Travel Trivia: How is the sex of a tortoise baby determined? By the temperature of the egg during the first third of the time spent in the nest. 1 or 2 degrees difference makes the difference between male and female. With a 80% success rate, Fausto, a local celebrity at the Darwin center, proofed that a hairdryer is the most effective instrument to influence the sex of the tortoise.

Today was spent on Santa Cruz, my old stomping grounds from about two weeks ago. As with any big adventure, sometimes things don't go quite as planned. Saturday was a national holiday - in honor of the city of Guayaquil. I'd love to celebrate the city of San Francisco or Boston nationally. But we live there and they live here and differences are the spice of life, so let's just go with it. Unbeknownst to the guides, that national holiday was accompanied by a local triathlon. And that impacted our day some. For lunch and after, we went up into the highlands to watch tortoises in the wild. A good afternoon. We packed up the bus at 3:30 to get back to town by 4, leave us some time for shopping and the last zodiac leaves the dock at 6. That was the plan.

We did leave at 3:30. 10 minutes later, in Santa Rosa (so marked by a bar), we were blocked from entering the "highway" and moving further towards town due to the bike part of the triathlon. We are 4 25-people buses of tourists (not just our group). To solve this problem, we first all bought a beer. The entrepreneurial spirit was alive and well, and the price of beer went up by a full dollar within 10 minutes.

We then had a choice: we could watch Ecuador play Uruguay for placement for the 2014 world cup. The bar had a little (20") TV with rabbit ears, and the came was only 30min along and broadcasted live. I don't have to tell you how enormous of a deal soccer and the world cup is outside of the US, so I'm not going to.

The alternative was to stand by the road and cheer on the biking triathletes, beer in hand. The smiles on their faces as they came around the corner were huge. They all cheered with us. We later learned they were just 5k into their ride at the Santa Rosa bar, and didn't see another spectator until they finished their rides in town - and those spectators didn't cheer. The must have thought we were staged there on purpose.

I did both. I watched the game, and it was great to watch a game with such enthusiastic people. Cantonis-spoiler alert: if you've recorded the game and haven't watched it yet, stop reading this blog. As I said, we had 15min on the first half, 15min break, and 45min on the second half. I used to break to cheer on bikers, beer in hand. Little did I know that I had a good hour after the game was over to do the same. What was great about the game is that Ecuador won and thus did it everything it could to place itself for the world cup (outcome of a different game in the pool today should solidify their placement). So as the game progresses, more and more people piled into this tiny little bar on Santa Cruz, and everyone got a got dose of excitement.

We made it back to town at 6:30. No shopping, straight to the ship. The staff apologized, but I have to say, we all had a great day and it is unplanned events like this that make an adventure the adventure.