GALAPAGOS - part 2

Day 5

Santa Cruz – all day

Santa Cruz is the most heavily populated island in the archipelago. Its port, Puerto Ayora, is an obligatory stop for all ships, and this is where we woke up. In the morning Valerio took us to the north of the island to look at the local flora and fauna. We saw what looked like 2 huge craters with overgrown vegetation which he explained were rather sunk-in craters. Here we spotted a couple of really bright vermilion flycatchers, which are small and bright red birds with a black mask around the eyes. There were quite a few different small birds but frankly we cannot remember them all. One that stayed in our memory was the carpenter finch, which is curious in that this bird kills worms by spiking them with a cactus needle – and then they use the very same needle to feed the worm up to their beak!!! Apparently one of the very few animals who use tools to kill and feed, wow.

From here we went to see a lava tunnel, which is a tunnel dug by a jet of lava. Not far from the tunnel was a tortoise rearing centre, where we wondered around looking for the huge tortoises, which were not difficult to find. It was rainy, muddy and quite horrible but this is the weather for this time of year in this part of the island, which is when the tortoises go down to the coast to find a suitable nesting area.

We went back to the boat for lunch and then visited the Charles Darwin Scientific Station. There were quite a few people around but we managed to get our little private space here too. Here they rear land iguanas and the giant tortoises, which are being re-introduced in the various islands after they were decimated in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their ability to survive long periods of time without food and water made them the ideal source of fresh meat on long voyages, so whaling ships took thousands of them to eat! Bloody hell!!
14 breeds of giant tortoise have been identified but only 11 survive, one of which is represented by lonesome Jorge, the famous solitary turtle from the Pinta island, which is the last surviving animal of his kind and really really old. The National Park has been looking for a mate for him for ages but none have been found so far. They are currently offering $20,000 worth of prize for anybody who can provide a female for him plus all shipping costs!!! In the meantime they have provided Jorge with a couple of similar-breed females, but he doesn´t want to know, not identical enough!! On the other hand, in the same centre we came across very active Superdiego, an Espanola island male tortoise who has fathered thousands of babies in the last few years. And we saw him in action too!
Ah yes! Do you know how male giant tortoises fight for females? They stand in front of each other, stick out their necks high and the tallest wins!!!

On the way back from the Darwin Centre we had the chance to do a little shopping on the million shops along the main avenue – guess its name, Charles Darwin Avenue! - and then we went back to the boat for dinner. After dinner Gregory and I went back to shore for a couple of hours and then we sailed off to my favourite island – Espanola.

Vermilion flycatcher

Mockingbird

Superdiego in action

Lonesome George

Iguana in captivity

Young reared tortoises car park - numbered in different colours, each colour representing a particular island and breed

Day 6

Espanola Island

Gardner Bay - AM
Punta Suarez - PM

Garner Bay is GORGEOUS.
Though Valerio had told us that we were about to see the most beautiful beach in the Galapagos, ´if not in the world´, from the boat we could not quite understand what he was on about. Till we got to the beach! We are not going to get into discussions here if this is the most beautiful one in the world or not – we have seen some pretty places in Cuba and Thailand that may or may not make it a little hard to stand up for this one – but Gardner Bay is a white-sand paradise. The beach is white, large and pristine AND covered with huge colonies of really friendly sea lions. The young pups are really inquisitive and, if you stop to take a picture a little close, they run up to you to find out what you are doing! One really took me aback as she run towards me, I think she wanted to smell me or something, I got so shocked that she might touch me that I fell back on my bum!! Then I remembered that it is WE that are not allowed to touch THEM, but surely THEY can touch US if they wish? It was funny. Gregory had the same but with an adult female, and he stepped well back, got him on camera! Less funny was my encounter, together with Daniela and Tina, of one of the few beach masters. The sea bull went for us and it took all three of us to raise our hands before he desisted. First Daniela raised them. Nothing, it kept charging us. Then Tina and I reacted and only then he decided that three 1.8 m or so tall humans with stretched arms were not worth the fight. We agreed to leave the beach only because Valerio was taking us snorkelling with the sea lion pups on the other side of the bay. This was our best snorkelling session, we had sea lions pups right left and centre, all coming towards us to play. They are really playful, especially if you respond to their acrobatics by twisting and turning in the water with them. At one point Valerio picked up a sand dollar (it is an echinoderm which looks like a flat round large white pebble), to be exact, a DEAD sand dollar, and started throwing it up in the water. The pups were just like dog puppies, picking it up in turns and passing it around. We all played in with the dead sand dollar and it was great memorable fun, till we were reminded that it was lunch time and we had to go to Punta Suarez.

Punta Suarez is another extremely worthwhile spot, if not the most worthwhile, given the high concentration of animal quantities and types all in the space of a couple of km.

Underwater pics with the sea lions

Punta Suarez

We disembarked in Punta Suarez near a lovely white beach covered with - guess what - lots of sea lions! The beach is protected by a stretch of piled rocks where rather rough waves break. As we were stepping out of the dinghy, sea lions were playing body surfing, which is basically throwing themselves into the waves as they break ashore. It was a beautiful sight to see the seals in the transparent wave, but we were not quick enough to take a picture, and Valerio rushed us off the platform towards the beach, where piles of marine iguanas were sunbathing. I think they were sunbathing, all collectively staring together into the sun. Quite funny. Not only are they funny in their looks, they also move funnily and sneeze out the salt from their noses in a funny way.

So we went through the many marine iguanas crowds into a trail of birds again: the by now usual blue-footed boobies, the Nazca boobies, swallow-tailed gulls, the mockingbirds, etc. Valerio warned us that it was not allowed to offer water to the mockingbirds. Espanola is scarce on water and these birds crave it and they can tell that you have some in the plastic bottles! So they hang around you and if you open one, then suddenly you get covered with mockingbirds, which, like Valerio said, ´looks rather cool but it is not. Don´t do it´!!

The bird trail takes you to the nesting area of the waved albatross, a beautiful, graceful and huge sea bird which only breeds on this island. We found them in courtship season, which provided us with a really curious courtship display resembling a fencing duel. The ´duels´ lasts several minutes each and consist of bill-snapping and bill-rattling in a certain sequence that only the mating couple can perform together. So they use this to remember each other.

When we left the island the sea lions were still wave-surfing, but by then it was quite late and the waves were not see-through any more. Sigh. On the other side of the beach from the surfing sea lions, another group of sea lions were resting and drying off, when what everyone thought was shark fin suddenly broke the surface. The sea lions on the beach moved up a little further, then we realised that it was a sea lion lying on its side with its fin in the air pretending to be a shark patrolling the beach!!

Waved albatross

My perfect picture of a blue-footed booby

Wave-surfing sea lions

This is a short movie of the albatross courtship sequence

Day 7

Santa Fe Island - AM

This was, for me, the least interesting island we visited. What was special here was a type of land iguana which only lives on this island – the Santa Fe iguana – and the few hawks that we saw really from close-by. One interesting fact around this iguana is that it has two penises, one connected to sperm and one not, and the male iguanas use one or the other depending on the state of things!! According to our talking encyclopaedia Valerio, many other animals have ingenious forms of birth control. For example, the blue jellyfish that we saw washed up to the shore. They looked like bits of blue plastic bottle, but they were jelly fish with an air pocket that could be popped. These were the males, who have an air bubble so that they float in a different current than the females, who have no bubble, so that they rarely meet and that one time is enough to keep reproduction and their numbers under control. Crazy, not?

The island is also home to a forest of giant cacti and Palo Santo trees, but by then we had seen lots of them. Unimpressed!

Santa Fe iguana

Galapagos hawk

Galapagos snake

Valerio loves the giant cactuses

South Plaza - PM

This island was our nice closure to the trip. We really liked it and it ranks at least fourth in the compilation… which goes as follows:

1) Espanola – the WINNER!
2) Rabida
3) Santiago
4) South Plaza
5) North Seymour
6) Genovesa
7) Santa Cruz
8) Santa Fe

We were greeted by a couple of barking beach masters, who nevertheless allowed us to disembark trouble-free. This island is home to many sea lions and it is due to their high concentration that snorkeling here is banned. Lots of males compete for the females and those who lose the fights end up living in the bachelor colony in the southwest of the island. We saw a few of them sleeping off their wounds high up at the top of the cliff and could not quite grasp how they could climb up this high?? From the cliff we saw lots of red-billed tropicbirds, which are beautiful white birds with a long string tail and a red bill, as the name tells. They were very fast and unfortunately between the two of us we were not able to take one picture of them.

Past the sea lions it was a few nice yellow land iguanas, a rare hybrid iguana from a female marine iguana and a male land iguana and then, by the beautiful cliff, lots of the funny marine ones with the white crest on their heads. The island in this time of year was covered with carpet weed of an amazing red which contrasted beautifully with the cute prickly pear cactus trees.

Bachelor sea lion resting at the top of the cliff

Too much sun these ones...

Here's a couple of movies of sea lions on Plaza, the one in the water is the nasty beach master - I hope their sounds can be heard, they're sooo horrible!!!!

And this was our last night...

Day 8

Our last day was an extremely short one: get up at 6 am to be on the dinghy at 6:15 and off to Caleta Tortuga, on the north side of Santa Cruz. The idea was to see the mangrove swamp at low tide, which acted as a nursery for marine turtles, sharks and rays, each having their own part of the swamp. We got up on time and everything but the tide at 6:15 was already quite high and so all we saw very little – a turtle, a ray and a few pelicans.

From there it was a quick sail back to Baltra, where we sat for 3 hours waiting for the plane, thinking about the blue-footed boobies we had left behind.