Advertisement
Published: July 11th 2010
Edit Blog Post
We travel between islands overnight, making for several hours rocky sleep in our top floor cabin, but it does mean we always wake up in a new location with a new adventure ahead. This morning we arrived at Floreana island, landing on the Zodiacs at Post Office Bay. In the late 18th century an English captain of a whaling vessel placed a barrel here to be used as a post office. Passing ships would stop to leave mail for loved ones, collecting at the same time any mail destined for ports on their itineraries. The barrel (probably a new one!) is still in use today, where tourists are now responsible for picking up the mail, no stamps needed! Soph and I popped a postcard in, but I'm not sure it's even worth crossing our fingers that it will arrive soon!
We donned our snorkelling gear and headed out into the water, unfortunately very cold today as the sun was hiding. This cold water however treated us to something amazing - we were delighted to discover a giant sea turtle feeding on the rocks we were swimming along! Better still, we were testing out an underwater camera case and so were
able to take a few, some blurry, photos. Whilst down there we also came across another, and a baby one!
Pleased with our early morning snorkelling, Hanzel had more in store for us, taking us snorkelling off the Zodiacs at Devil's Crown. This derives its name from the broken remains of a partially submerged volcanic cone. Surrounded by hundreds of colourful fish and starfish, the sights were beautiful. A bit further round the point, we had our third snorkel of the day, excitement rising when Hanzel stopped us and pointed down to reveal we were treading water above four white tipped sharks.
Later in the afternoon we visited Punta Comorant, a wet landing on a beach of green sand with Galapagos sea urchins. We followed a trail to a lake, semi-dried, reputed for inhabiting flamingos. However it looked like our luck for that day had run out, no flamingos today. The trail lead round to Flour Beach, which is a turtle nesting site, our one sign unfortunately empty shells of baby turtles picked off by frigate birds when they were forced out of the nests during the day by their brothers and sisters. The sex of the newborn
is determined by the temperature of the egg, and thus in this case its position in the nest under the sand. Females are produced in higher temperatures, the reverse of other reptiles. The beach was also home to an abundance of crabs hiding out on volcanic rock which kept Sophie occupied for ages photographing them. From the beach we were also able to spot blue footed boobies diving for food, and two eagle rays (large sting rays) floating just off the shore. The evening was spent relaxing after a very active and exciting day with nature.
How Sophie Sees It Despite spending 45 minutes in the freezing cold (wet, maybe not freezing!) water in only a bikini, this morning was such a treat. We just floated above the turtles and moved with them as the waves carried us both from side to side. I found one of them swimming towards me as it surfaced momentarily - mesmerising to watch its flippers make its movement seem effortless. Back on board we were given freshly squeezed juice and snacks (as always the case when we return from an excursion) but stayed, in our snorkelling gear ready to jump into and
shortly after straight out of the dinghy into the crater of a submerged volcano. Beautiful. The water was deep (maybe 10m) but you could see all the way to the starfish covered sea floor, and when I lost a flipper it sank fast - luckily Hansel was in the water with us and swam down a good 4 metres to rescue it. I could not have swum without it - he water was choppy and we got caught in a current or two. The volcanic rock was magical, as were the hundreds and hundreds of fish (for which we couldn't master the camera). And the Sally Lightfoot Crabs in the afternoon - you will understand why I wanted so many photos - their vivid reds and blues are stunning and I even caught a couple fighting!
After another 3 course dinner at 6pm we fought hard to stay awake but, despite my siesta after lunch, we retired at 8o'clock (leaving only Mark awake!) GAP treat you very well with food and time to relax in between activities, but they exhaust you to boot!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.155s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 14; qc: 79; dbt: 0.089s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb