Giant Tortoises and a Boat Ride

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Well, needless to say I didn´t get much sleep last night...about an hour and a half until the phone rang informing us Javier would be there at 830/9am and the girl wanted to know when we wanted to have breakfast...I told her 8am. We had your standard Ecuadorean breakfast with fresh fruit, juice, tea, bread, jelly, and cheese. After breakfast we waited around a few minutes until Javier and his taxi driving friend picked us up. We headed into the highlands (I took a quick nap) to see the giant tortoises on his family´s property. 60 years ago when his father moved here, he asked the town where he could set a house, and they told him to go up into the highlands and claim a piece...FOR FREE!...so he picked up 200 hectares of farmland and started farming.

We arrived to the farm and made our way to the back of it where it borders the national park. We hopped out and immediately saw the giant tortoises...very cool. I approached the first one too quickly and it hastily withdrew into its shell and started hissing at me...I didn´t know tortoises hiss! So we made our way through the farm/national park and took lots of pictures (Raya, they will be posted as soon as possible and you will be the first to know!).

After seeing the tortoises for a couple hours, we hopped in the taxi and went to a lava tunnel on his property that was found because a cow went missing a long time ago (fell into the lava tunnel/cave). It was pretty cool to imagine lava flowing through it. After the lava tunnel we hopped back in the cab and headed back to Puerto Ayora. We packed up our things and headed to the harbor to drop off our stuff for the boat ride to Isabella.

We dropped our stuff off and had an hour to kill, so we grabbed lunch at the same place we had lunch the first day...I of course had chicken cordon blue again...why reinvent the wheel? We also ordered some desserts, brownie with ice cream and some flan. We hopped on the boat at 2pm and were in for a long arduous ride!

The small boat was packed to the gills with people making the 2 hr trek to Isabella over choppy, rough seas...def wasn´t pleasant. Lucky for us we took some sea sickness pills at lunch and weren´t bothered too much by the rough water. I napped half the time. Once we got to Isabella, we were picked up by a hotel truck and transported to San Vincente...much like Santa Cruz, there is only one town on the island.

We checked into our hotel and was told dinner was at 7, so I of course napped til 645 since I was still running on fumes from the night before. We had a pretty good dinner at the hotel, spaghetti with chicken, bread, soup, and a fruit plate. After dinner I headed to the internet to check up on a few things...but it was SOOOO slow in Isabella...so I decided to call it a night and headed home to hit the sack...gonna be another early day tomorrow.

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