Day 68 16.09.15
We had breakfast at the hotel, buffet style. I had some granola, yoghurt and fruit – a repeating pattern I am afraid. I just don’t trust the scrambled eggs of buffets no longer.
We headed over to the port where we first got to see an overview of Isabela Island, since it had been dark when we arrived yesterday. Isabela is the largest island of the Galapagos.
It is not the most populated island, but it sure seems that it has a pretty large iguana population judging the amount lying around at the beach.
The tide was pretty low this morning, and so we could see several boats that seemed stranded all along the port.
We were greeted by a little sea lion that came swimming towards us.
We hopped on the boat to go snorkelling at a nearby place, where we hopped off onto the volcanic rocks walked a little and reached the bay.
The water was cold, and so I was happy about the wet suit. We had to be really careful with getting into the water, as there are little really territorial fish that would love nothing else for you not to step on their houses, and they will defend themselves by biting your feet.
We swam around the bay and instantly found several colourful starfish. Especially these blue ones were quite impressive.
There were also some chocolate chip starfish (if that’s really what they are called…)
We saw another type of stingray, an eagle ray, which seemed to be hovering the ocean floor with its large vacuum mouth.
Again we were accompanied by these little brownish coloured boxfish.
In a little cave like rock formation I saw a sea cucumber that was spiky. I had never seen them like this before.
And then we saw a different type of puffer fish than the one we had already gotten to see, one with actual spikes.
From the rocks we had already seen several marine iguanas swimming on the surface from their rocks to the sea to go eat.
Now we were actually swimming with them, only about 5 to 2 metres away from them. The swimming part was actually quite tricky as they were swimming through a larger channel to the sea. We couldn’t get to the channel without passing some very shallow rocks. As soon as I had passed, I realised that following the iguana and with that the channel wouldn’t be such a great idea, as I didn’t know where it would lead. So I turned around and realised that two fellow group members had already followed me. Turning around on the shallow rocks however is not the easiest thing to do without damaging the rocks and corals beneath you.
We got out all right and I decided I had had enough of swimming with the marine iguanas.
Instead I saw another beautiful specimen of a parrotfish along the rocks.
I finally got to see a concha shell, from which I had had that awful soup in Roatan Island back in the days. Maybe if you clean the shell up a bit it might look prettier, but as we didn’t take any shells or the like out of their natural spaces I soon dropped the thought.
Then someone called out turtle heaven. See for yourself.
There we probably more than 40 turtles just relaxing on the sand, every once in a while coming up for air. Some were getting cleaned by little fish, others tried to hide underneath sand. We spent most of our time there and didn’t know which turtle to take a picture of first.
We headed back to the bay and the boat and off we were to see the islet of Tintoreras. On the way there we saw the unique penguin colony to Isabela, which is the one that is closest to a human settlement. The penguins were just sitting along the rocks, occasionally one would fall in, but climb back up the rocky edges to be with its kin.
We arrived at the Tintoreras, which is a volcanic island rich in iguanas, sea lions, lichen covered rocks, different birds and another goodie Ill show you later.
The lichens like to populate the rocks causing their white colour.
A plant that I really enjoy is the mangrove. Its ability to filter salt water, to live semi on the beach and semi in the water, and find a place to grow in the most hostile areas is impressive. Here are the three stages, from seed, to little seedlings to the actual mangrove.
The waterfront was rather black compared to the lichen covered rocks, and their colour made it really difficult to spot the iguanas that had positioned themselves here to warm up.
Some of the iguanas were eating on the green seaweed.
Again the terrain was difficult to walk on, but little paths had been evened out to facilitate the walk.
Meanwhile frigates and blue footed boobies were fishing in the bay infront of us.
I don’t know, whether this already counts as Nature Vol. 3, but we saw some regurgitated parrotfish scales and bones, that had been left by a sea lion.
The next picture however does count to the Nature Vol. 3 as it depicts a dead sea lion baby, either having died during birth or already being dead before birth. You can see that it is still wrapped in its embryonic sack. Most first time sea lion mothers will bear dead babies. “They are just not that experienced” says our guide. Apparently they can also choose to abort when they know their baby is no longer alive within them.
Next we moved on the shark alley.
The sharks are harmless to humans, but it is still not permitted to snorkel with them in order not to disturb their peace. The white tipped sharks remain here during the day where they are not disturbed by predators or humans or the current, and can just lie around in the water with water still passing through their gills.The sharks hunt at night and leave this little alley through this passageway.
We saw another great example of where a crab had left its shell to grow a larger one. This one was a male, and was a great way to prank others.
Back at the bays beach and boarding point of the boats we saw another bird that I could get a closer picture of.
We went for lunch in town, where we had vegetable soup – again with popcorn.
Accompanied by some spaghetti carbonara – eventually you need something different than fish and rice.
We headed back to the hotel, got changed, enjoyed some Internet and waited for the cars that would take us to a special look out.
Special in the sense that we were heading to the point where a man made lagoon attracted flamingos. The flamingos are the proof of the well functioning ecosystem of the Galapagos. The red seaweed is eaten by the shrimps, the shrimps are eaten by the flamingos. That is how the flamingos receive their red colour. When flamingos are born, they are completely white until they eat enough food and the pink pigment starts settling in their feathers.
We then moved on to the turtle breeding centre, which was just a stone’s throw away. Here the turtles are kept for breeding, the eggs are secured and the hatching process is closely monitored in order to be able to reintroduce the turtles in their natural environment.
They had several enclosures all sporting different sized turtles; either they were of different age groups, (the turtles are kept at the breeding centre up to 5 years until they are ready to be reintroduced into their natural habitats), or of different geographical groups. Some turtles, whose population is in extreme danger of extinction, are taken out of the wild in order to reproduce sufficiently, to stabilise their numbers enough to be reintroduced.
We got to see where the little turtle babies were kept and hatched. We saw the size of eggs including the size of a small only recently hatched turtle baby.
The guide on site also showed us the different stages of turtles growing in the egg.
There were some saddle back turtles, which are defined by their shell form.
They have a very clever way of keeping the wasps under control. They put up a basin of water with a soup detergent mixture. The wasps drink the liquid and instantly die in the water. They cannot put out any other poison as that might mess with the rest of the ecosystem if they are eaten by birds or any other predators, that then might die from the poisonous wasps.
After the breeding centre, we headed on along a walkway passing another lagoon with flamingos, little crabs and a little bird sieving through the water, walking towards the beach.
We reached the beach when the sun was slowly setting and the light was breaking beautifully against the clouds.
While crossing the road towards the water we saw a grand sign!
We walked along the beach towards a beach side bar.
The iguanas had obviously taken the street sign to heart and had slowly made their way to sit in front of a bar.
It was coco loco time! It is pretty much the coconut water, chilled, and sugar cane alcohol is added. It was really my favourite drink I have had along the trip but it was a nice refreshment.
We ordered at a place where they also made pizzas. I chose a ceviche instead, and some octopus on the grill. While the others were waiting for forever for their pizzas to come, obviously Galapagos “20 minutes”, I got my starter and my main at the same time. So while my food was sitting there going cold, the others were still waiting for theirs. I started mine and as soon as I was nearly finished, the others pizza was delivered. However, not from the actual restaurant but from the restaurant next door. The pizza didn’t look like the best one either, so I was happy not trying out some pizza on the islands.
While we had been waiting for the pizzas to arrive we had talked a little about how the locals coped with different pronunciations of the foreigners. For example, one of the group members called Peter from Australia, found that letting people know his name was quite a challenge. When he introduced himself as “Pete”, the locals would ask him, “what?” or “please repeat?” So when he did and said “Pedro”, the locals would then understandingly tell him, “ohhh you mean Peter!” Obviously there is not that much difference between Pete and Peter. It kept us laughing for a while. Especially as this exact phenomenon repeated itself in the bar we went to after dinner.
We went to the bar where we were hoping on learning some salsa. Unfortunately, there was mainly American music playing. We passed the time by watching Peter use his poi, which is a little juggling device that changes colour and makes for great images when being swung around, especially at night.
We all tried ourselves and at some point when the Latin music started playing we stopped with the poi and started dancing salsa. It was great fun and we left before we could do much damage and in order to have slept at least a little before our big hike tomorrow.
