STEPH'S FRIEND!!!

The Eclipse - A week touring the Galapagos



Hi All, it has taken a couple weeks for us to put this together, sorting through the 3000+ photos we snapped. I know it is a little epic...we wanted to show as many of the animals and landscapes as we could without going absolutely overboard. The trip was really awesome, sorry if you are photoed out before you get to the end :)


 The Eclipse

We got to the airport nice and early after about a 45 minute drive through the town and highlands of Santa Cruz. The island is really quite big, and contains over half of the population of Galapagos (32,000), you almost don't expect the place to have a 'normal' town . The highlands are where the majority of the giant tourtises live in the wild. Its quite strange, it is nearly always raining there, whereas the rest of the island is almost always dry. Anyway Back to the airport....the Airport is actually on Baltra Island, which is literally seperated from Santa Cruz by a two minute ferry ride. The island has almost no animals and was used as an American military base during the 1950's - the reason the island has almost no animals.

Anyway at the airport -  After a while we found one of the guides from our boat. Hew took our tickets over to the guide who embarrasedly tried to hide the beer he was drinking...nice form at 11am. The rest of the passengers arrived on a plane at around midday, we watched with great anticipation as we had been concerned about the demographic. We were quite excited when we spotted a couple who looked to be under 40 ( Steph joked - hope they speak english) and another couple travelling with there backpacker daughter with a guitar on one shoulder....We had at least 3 people to talk to!! 

OK - The tour we will do is over 8 days and is set up for island touring and snorkeling - between 2 and 4 activities a day. The boat we have been moved to, after the Eric ran a ground, is quite a different deal. We orginally chose the Eric because of the itinerary and the fact that it only had 16 passengers. We were offered a couple of different choices of boat and we thought the bigger boat had the best itinerary, even though it had more passengers ( max 48) and probably an older client base. Turned out that 10 others ended up being on the Eclipse that were supposed to be on the Eric - so the age range was always going to be the same. Also the boat wasn't full, 37 on board.

Galapagos Map

























Itinerary

Saturday Morning
Afternoon
Airport - Baltra Island, Galapagos
Santa Cruz Island - Las Bachas Beach
 Sunday Morning
Afternoon
Santiago Island - Puerto Egas
Bartolomé Island
 Monday Morning
Afternoon
Santa Cruz Island - Cerro Dragón
Rábida Island
 Tuesday Morning
Afternoon
Isabela Island - Tagus Cove
Isabela Island - Elizabeth Bay
 Wednesday Morning
Afternoon
Fernandina Island - Punta Espinoza
Isabela Island - Punta Vicente Roca
 Thursday Morning
Afternoon
Santa Cruz Island - Charles Darwin Research Station
Santa Cruz Island - Highlands
 Friday Morning
Afternoon
Española Island - Gardner Bay
Española Island - Punta Suárez
 Saturday Morning Santa Cruz Island - Black Turtle Cove
Departure to Guayaquil Ecuador






























Day One: Las Bachas Beach, Santa Cruz Island

This was really only a half day, and after getting on the ship, sitting through a couple of presentations, a safety drill, and organising snorkeling gear we had an hour or so to stroll along Las Bachas beach. Las Bachas beach is so named after the barges (bachas in Spanish) that were left behind here by the American Army when they were ordered to get out of the country within 48 hours... hmmm,...wonder what they did wrong??So the brages were left to rust on the beach and now all that remains is a serious of metal spikes coming out of the ground (Hew's dad joke - mini galapagos stonehenge) The american also dumped all their jeeps and stuff off a cliff somewhere nearby too.... idiots!



The beach was really nice. There was really fine white sand with dark volcanic rocks scattered along the shoreline with the occasional marine iguana or sally light foot crab. As we went for a leisurely stroll, the odd boobie was dive bombing off in the distance, as well as a  giant blue herron was standing on the shore posing for photos. There were a few turtle tracks heading off into the sand dunes at the top of the beach. It's actually out of season for laying now as the hachlings are due to make the long journey into the ocean. The average turtle will lay around 100 eggs, three of those will make it into the ocean and only half those will become adults. The small turtles make a nice meal for Frigates, Herrons and Hawks.  As we were walking past, a group of Frigates were circling the nests checking for any sign of activity. Further along behind the beach we found a salty lagoon with a solitary Flamingo.


A quick dip followed, the water was an amzing blue color, everything just seems nicer here! Steph found a baby reef shark in the shallows (although didn't point it out in case one of the oldies ad a heart attack and keeled over) and then back to the boat for a three course meal, welcome cocktail, and an eeeeeexxxxxxxttttremely informative talk on how to snorkel and breifing on the next days activities. As we imagined the majority of people were a bit older. There was a few fun people in the crowd though. Tina and Ian from England, a couple in their early 30's and then there was Bill and Liz and thier daughter Hannah. Also met a really funny couple Leo and Jane (Leo, Canadian, Jane, NZ). They have a house in NZ, Canada and Hawaii, lucky bastards!

Day two:  Puerto Egas, Santiago Island and Pinnacle Rock, Bartolome Island

Todays first activity was to Puerta Egas, the sand here is black. It is made from ground down volcanic rocks. Pretty cool. It did stick to you an aweful lot though! As we started off on our walk the obligatory sea lion was sunbaking just waiting to wave us off. As we headed around the point swarths of marine iguanas were sunning themselves in preparation for an afternoon of diving and algea munching. The big males can actually dive up to 40 feet deep and stay in the water for around 45 minutes. They all lie on top of each other in an iguana tangle and then sometimes crabs lie on top of them. Giant stacks on... We also saw some Galapagos fur seals, these seals are shorter, fatter and furier than there Galapagos counterparts, the sea lion. The biggest male weighing 65kg's, while the big male sea lions get to 150kg. The seals spend their days in the shade of rocks as their fur is so thick that if they try and sunbake they quickly overheat (sea lions on the other hand do nothing but sun bake...)
Volcanic shorelines that make up most of the coast on the majority of Islands




After the walk we went for a snorkel (and again in the afternoon), this one was just aff the beach and around a close by point. We saw heaps of tropical fish, schools of baby and juvenile Barracuda, a couple of white tip reef sharks, diamond stingrays, a turtle, and unexpectantly a couple of wahoos. Nice snorkel!
A quick shower and change of clothes and back onto dry land for a "hike" up to the most famous vista of the Galapagos, Sullivan bay. Awesome view....Again arid landscape due to volcanic topography. Not alot of life around here, just a few lava lizards and lava cactus amoungst some other drout tolerant plants.
On the way up to the lookout to Sullivans Bay


Sullivan's bay




Day three: Cerro Dragon, Santa Cruz Island and Rabida Island

Cerro Dragon, or Dragon hill, is named after the land iguanas that used to own the island. Introduced predators (dogs and cats) have almost wiped out the population. Some breeding programs have helped restore the numbers somewhat. We managed to find 5 or 6 during our walk. They are quite a bit bigger than the marine iguanas. We saw too large males facing off over some territory as well as a male trying to impress a female with a head nodding display reminscent of a mosh pit. A swim at the beach followed.
Before lunch we were shown how to make tradicional Ecuadorian ceviche. Fish, lime, salt, tomato, red onion, oil, corriandor and presto - certaintly beats $2 hamburgers.
The victor in front, with his opponent slinking away at the back....
Rabida Island - We had an afternoon snorkel along a picturesque lush green and red cliff faced island. The snorkeling was again quite good. We jumped in off the panga and Steph and I swam towards the rocks to try and coerce a small sea lion into coming in for a play....he thought about it as he moved like he was going to jump in but ended up turning his back on us and continued sun baking grrrrr. The rest of the snorkel was really good. Sharks, Turtles, a Diamond Stingray, massive schools of different bait fish, plenty of hogfish, hawkfish, angel fish, damsels, file fish, barracuda of differing phases, and... steph was very excited.....- a diving Marine Iguana!!!! He was eating some algae of some volcanic rock at around 3-4meters. 
Feeding Marine Iguana

After a short break and rinse we were off for a walk around Rabida island. An awesome red sanded beach, up to a small hill. Plenty of lava lizards, finches, cactus, and a pile of marine iguanas sun baking on the rocks at one end of the beach. Another lagoon behind the beach and a couple of small groups of flamingos. The sun was setting as we ended our walk on the red beach, which made all the colors really intense. The iguanas and flamingos in the lake, were all posing in the last light.


Galapagos Mocking Bird


One of the thirteen species of Darwins' finches, the main difference between them all is the size and shape of the beak - except the vampire finch that drinks the blood of sea birds....
We returned to our room to find this rather suggestive towel art

Day four: Tagus Cove & Elizabeth Bay, Isabela Island

The day started with a wake up call at 6am for a nice kayak along Tagus Cove. We saw quite a bit of wildlife, sea lions, penguins, blue footed boobies, marine iguanas, and our first sightings of the flightless cormorant. The flightless cormorants are strange looking birds. Massive bodies for such small wings. Apparently they flew to the islands and over time lost the ability to fly as they had no natural predators. We saw a couple trying to navigate some rocky terrain, to move about they used a combination of waddling, jumping and flapping their little stumps! Very silly looking, but, they are great divers.... There is a bunch of old graffiti on the cliffs high up in the area from the late 1800's and early 1900's. Ships landing on the island would carve or paint thier names onto the cliff face.

Flightless Cormorant

A little later in the morning we had another snorkel. The current was a little stronger this time and visibility not so great. But it was still awesome. A heap of turtles, an eagle ray and we got to play with 3 sea lions....one for over 5 minutes - they are so incredibly fast in the water, and so playful. The first we saw briefly - Steph and I would swim out in front of the group to try and avoid the mess that the oldies were causing (think dodgem car snorkeling). He darted backwards and forwards a couple of times before doing a  somesalt around Steph and sped off not to be seen again. We finished the snorkel and were heading back to the boat when the guide found some penguins and a couple of sea lions in a small cove. We all jumped in and proceeded to play with the sea lion for 5 or so minutes.  I found the last one swimming back to the boat - he was a really big male, much slower but still interested......
A rather playful Sea lion that we snorkeled with

In the afternoon we had a panga ride through some mangrove channels in Elizabeth bay. There were sea turtles everywhere through the mangroves, as well as penguins and sea lions. There was a big rock a little way out to sea that had everyone sun baking and posing in perfect lighting - iguanas, sea lions, boobies, penguins, cormorants, and crabs.


The rock that everyone hung out on

Blue footed boobie posing nicely






Day five: Puerto Espinoza, Fernandina Island and Punta Vicente Roca, Isabela Island 
 
 



AM
Fernandina is one of the youngest islands of the archipelago. It is almost all vocanic rock with a large volcano dominating the landscape. We spent the morning walking around the coast of the island, which was made up of rock pools and small inlets - the tide was quite low so a lot of water was trapped in the pools. The rocks are covered in marine iguanas (and green algae) and are teaming with other native reptiles, mammals and birds. In small groups of rocks we could watch sea lions frolicing, turtles sleeping, iguanas sun baking and diving, crabs scurrying, and flightless cormorants and penguins fishing.

Sally Lightfoot Crab
Striated Heron , scary birds, have been caught on film grabbing finches by the neck, holding them under the water until drowned, and then eating them whole!!!!!!

Lava Lizard
We had our first sighting of the Galapagos Hawk, albeight from a distance - perched in a tree a little too far away for the camera to do it justice. There was also a baby whale skeleton on the rocks and big piles of driftwood caused by the wave (was a tsunami actually!) sent from the Japanese earthquake.
The other animal we spotted for the first time was the Galapagos snake - we actually found four, of which two were mating. These snakes are harmless and completely docile, luckily as the snake slivered through the group of us watching him, right under Steph's shoes!

Thats Stephs shoes that snake is going under.

Algae munching

Lava cactus, can only grow in "new" lava

Now thats a lot of lizards

The other great thing we have noticed about the Galapagos is the distinct lack of people visiting the islands. Annually around 150,000 people visit the islands, and the National park has restricted the number of tour boats to 80 for the entire archipelago. This is great, as so far we have only seen 2 other boats in our travels and have only had one of those boats at the same time at any of the visitor sites.

PM

A snorkel was next, we were told the visibility was not going to be good before we went out - half the people pulled the plug... we were crammed into the panga as the other two were being used to tour the bay - 16 of us in there as opposed to the usual 12... It was a quick motor over to the spot - we could see the waves crashing into the sharp rocks at the bottom of the cliffs...the setting is really nice, a massive volcano that is over 400m tall. We jump into the water and it is freezing, the visibility not much better.....but, we were really close to the point and a couple of sea lions were there waiting to be played with. The group swam away whilst I kept warm swimming with the sea lions,. Steph bellowed HEEEW! angirily - at this point I have 4 sea lions darting backwards and forwards in front of me! So I had to catch up to the rest of the group...ggrrr.. The rest of the snorkel was fairly uneventful until we reached the next point - this time Steph and I found 3 more sea lions - Steph found a really big male that would have been as big as her.
The other cool sighting was a flightless cormorant who dived in front of us a couple of times...they go deep as well....

Day six: Highlands and Charles Darwin Research Station, Santa Cruz Island

This was our day amongst civilization. In the morning we headed to the Charles Darwin Research Station. Here they do lots of good work, researching and keeping tabs on all the populations of most of the animals on the islands. One of the main focuses is the breeding programs for the giant tortoises. They can only breed tortoises that came from the same island. Apparently they are otherwise sterile, also they would lose the differnt species if they started interbreeding. We got to see lots of tortoises of all sizes. It was quite amazing how small they start out! Like tiny tea saucers!
Next we headed up into the highlands to find some in the wild. On the way to the reserve, we stopped in briefly at a giant lava tube that you can walk down into. It was pretty amazing to imagine it full of liquid hot lava racing along towards the sea.
Lava tunnel
On our way to the reserve we actually found 4 tortoises in an area just off from the side of the road. There was a massive old male, chasing two small females. He caught up to one of them and proceeded to mount, with no actual chance of any action, he then just sat on top of her for a while.
The large male in hot persuit....
Next stop was the reserve, here we found another couple of tortoises, mostly eating, and a very special breed......
Very special type of tortoise....

In the afternoon we got some free time Puerta Ayora. Looked in a few more shops and said goodbye before our next leg of the journey.

Puerto Ayora, the boats are in today!


Day seven: Gardner Bay and Punta Suarez, Espanola Island

Gardener Bay was a picture perfect beach covered in Sea Lions. When we first arrived there were two Galapagos Hawks sitting really close to us!

Galapagos Hawk, top of the food chain in the islands
"I am sooo sleepy...."

"So are we..." (sunbaking Galapagos Sea Lions)


We spent most of the morning there doing as we pleased, walking, swimming or snorkeling. The sea lions were not very playful we tried to coerce a few into the water with not a lot of success. I went for a bit of a snorkel, not much around apart from a heap of baby rays in the shallows and the odd sea lion darting past returning to the shore after fishing. A little later we went for a bit of a walk up the beach and found a couple of babies playing in the shallows. We joined them and rolled around in the shallows with them for ages. It was really fun... Steph didn't want to leave!
Steph and Hews' new friend - we spent ages with guy
 
Next we went for a short panga ride to a usual diving spot for some deep water snorkeling. We tried a second spot as the first had lots of fish, but we were hunting some bigger critters. The second sight was much better, we found 3 or 4 Galapagos Sharks, a couple of turtles, stingrays, big schools of snapper, gringos and grunts. We were starting to head back to the boat when a small school of Golden Rays passed under us which was really cool. As I was about to get back into the boat a Galapagos Shark cruised underneath, a fitting end to the under water world of Galapagos. (Not such a fitting end for Steph as she got seasick in the reasonable size swell and decided to give the fish a special feed, maybe she should have stayed on the beach after all!)

After lunch we all headed to the last real site we were to see. Talk about saving some of the best till last! Punta Suarez starts off with a landing onto a natrual rocky spit. Quick hop, step and jump over some rocks (or a slow stagger depending on who was in your group) and we were on a small beach with MORE sealions. Also the iguanas on this island are slightly different to the other islands. They have a red and green coloration, especially bright during the mating season, but still apparent for our trip. The locals call them christmas iguanas!
Christmas Iguana (note the red and green colors)

As we walked further around the island, we came across what we were here to see, the waved albatross. They are considered endemic to Espanola, as even though they spend months at sea a year, without touching land, they return each year to the same island, find the same mate (they pair for life) and lay one egg. They are huge birds, and quite amusing to watch on land. They are built for the air so anything done on the ground is quite comical, especially their re-uniting/mating dance. We were lucky enough to see this a number of times as well as some of the first eggs for the season.
A pair of nesting Waved Albatross

Next stop was the albatross airport, a smooth strip of open grassy area which they all use to land as they are a bit unco. To take off, they are too heavy to just take off anywhere, instead they have to waddle all the way along the path to the nearest cliff, where they wait for an updraft and just step off into it! Pretty impressive. This cliff was our next stop on the walk and we sat and just watched for a while as gulls, boobies and albatross all glided about.

A bit further on we also found nesting boobies. These guys too have a funny premating dance that involed the male showing off his feet to the female, for some reason it reminded us of John Cleese. The boobies weren't bothered by us at all, if you went close to one, they just looked at you like, "yeah, what do you want? here, I'll pose like this, now you take your photo......".


"Check out my feet woman...."
Hew, they won't talk back you know.....



An amzing end to an amazing week. Hopefully we'll come back one day and find all these animals still roaming about, oblivious to the rest of the world.

Adios!


Isabela Island, Galapagos

We had a couple of days (well nearly a week) to spend on Santa Cruz between our Dive liveaboard and Island cruise. For the first two days we just did some souveneir shopping and ate and drank (& visited Tortuga bay which we already mentioned). We caught up with a couple of guys from the dive boat, had a good night with too much food and alcohol (thanks Dirk). Dirk is from Germany and we were affectionately refering to him as CEO of the world. He is a CIO (Chief Information Officer) of a big software company that supplies database management options to some of the worlds biggest companies. He has staff in about 10 countries and speaks German, French, English, Thai, Vietnamese and Mandarin...crazy! He also has a "small" dive camera of which steph was very jealous!

CEO of the world, Dirk
For the last couple of days before our cruise we decided to head on a short 3 day tour of a nearby island called Isabela, which we had been told was really nice. The tour we booked involved a volcano hike and some snorkelling, sounds cruisy enough!

We left Santa Cruz at 2pm Thursday afternoon for a 2 hour speedboat ride to the biggest island of the archipelago, Isabela. As soon as we got off the boat, the wildlife was again on display. As we waited for our taxi on the pier we had a group of four sea lions frolicing in the shallows, one playing with a small piece of rubbish to amuse himself. Not far in the distance a penguin was fishing behind a boat, a seal sun bathing on a buoy, as well as boobies, pelicans and frigates flying overhead.

One of the welcoming party


A small ride to our Hotel (surprisingly nice hotel, didn't actually think to ask about that when we booked), with a lagoon outfront and three flamingos fishing for shrimp and other microscopic goodies. We went for a small drive to another small lagoon to find a few more flamingos. It seems odd to have flamingos in the Galapagos, they seem a bit out of place. They are so colorful, whereas the rest of the animals are sort of muted tones.

Our hotel, nice considering we had forgotten to ask!

Dinner was supplied at the hotel, we shared a table with a young couple from Chile. The extent of the conversation (in Spanglish) was something like: HI, Im Hew and this is Steph. What are your names and What to you do for work....Only took us about 10 minutes to get that out once we mustered the confidence to actually start the conversation...hahahaha

The next day was an early rise and drive over to the closest national park to visit two volcanoes, one is the tallest volcano on the archipelgo, Volcan Cierra Negra, which is around 1500m tall.  We set off for what we thought was going to be a short, leisurely climb of this modestly sized volcano...HA! We spent the next 5 hours almost running through some crazy, almost out of this world terrain. The Galapagos islands were created by Volcanic eruptions between 500,000 and 5 million years ago, so the terrain is quite barron as eruptions had been quite regular, the last was only in 2005. Some of the views and scenery were awesome, alot of the area a combination of lava tubes (a tunnel of lava), lava flows (rivers of lava), and spatter cones (small cones that explode and spatter molten rock all over the place). The further we went the less vegetation there was, the most recent erruptions are just barron rock. You could also see the change in the colors of the landscape, from black to brown, to red. As time goes past after an erruption, the iron in the rocks is oxidised and they turn a reddish brown color. There are also yellow patches around which are where there is/was sulphur escaping from below. It looked pretty crazy, maybe like an extra terriestrial surface might. Only Scientists are allowed on the cauldera of Cerra Negra as it still vents noxious sulphuric gases that are over 300 degrees - would be a nasty surprise for a tour group...

The caldera of Cierra Negra
Our crazy guide and some sharp terrain

A species of Darwin finch on top of the cacti
We had a short break for our lunchboxes and powered back out down the trail to were we started....It was hard going, Steph was her usual beetroot colour (sweaty and slightly cross) and I was glad we finally could see the finish in the distance. Turns out we had gone 25km's in the space of 4 hours!!! Not a bad pace when you add in lunch and plenty of time to take pictures and have the guide explain the vegetation and geology.
Later in the afternoon we had a small boat tour of the bay where we were able to view colonies of penguins, blue footed boobies, and marine iguanas.

Lunch break
Blue footed boobies
Penguins and mangroves, a rare combination


After that we snorkeled in a protected inlet. Saw some nice big reef fish, a few turtles, and marine iguanas swimming - which was really cool. They use their tails as both a rudder and propellor, they kind of look like dogs swimming from above but like dragons (good one Steph) from below....bizarre.
A swimming marine iguana, we got a couple of good movies of this

We had an early start the next day to catch the ferry back to Santa Cruz to be at the airport by midday to meet our cruise ship. Steph got saturated on the ferry...and nearly left behind some luggage. Oops! After a 5am start we devoured our breakfast at about 10am, we were starving....