My first glimpse of Tsukiji fish market's big, daily tuna auction is surreal: A thousand frozen blue fin tuna – weighing between one and two hundred pounds each – laid out in symmetrical rows on a concrete floor. That first look through a scratched plastic peephole, blurring the edges of the scene, makes it evermore otherworldly. A pair of cavernous auction rooms sit at the far back ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Fish Mecca
Aug 10th, 2009 at 9:00AM: A long line of three-wheeled electric carts steered by oversized circular handlebars, each with an attached four-foot-long wooden bed, whizzes through the narrow aisles of the Tsujiki fish market. Each is steered by a wild-eyed, sometimes smiling, sometimes glaring, Japanese fish monger – one of 60,000+ employees here in the world's largest fish market – who would just as soon mow you ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Swine Flu and Tokyo
Aug 7th, 2009 at 9:00AM: The direct flight from New York to Tokyo is one of the longest, thirteen hours and forty-five minutes, looping across Canada and the Bering Sea before paralleling Kamchatka and the eastern islands of Japan. It's a long way to travel for humans and viruses alike ... though I have to admit I hadn't thought about the latter until we touched down at Narita International Airport and found among the ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Zanzibar
Jun 22nd, 2009 at 10:00AM: After the Perfume River in Hoi An and the souks of Marrakech, Zanzibar rounds out the trio of 'most-exotic' places on the globe that I've long wanted to spend not days, but weeks. While these are very real places - crowded, often hot, occasionally dirty – they have each set themselves up in my mind, mostly through books, as mysterious, romantic. Now I've officially spent time in each. ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Ibo
Jun 18th, 2009 at 10:00AM: Ibo – officially Ilha Do Ibo, by the Portuguese who colonized it - is one of a string of 32 islands that make up the Quirimbas archipelago, separated from the Mozambique coast by just a shallow channel. Barely two miles long and two miles wide a fringe of reefs surrounds it; at low tide you can walk to the next island. On its main, slightly derelict beach fishermen hammer at boats turned on ...Bowermasters Adventures -- Becoming a French state
Jun 15th, 2009 at 10:00AM: Dozens of small tri-colored French flags hang from the awning of the bar 5/5 on Mamoudzou's seafront. A Malagasy polka/country/blues/rock band plays to a mixed crowd of blacks and whites. Two weeks ago a historic vote turned the street out front into a riot of celebration when 95.5 percent of voters on this tiny island of 186,000 people voted to officially become French citizens. Though Mayotte ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Communing with hermit crabs
Jun 12th, 2009 at 10:00AM: It is with great privilege and no small amount of humility that I spend as many days as I can on remote, uninhabited atolls. This Sunday morning it is in the Alphonse group of the Seychelles – south of the main granite islands of Mahe, Praslin and La Digue - and is called St. Francois. Shaped like a broken piece of coral, with several small fingers jutting northwards, it is just two miles ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- LaDigue
Jun 9th, 2009 at 9:00AM: I often ask audiences to define paradise. While responses vary, a high percentage involves some combination of white sand beach, coconut palm and blue-blue sea scenario. It's so pervasive I've long been curious where the notion first originated. Honeymoon brochure? 1940s movie? Similarly, as I travel and explore I keep running into places touted as "paradise on earth." A couple islands in the ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Pirates in Seychelles
Jun 4th, 2009 at 10:00AM: Five a.m. on the Indian Ocean, a quarter mile off the small granite island of La Digue. Daylight is still an hour away, the sea flat and quiet, still too early for the call of morning birds and too dark for pirates. And pirates are on everyone's minds and lips here. Just days before Somali pirates had grabbed a tuna boat with a crew of 29 just to the north of where we motor, near Denis Island. A ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Welcome to the Sea of Zanj!
Jun 1st, 2009 at 10:00AM: Six to seven hundred years ago the very first to explore what we know as the Indian Ocean were Arabs, from Persia and the northern deserts. Searching what every sea-faring explorer of the time was seeking – trading routes and new lands to colonize – they explored what came to be known at the time as the Sea of Zanj, the Sea of Blacks. From the Maldives to the east coast of Africa ...Bowermaster's Adventures -- Bluepeace
May 15th, 2009 at 9:00AM: Saffah Faroog sips a mango juice and continues explaining the history of the Maldives oldest environmental group, Bluepeace, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. He is its communications director, a volunteer like the rest of its staff, and has a great story to share - the organization has a great web presence and a long history of doing the right thing in the Maldives by keeping ...
