Day 7 – Jan 20 – Galapagos 1

Today we left the ship after it docked in Equador for 4 nights away on our Galapagos excursion. Getting there was half the effort, but not half the fun. We left the ship at 6:30 am for a 3-1/2 hour bus ride to the airport, then a 1-1/2 hour flight to Galapagos. Once we arrived, we had a 10 minute bus ride to a ferry, the ferry crossing, then another bus about 45 minutes to the hotel. But we had 3 excursion stops and lunch along the way.

Galapagos is an archepelgo of volcanic islands, similar to Hawaii. There are 12 separate islands. We stayed three nights on the island that we landed on: Santa Cruz. We visited Santa Cruz the first day, then had trips to two other islands scheduled for days 2 and 3.

As we left the airport, we were surprised that this part of the island did not look like the tropical rain forest that we expected. It looks more like Santa Fe: dry, brown, desert-like. As we drove onward, we went up the mountain. Now it looked like a tropical forest, and we had the typical tropical forest afternoon rain.

Our first stop was at the top of the mountain. There were two twin craters where the volcano had collapsed when the lava stopped exiting at that point. The craters were about 100 yards across and 100 yards deep, with vertical walls.

We had lunch then went to a “farm” where there were the giant tortoises roaming freely. This looked more like a wild field with trees and shrubs, than a farm. There were cows and tortoises intermixed. We could go right up next to them, but were not supposed to touch them. It ends up we saw tortoises 3 times during the trip. (I’ll post photos later above after I enter the daily texts.)

Finally we went through a lava tube. This is an underground tunnel where the lava had flowed. It was like a miniature version of Mamoth Cave. It was about 500 meters long, 10-20 meters wide, and 10 meter tall, although there were places where the ceiling was low enough that we had to do the duck walk. The owner had installed electric lights, but in the US they would never have you go through this type of space without a personal light.