Galapagos Island Highlights
11 February 2018 | Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands
Cheryl
Since we planned to keep our boat in Santa Marta till around March, we also planned some adventuring trips over land. We visited Cartegena, Medellin, and Peru in November, and Texas in December. January was spent in the marina visiting with the world arc boats (organized group of boats travelling together around the world or parts thereof). We saved out trip to the Galapagos till February mostly because the water temperature was supposed to be a bit warmer. Hmm, it was still very cold to us. The Galapagos islands are 600 nautical miles from mainland Ecuador. We flew there since we had no plans of taking our boat thru the Panama Canal (at least not yet). We spent 5 days staying on the island of Santa Cruz which is in the middle of the archipelago. We visited the Charles Darwin research center and the tortoise sanctuary. We walked all around the town of Puerto Ayora seeing Darwin finches, warblers, pelicans, egrets, marine iguanas, sea lions, beaches and lava tunnels. All of this was very interesting but did not compare to our diving experience. We heard the diving in the Galapagos was challenging and some dive sites require a minimum of 30 dives before they will allow you to go due to the strong currents. Well we have dived in strong currents before, both at Saint Lucia's Superman dive and also in Taganga Bay, just north of Santa Marta. We don't like strong current dives. You go so fast that you don't get to really see anything. We chose to dive a more relaxed dive site at Floreana, south of Santa Cruz. We went with Scuba Iguana (which we liked very much). Travelling light, we didn't take our underwater camera but our dive master took some very good photos and videos and shared them with us. We saw stingrays, turtles, the largest schools of fish ever, more species of starfish than we have ever seen. And to culminate our experience, our dive ended with us playing with sealions for about 15 minutes at the end of our second dive. WOW! FYI, the water temp of our dive was 70 degrees F and I was wearing a 7mm wetsuit. It was cold but bearable. I'll post a few to facebook and more to our blog gallery.
The second half of our trip was spent on the motor yacht Coral II. This is as close as we have come to going on a cruise. The boat had 20 guests, 2 naturalist guides and about a half dozen crew. Each day, we would go on two land or dinghy excursions at different places and two snorkeling trips. The first snorkeling trip, I forgot my mask back on the boat so I stayed in the dinghy. Ed was in and out of the water so fast that except for his wet clothes, I would have sworn he never got in. Yes it was that cold. All the other passengers, opted for wearing shorty wetsuits after the first snorkel. These folks were from cold climates. Ed and I opted to not snorkel. We didn't feel like we were missing out since we had had such an amazing dive already. Our land trips were fun. Each site we visited offered something unique, whether it be the giant tortoise we saw in the wild, or the hundreds of marine iguanas warming on the rocks, or the frolicking of sea lions nearby, or the penguins, or the blue footed boobies or the crazy looking lava flows, pahoehoe (ropy) and the aa (hurt).
We enjoyed our trip to the Galapagos and hope you enjoy some of our pictures.
To view the pictures, at the top of the blog, there is a menu (top right hand corner). Select gallery, then select the Galapagos album to see the photos and videos.