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Published: July 19th 2009
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(photos coming soon)
Hannah arrived on the Sunday night and the previous day, after a mad dash about town, I had found a trip to the Galapagos for us.
After an early morning wake up, a few hours on a flight, we soon arrived at the GALAPAGOS on Baltra Island.
It was a tiny airport, where we paid our park entrance, collected our luggage and then met our tour guide. We spent 10 mins on a bus before unloading again and swapping to a boat - well I say boat, more like a large rabbit hutch that floats. A short trip on a boat and we were soon onto another bus and taking our first drive through the Galapagos Islands.
After an hour or so driving through a very beautiful tropical setting we arrived outside a very nice looking hotel at Puerto Ayora on Isla Santa Cruz. This was to be our first nights accomodation before spending our next three nights on a boat.
The rest of the first afternoon we spent at Charles Darwin Research centre amongst hundreds of tortoises. The island holds a breeding centre so we saw plenty of tortoises ranging in sizes -
from teeny weeny to enormous - we even met George, a very lonely male saddle back tortoise who can´t be mated as he´s the last one of his type left. Poor fellow!
After we met a few iguanas and headed back to our hotel for dinner.
The next morning we hopped on another bus to see some exctinct volcano craters, an old lava track created three millions years ago and finally arrived at our boat, Yaucht Fragatta. Thankfully, it looked like it would float! We were to share the boat with 14 other people and Hannah and I shared a little cabin at the bottom of the boat. Despite the experience, I think Hannah and I will need some persuading to go on a boat again after 3 nights of sea sickness and stomach bugs! All part of the fun though.
That evening we had our first "Galapagos moment," and were taken to a beach covered in sea lions. It was incredible to see and they had no fear of humans, you can literally stand a few metres away from them. A couple of the babies were also swimming in the water too. We spent a while
just watching and listening to the sea lions and then jumped on the boat again to take part in our first snorkellng experience. The whole group jumped into the water with the guide and we snorkelled around the coast. Before long, we were swimming with sea lions - unbelievable!
On the second day, we were on Isla Espanola reknowned for black marine iguanas. They spend the day sunbathing and there you can spot their little heads bobbing up and down in the ocean whilst they try to catch their food. The island was also the only home of albatross´ who pair for life. I never would say I was one to birdwatch but watching these huge birds take off from their runway was pretty cool. Whilst we´re talking about birds... we also saw some crazy birds with blue feet (blue-footed boobies) and frigat birds who have an incredible red ballon on their breasts whilst in the mating season.
In the afternoon on the second day, we pulled up to Gardeners Bay - the whitest, most amazing beach I´ve ever seen. Again it was covered in sea lions, these ones far more lazy than those we had previously seen
and we spent a few hours sun bathing alongside them.
We had a few more snorkelling experiences during the week, even involving a very close encounter with a white tipped shark. Our guide dived down, into Mr Shark´s cave, woke him up and ta-da, there was a shark no more than 5 metres away from us. Eeeek.
One afternoon we swam with more sea lions at sunset on a very beautiful afternoon and also got an amazing encouter with two huge sea turtles.
On our last few days, we caught a glimpse of flamingos and despite the stingrays not making an appearance, we did catch 5 little penguins having a dip. Rare on the islands we were visiting! Wow.
I could use a few more adjectives to say how brilliant it all was but I´m all out. It was a very relaxing and beautiful week and one that I would recommend to anyone. I will put the pictures up as soon as I find a computer from the 20th century.
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