Galapagos pt 1...

I was supposed to meet my group in the evening of the first day of the trip. I saw the list of names for the trip and it was just me and 4 othet women so a small group. I went down to the meeting at 6.00 to find just me and another lady there. The othet 3 were arriving later that night so we postponed the meeting until the next morning. I was a little glum as I was really looking forward to meeting people again and goung out in a group.

I was expecting the trip to be boat based (ie you live on aboat the whole time), but clearly I hadn't read the itinerary that carefully as we were actually staying in hotels on the inhabited islands.

But the next morning we woke up early and were off to the airport :) we landed in San christobal island and were met by our naturalist and guide for the week, Zambo, and got taken to our hotel to have lunch. The hotel was right on the seafront and the beach there is called sealion bay. There were so many of them! They were mostly on the beach and rocks lazing about, but some of them were on the pavement and even lying on benches!

After lunch we went up to the highest point on the island to a viewpoint and then we mountain biked down to a beach. There were more sealions on that beach, totally unconcerned by the people. Next to them. I also saw my first iguana.

The next day (15th) I saw:

Blue footed boobies
Eagle rays
Green turtles (having abut of an orgy)
Frigate birds with inflated red chests
Black tipped reef sharks
White tipped reef sharks
Lava gulls
Lava lizards
Pellicans
Nazca boobies
Sting rays
Puffer fish
Chocolate chip star fish
Sally lightfoot crabs
Another type of starfish that I've forgotten what it's called
Marine iguanas
Dolphins
Sealions

As you can see, I had an ace day! We had breakfast at a local restaurant and then went onto our boat for the next 4 days that would take us from island to island. It was a nice sized boat, someone said it was 12m long. It was really nice with just 5 of us, we had loads of space to lounge about.

Anyway, we went along the coast to our first snorkeling site. Here we saw some sealions and an iguana feeding on the algae on the rock which was cool. An we saw an eagle ray.

Then we headed straight out to our next dive site at a place called kicker rock. This is a big pillar of ash coming out of the sea. The drop offin one side of the rock is about 4000m but there's a shallow channel of about 30m that's good for spotting sharks :-) I was really looking forward to seeing sharks and I wasn't disappointed!! We saw at least 30 of them swimming below us - it was amazing! And one of our guided dived down quite deep and saw hammer head sharks too! I don't see how people can be scared of sharks, they're beautiful!

Then right after seeing the sharks, we saw a shoal of eagle rays - about 18 of them which is apparantly quite rare ti see. We snorkeled round kicker rock where I saw a few more sharks and dome starfish and sealions - it was so cool!

Then we went to chill out on a beach for a bit and eat lunch and sunbathing on the hull of the boat - nice!

In the afternoon we went to the interpretation centre which was based on the human history of the islands. they started being a place where they sent prisoners, but it didn't turn out very well and got closed down. And it was a popular spot fir pirates too.

In the evening we went out for a meal (all meals consisted of some form of fish) and then walked back along the beach, watching the sealions settling down for the night.

The next day (16th) I got up early (by accident, I forgot to move my clock back an hour) but it was really nice as I got to have a final look at the sealions on the beach. They're so playful and lazy! All they do is sleep on top of one anothet with one occasionally whacking it's neighbour with a flipper, and with others climbing over others to much moaning and complaining than those being crawled on! I saw that they didn't just sleep on the beach, rocks and pavement but they climb into boats in the harbour as well! I saw one boat that had been taken over by a sealion and a pellican, it was funny to see!

Then we had a 2 hour boat trip to Floreana island. We saw dolphins jumping out of the water - it was great! In the distance I saw a whale... Well, a spurt of water from the blowhole anyway. We stopped off by a small island on the way there to see frigate birds. As it was the mating season, you could see all their red chests inflated like balloons! It was great to see!

Then we went snorkelling again. We saw turtles,rays,starfish, big shoals of fish that scattered when zambo dived down which was cool to see, a galapagos penguin and a parrot fish.

We got to our little hostel on floreana and saw some red iguanas. There are only 150 people living on this island. Zambo, who was born and raised on the galapagos says this is what the islands uses to be like 15 years ago before tourism really took off here.

In the afternoon we went up to the highlands to see the pirates cave. It had good views of the sea, which I guess is why the pirates liked it as a look out. Then we went diwn to see sone tortoises which was ace!

On the way back we stopped off to pick fresh pineapples. I've never seen a pineapple bush before - they're really spiky! We got given a machetti and had to hack one off! We ate them for pudding and breakfast the next day :-)

Then we had a little game of football on the beach which was quite fun (she says grudgingly as I don't like football as a rule) but we were barefoot on black volcanic sand which was spiky!

We had a nice meal our of asparagus soup and we gad to put popcorn in it! (different to Bolivia where you put chips in soup!) and some wahoo fish which is good and meaty.

The next day I woke up covered in mosquito bites :-( I'd felt them biting me ever since I got to the islands, had a quick count up and got to 45 and that wasn't including the ones I couldn't see on my back!

But anyway, that morning we got up early ti go and see a little peninsular off the beach which was very pleasant with black rocks and White sand and blue sea and green cactuses.

We got the boat to Isabella island in the morning and it took a couple of hours. I got pretty much drenched from sitting in the spraybut it was cool. Near Isabella, we stopped at an island that had more frigate birds with their chests all puffed out.

In the afternoon, we went for a walk to the tortoise breeding centre. On the way there we had to walk through a bit of a natural park. At one point there was a wooden boardwalk that was covered in iguanas! I felt so sorry having to disturb them to get by! Some of them just kept walking ahead of us.

We got to the breeding centre and saw the little baby tortoises. They're kept in little huts for the first 3 years of their lives until they have a hard shell to help them fend off predators. Then they're in outside pens until they're 6 and after that they're released into the wild.

Then we went to the wall of tears.  This was built by the prisoners who were sent to the galapagos as punishment. The wall was built for no other reason than to keep them busy. It's said the bones of the prisoners who died building the wall can be found inside. It's a massive thing, 100m long and 9m high and it's really thick as well.

Then we went to the love beach which is where iguanas dig their nests to lay their eggs.  Loads of female iguanas were there protecting their teritory. While we were there,we saw lots of activity with the sea birds further along so we went to have a look. It was a feeding frenzy with blue footed boobies. There were also frigate birds and pellicans there too. Zambo our guide said it was pretty rare to see. The frigate birds can't land on water but they were flying really close to us (less than 1m away) and trying to pick up stray fish that were in rock pools. It was amazing to see!

After that we headed to the pink iguana pub for happy hour. This was a brilliant pub on the seafront that did very nice cocktails! It was also home to 110 iguanas! They were climbing up the Walls and sunning themselves on the balcony - it was brilliant! A very chilled out and idyllic way to spend an evening!! :-)