APOLLO MUSEUM HOTEL

We're in Portland this week so the Skipper can attend to shore-related matters.

Among other things, I've used this break from cruising to shop for my upcoming trip to Ecuador this fall.

Using the Photo Booth feature on the Skipper's Mac, a lamp from our ultra-hip inn in Portland's uber-cool Northwest district, and Photo Shop, I've assembled a composite showing the sun hat I plan to wear in Quito the Galapagos to protect myself from those horrible sun rays.

I bought it at Portland's own Columbia Sportswear®. The hat is made from a fairly heavy miracle fabric that's supposed to cool your noggin far more efficiently than other manufacturers' miracle fabrics. I'll report back on whether this is just an extension of the P.T. Barnum school of marketing ("There's a sucker born every day") or whether the product lives up to the claims.

Since the Galapagos are (mostly) uninhabited, I won't have to worry about trying not to look like a total Gringo pendejo to Ecuadorians.

Anyway, I'll accomplish that with or without the hat, since I believe most Latin Americans probably think the US engineered the recent coup in Honduras. Other nationalists such as Morales, Chavez and Ecuador's own Correa are too prominent and their constituencies too large to take down the old fashioned way, but we've been messing with Central American nations' internal affairs with coups for well over a century to protect US interests and Central American oligarchs.

But I digress.

As for the fauna, they've had to put up with indignities from Homo Sapiens ever since the buccaneers and the early explorers began stopping at the Galapagos to reprovision.

That includes the revered Chas. Darwin, who spent an enjoyable hour or two tossing a Marine Iguana into a tide pool to observe its behavior. Answer: It always swam back to the place from which it had been launched, once it thought the coast was clear, which it wasn't, since Mr. Darwin was waiting there to fling it back into the water. What Darwin learned from this, as from all his other studies in the field, was actually quite significant; in this case, as to what makes Marine Iguanas tick, though it's unlikely his subject would have agreed.

Darwin was also a connoisseur of tortoise meat, knowledge he gained from personal experience and from conversations with locals. I think that's a subject he spends far, far too much time on in his chronicle of his time in the Galapagos.

Like the revered Audubon, Darwin's professional obligations required him to kill "specimens" of almost every animal he encountered so it could be sent back to London and studied. That's just the way it was.

Just read or listen to The Voyage of the Beagle.

So with that history, I doubt any of the endemic species who populate the islands will give a good gosh darn what I have on my head, or whether I even have a head.

As for my fellow passengers, well, it's my epidermis, isn't it? At least I won't have to worry about looking too gay.

The temple of the Sun or Koricancha is located in the southern part of the city of Cusco. Seen from the South, it looks like a pyramid, because the temple was built on a natural hill that was in its time the main temple.

The temple was built during the reign of the Inca Wiracocha around the year 1200 A.D., and later with the Inca Pachacutec the temple was embellished or decorated. Around the temple there were many buildings like the Palace of Huayna Ccapac, the palace of Kusicancha, the Inn of Kunturpata and the Inticancha Plaza.

Many chroniclers, historians, travelers and critics have written about this monument, and it's believed that from this temple the incas took most of the treasure to pay the release of the Inca Atahuallpa, captured by the spaniards. This treasure was made up of more than 700 plates of gold that weighed 10 to 12 pounds, and the smaller ones weighed 4 to 5 pounds. Also historians claim that idols were taken as well as utensils and other objects, in total they filled up one room with gold and two rooms with silver objects.