Galapagos - Floreana Island Tour
Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Sun 9 Mar 2008 13:36
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00:44.827S 90:18.414W
On Tuesday (3/4) we went on our second of three day
tours, this time to the island of Floreana, which is south of Santa Cruz.
Thankfully we didn't have to go through the planes, trains and automobiles
exercise like we did for our first tour, and the hour we left in the morning was
not nearly as barbaric. The tour boat was smaller, but powered by two
very large 200 horsepower outboard motors. Yes! We were all
excited to finally be on a boat that could speeeeed.
The first stop on our tour was a circumnavigation
of the very small Champion Island. This island is one giant rounded
chunk of rock pitted all over with holes just large enough to make
nice homes for all kinds of incredible birds, some of which can only be found in
the Galapagos. The most famous Galapagos bird is called the blue footed
boobie. We tried to capture this bird in picture 1, but it's not the best
image. If you squint your eyes and turn your head sideways, you might
be able to tell that this bird actually does have blue feet. Not just
any blue either. It is a very nice and bright powder blue. As
Mandy, the World ARC rally event manager said to us, 'The blue footed boobie
struts around with a dignified look on its face as if it doesn't completely
realize that it looks utterly ridiculous with those bright blue
feet.' This is exactly true.
The image of the blue footed boobie is splashed
across almost every Galapagos t-shirt we've seen (including the one we bought
for me). At the rally farewell party this past Friday night, the entire
crew of Whitbread (an English, 72 foot ex-racing boat built long ago and
carrying a very young captain with at least six or seven
20-something aged young men and one young woman as crew) showed up with large
powder blue balloons fixed to their chests under their shirts in honor of the
blue footed boobie (the young woman opted to honor the blue footed boobie by
wearing a bright blue shirt and some very unique powder blue, webbed slippers -
purchased in the Galapagos no doubt). When the Whitbread crew made their
grand entrance to the party, I realized my mistake in not bringing the
camera. Sorry.
After our circumnavigation of Champion Island, we
moved on to another very small island called Enderby. There, our guide,
who spoke English that we could actually understand, suited up for snorkeling
and led us in a snorkeling circumnavigation of the island. This was the
longest time I had ever snorkeled, and I not only survived, but enjoyed it
as well. There were many sea lions on the rocky shore and before we
got in the water, our guide explained that there was one male to as many as ten
or fifteen females (Don thinks these odds are excellent) and the male
didn't like humans snorkeling too close to his harem. With that
in mind, we slipped into the water and were on our way, following the group and
our guide. A little while after we started, we got a little
behind because I was having trouble with my mask fogging. Just as we were
swimming to catch up to the group, we both noticed a big mass coming at us
from the edge of our underwater vision. Oh my God! It's a sea
lion! It looks huge! Is it the male? Is he going to bark at
us, attack us and batter us to death? These are all thoughts that
went through my head at the time. I'm not sure if Don was feeling quite
the same level of panic, but I know he was feeling some. It all happened
so fast that it took a minute or two to realize that the sea lion (who was
probably female) only came close enough to show off its ability to twist
and twirl and dive really fast, and all the while look as graceful as
a ballerina. This same sequence of events happened several times with
different sea lions (minus the panic since we soon got over that).
Each time, the sea lion would approach us very fast, like a sleek, but
blubbery torpedo. Then, once they were sure they had our full, undivided
attention, they dove and twirled for us and then moved on.
Unbelievable. We can truly say that we swam with the sea lions and lived
to tell about it.
The sea lions were one thing, but the array
of fish swimming below and past us was beyond anything we had seen before
- in terms of shear number of fish as well as variety. Every color, shape
and size you can imagine in a tropical fish swam by us. At one
point, our guide dove to the bottom and picked up a giant, pinkish-red
starfish and a prickly sea cucumber for us to touch and
hold. This whole snorkeling episode felt like we had stepped
into a marine documentary with a bit of fairy tale thrown in for good
measure.
After Enderby Island, we moved on to a second
snorkeling site called Devil's Crown. The name stems from the fact
that the site is an old volcano crater that is now mostly submerged. It
makes for great snorkeling because the crater forms a rocky circumference with
an area only a couple of meters deep inside the rocky 'crown'. Our
guide again led us around the site and we saw more of the same array of fish and
sea lions. After most of the group got back on the boat, we noticed three
or four people still in the water who seemed very reluctant to leave. When
they finally did make their way back to the boat, we found out the reason for
their reluctance. They were watching as one particular sea lion
twirled and danced underwater for them, and then watched as it dove to the
bottom to pick up a giant starfish. The sea lion then began to toss the
starfish up through the water and catch it again in its mouth. It did this
several times, and at one point, the sea lion missed the starfish on its way
down, and it settled back on the bottom. Thinking quickly, one of the
snorkelers dove down to the bottom to retrieve the starfish and then watched in
amazement as the sea lion actually approached and took the
starfish directly out of her hands with its mouth. We know this
to be true because one of the other snorkelers caught the whole
scene on their underwater video camera. Yup, like a marine
documentary with a bit of fairy tale thrown in.
After all that excitement, we moved on to the
island of Floreana, where we went to shore in a dinghy and met up with more sea
lions sunning themselves on the concrete jetty. One of them posed very
nicely for us (picture 2). A few steps away from the sea lions, we ran
into this rather massive iguana enjoying himself on a rock (picture
3).
We then stopped for lunch at a local
'restaurant'. The lunch was excellent (fish! what else?), but the term
'restaurant' is used loosely here. It was really the front patio of
someone's house. We know this because when we went to use the bathroom, we
had to walk through what seemed to be the dining/living room (although the
expanse of bare concrete floor was only filled with a deep freezer and a
refrigerator - there was no other furniture to be found). The bathroom was
much like you would find in an older home with one exception. The running
water was not hooked up to the toilet, but there was a convenient barrel of
water with a plastic bucket floating in it. The idea was to dump a
bucket of water from the barrel into the toilet to flush it (I didn't realize
this of course and had to, embarrassingly enough, receive instruction).
The rest of the house consisted of a small kitchen (too small to fit the
refrigerator and deep freezer in) and two bedrooms. The doors were closed
to the bedrooms, but I could hear kids talking and cartoons blaring from a
TV. Yup, TV, even on the remote island of Floreana where only 300 people
live.
After lunch we rode up to the highlands on an
interesting truck converted to tourist wagon complete with rows of benches that
looked like they had been swiped from the local catholic church (the seats were
padded, you don't often find protestant churches with padded seats). The
dirt road abruptly ended and we walked from there to an area where the local
variety of giant tortoises are looked after (picture 4). The beasts are
simply huge, but seemingly so gentle that they are almost cute in a reptilian
kind of way. Especially when you see them chomping on the green leafy
bushes within their reach, as we did.
We then hiked further to see the local village's
water supply (picture 5). That's our very enjoyable guide filling plastic
cups directly from the water source for all of us thirsty boaters suffering from
the 90+ degree heat. Rally boater Robert from the British sailboat Quasar
V is getting a much needed rest on the right. He's got a bad back and is
actually flying home in May for back surgery. He plans to rejoin his boat
in Australia. How's that for dedication?
We then hiked even further to see the area where
the first settlers on Floreana lived (they basically made their homes in the
crevices formed by large vertical slabs of rock). Picture 6 shows a
carving done by an early settler. There were no people on the Galapagos
islands when they were first discovered. So, according to our
guide, the early settlers were Europeans and other people from South
America.
We returned to the dirt road and rode the church
bench tourist wagon back down to the jetty where we re-boarded the boat via
dinghy. From there we made one more stop at another small nearby island
known to be a home for penguins. Sure enough, there were eight penguins
waiting to greet us in their dinner jackets when we arrived (picture
7).
After the penguin viewing, we settled in for the
speedy ride back to Santa Cruz. About five minutes into the ride, about
thirty dolphins appeared from nowhere to swim alongside us. Our speed boat
driver slowed down and changed course to accommodate the dolphins. We
thought that was extremely thoughtful (for us and for the dolphins). After
ten or twenty minutes the dolphins moved on and we again settled in for the ride
back. I haven't mentioned anything about the deck hand whose job it was to
make sure all of our needs were attended to. Let me just say that never
have we felt so pampered on this trip as we did during this boat ride. The
deck hand was so cute - small and compact
with a never-ending Ecuadorian smile. He was constantly in motion, handing
us fresh towels to sit on and life jackets to use as pillows (unlike our
previous tour boat, we didn't have to wonder where the life jackets were), not
to mention the constant supply of snacks (sugar wafer sandwich cookies
and watermelon are big down here). Heavenly, it was.
And so ended our second Galapagos tour. A
perfect day.
Anne
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