Heroes in a Half Shell

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3 stops today, so a fairly early start. We'd sailed to Floriana Island overnight where there was a small penguin colony, so we were up at 6 to see if they were about. Needless to say, they weren't.

After breakfast, we took a trip to post office bay, the oldest post office in Ecuador. Toursists now leave postcards here unstamped, and other tourists pick them up and deliver them if they leave near the recipient. Sadly no one else from Sidcup appears to have made it out here.

Afterwards, we went down a lava tube, basically a cave formed by when the volcano erupted thousands of years ago. Some of these tubes have wildlife in but not this one.

We did more snorkelling off the beach from here, and although I didn't see any penguins again, I did have a large turtle swimming around me most of the time. He probably wanted to know if I had any pizza for him.

Once we were back aboard the boat, we sailed further round the island to visit a lagoon populated by flamengos, though only a handful were there when we visited. Then we walked around to a beach were there were ten or so turtles and loads of rays swimming just off the coast. The highlight was a fishhead that washed up on the beach, clearly a victim of a shark.

Back on the boat for lunch then sailed a bit further, to the Devil's Crown, a half submerged crater where we did more snorkelling and again failed to find any sharks, though did see the best array of reef fish we'd seen.

That evening, we moored just off of Porta Ayora on Santa Cruz Island, a town of 20,000 which surprised me as I assumed the Islands were largely uninhabited. I went for a walk in town, had an ice cream and then ran into Andy, who's been doing the same trip on a different boat.

We went for a few beers at the dubiously named Bongo Club where one of the locals walked into our table, spilling my beer all over me. Little did I know that this would be the start of 24 hours of incompetence only the South Americans are capable of.

At around midnight, we headed to the port to get our water taxis back to our respective boats. Except the driver had no idea where mine was and tried to drop me off at a hotel instead. I should have seen the signs...

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Comments

[DARREL]

hand full of flamingos
I Know you have huge fingers mr Peache, but exactly how many is a handfull because i'm sure i cna only get one and thats using both hands