Sunday, November 23, 2008

Galapagos Islands

Woke up at 4.45am and finished packing what we hadn’t done the night before. Checked out of the hostel at 5.40am, Moritcio was waiting for us to come down as we had settled our bill and let him know we were leaving. He waited with us on the street until Paul from Carpe DM arrived to take us to the airport.
Paul had a little two door jeep which we squashed into the back of with our backpacks. There was another Aussie on board Andy from Newcastle who was also going on the cruise. He wasn’t in a very good condition having been out partying with friends until 3.00am. We stopped off in “New Town” to pick up Lev from Alaska and got to the airport with plenty of time to check in and get a coffee.
Had a window seat on the plane with a good view over Quito for the first few minutes until we disappeared into cloud. Landed at Guayaquil and had to disembark and after another hour in the airport, took a second plane another hour and forty minutes to the island of Baltra in the Galapagos. The view was impressive as we flew in to land on the island. What I could see was flat and barren with steep cliffs. We were met at the airport by Juan Carlos who was going to be our “naturalist” guide for the week and took a short bus trip to the dock where we boarded our boat the “Nemo“.

Sarah: It was weird as there was a whole family of sealions taking up all the seats at the dock and we saw our first frigate-birds which are big and I think look a bit like pterodactyls. So if any of you had a look at the link for nemo, the boat was exactly the same (deep down I had a feeling that it was going to be a old dodgy boat but I was happy to be wrong) the boat was amazing and far exceeded my expectations. Damian and I had one of the two double suites. It was tiny but practical and enough room for the necessities. Every cabin had their own bathroom which had toilet which you had to pump to flush. After a lovely lunch we headed to Sandy beach on Santa Cruz island where we saw our first Marine Iguana, a lonely Flamingo, lots of Sally Lightfoot crabs which are bright red with other colours around their mouth. Very beautiful and were an amazing contrast with the black basalt rocks along the shore. The coolest thing for me was seeing the Turtle tracks lead up to the sand dunes and around a depression in the dune where they would have laid their eggs.





200 photos of the trip



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