The Galapagos
Ok, well last Friday, March 19th we were in the Galapagos, we had had an AMAZING couple of days….Thursday we had arrived on the Island of Santa Cruz where the airport is. We took a bus to this hut in the forest where we went for a walk and saw Giant Tortoises! They were just hanging out in the woods. After that we drove to this cave created by a lava flow. That was pretty cool, it was tall but not incredibly wide, there was this one part where the ceiling and the floor were about 2 feet apart from each other and we had to crawl underneath it to get out the other side. After this mini-adventure we headed out to find our boats. Our boat was named Antartida. It had 3 rooms on a second floor and more on the bottom and middle floors. My room was on the second floor. After we settled in, we ate an amazing fish lunch and then headed to the Charles Darwin research station on Santa Cruz. There we learned a lot about the conservation of the Galapagos, but the turtles especially. Also, we saw lonesome George, which was really exciting. There were other tortoises also, which you could get about 2 inches close if you wanted to. Also crawling all over the place was lava lizards, which had awesome coloring, well…the males at least. We ended the day by walking through town, boarding our boat and going to bed. I felt a little sea sick, but I took some medicine in hopes of feeling better. As I lay on deck trying to feel better, everyone was singing songs and making jokes. Jim had written a song called the Bonero Rock. Bonero is the new name that we gave our boat, and we proceeded to call it that the whole rest of the trip. The next morning we woke up, ate and got off at the Island Espanola which we had traveled to during the night. As soon as we got close to the island we saw sea lions resting on the shore. Then when we stepped off of the boat, there were two fairly small sea lions about 2 feet away there to greet us!! We walked passed them, after taking about 100 pictures of course, to the beach area where we saw a colony of sea lions, all so close to us. It was so amazing; one baby was sleeping on a long with sand all over its eyes. I took a video tape of the baby when it woke up and stormed off to the beach where the rest of the sea lions were. After we finally managed to pull away from this awesome scene, we found another colony about 2 minutes later. There we saw sea lions playing, some were making some really lout noises which I also managed to get on tape. Just watching the interaction between individuals was incredible. Here are these animals you’ve only seen on the discovery channel, and I’m standing right there where they could have filmed it! And everyone feels like a photographer here because it’s impossible to take a bad picture! Every aspect of this moment was beautiful. And it was only about 9 o’clock! We continued walking around the island and encountered some blue-footed and masked-boobies. There was this cliff that stretched for a long time and had a break in it for this large horse-shoe shaped rocky beach. We were up top on the cliffs which appeared white on top because there must have been hundreds of birds hanging out there. What a scene! As we walked along the cliff we climbed down to the shore area, where we saw two seals, probably males living in a bachelor colony. We hung out there for a while just watching them. Then we moved on. We walked on top of another fairly large cliff to this part that they call the “blow-hole” because there is a large stretch of rocky under the cliff that is the same level as the sea, so as the current pushes the water towards the shore; it shoots up into the crevices of the rocks. We sat there for a good while just watching. Amazing Beautiful! I can’t even describe how it felt to just stand there and watch how powerful the ocean could be. Finally, on our walk off of Espanola we saw a Galapagos hawk perching on this monument tower. We returned back to the boat to an awesome snack on deck of cheese, crackers and olives. The sky and water were the brightest blue I’ve ever seen. I never even thought that nature could make this color blue, but there it was. We sat, ate and joked hoping that they wouldn’t give us lunch soon because we ate so many crackers! Jim was afraid to throw the olive pits in the ocean because he didn’t want to be the cause of an introduced, invasive species. We all laughed a little at that, but in a way I totally understood where he was coming from. Anyways, after lunch we all went snorkeling near the boat for a little while. It was awesome, I didn’t see many fish, but we did spot a sea turtle and follow it for about 20 minutes, and once we lost the sea turtle, we saw a sting ray! Huge! It was amazing to watch the turtle though. They are so amazingly graceful in the water. From our boat we could see them come up for air now and then, but they were so incredible to see underwater, but it was so hard to keep up! When we got back on the boat, we right away prepared to go somewhere else to snorkel. The crew took us to this rock formation where we saw hundreds of fish, in so many different colors, shapes, sizes! I saw this really big yellowish fish and dove down to get a closer look, I saw that it had big teeth and I swam right back up to the surface! So we swam almost all the way around the rock when I saw this little speck of white next to this rock on the ocean floor. Upon closer inspection, it was a white tipped shark! I must have floated there staring at it for at least 10 minutes! I dove down to see it, came back up, floated there, and took tons of pictures! That was absolutely the best part of tat snorkeling trip. All tired and excited we went back to the big boat to drop some stuff off and hang out at the beach for a while. Since we were anchored very close to the beach we could already see the dozens of sea lions sleeping on the beach before we even got there. On the beach we hung out for about an hour and a half. About 1 foot away from dozens of sea lions all sleeping in rows down the beach. We walked in the water for a bit, where a sea lion started to swim right towards me! I moved at the last minute because I was scared! It was awesome though. On the way back we saw the other group. It was really fun to hang out with them for a while. They buried one girl under the sand and made her look like a mermaid which was really cool. The small boat finally came to pick us up and we went to eat dinner and hang out on the boat until bed. That was our last night in the Galapagos, and it was totally worth it. What an amazing magical place that I would visit again in a second!