a. Galapagos, Pt 1
The Galapagos Islands lie some 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean. It was interesting flying from Quito Ecuador (elevation 9000 ft) to the Galapagos. The plane needed plenty of fuel to make it there and back (no fuel out in the Islands) so had to fly to Guayaquil Ecuador (sea level) to fill with fuel, only a 45 minute flight. Same returning.
We flew into Baltra, the principle airport, and started our cruise from there. We spent 4 days and 4 nights on “our yacht”, the Coral II, a 110 foot rather nice boat.
Our cruise was some 350 miles with normally 2 stops per day for visiting the islands.
This was our first view of the harbor from the plane. The Coral II is second from the right in the back. The other is her sister boat which traveled much of the time with us.
The Baltra airport.
Waiting at the pier for our transportation to the boat, we had some visitors. Luckily no one had the need to sit. Of course there were immediate breaches of conduct where our boat mates decided to get way too close to the “wildlife”. Some of the rules are thou shalt not approach nor touch the natives. In this case sea lions and ocean iguanas. The animal life on the islands are not accustomed to people and have never learned to fear them so they must be protected from us. We will talk about the sad results of this lack of fear later on in this presentation.
On the way to the boat.
In the lounge awaiting instructions on where we were going to live and other such important information. This is probably the time to give some info on the boat. Can handle max of 20 passengers and has crew of around 10. There were only 16 of us.
We believe this is a frigate bird.
Other birds. We will identify as we can.
Great Blue Heron.
Black-Necked Stilt.
The prickly pear cactus are different than we see in the U.S. having long hair type growth on the stalks.
Land iguanas.
Galapagos Mockingbird.
Small Ground Finch
One of the naturalists. The Galapagos Islands are an Ecuadoran National Park and to visit the Galapagos, each boat is required to have a naturalist on board for each group (we had 2) that goes ashore. Their parks are a bit more expensive and limited than ours’. The entrance fee is $100 and numbers of people visiting is limited.
The islands are all volcanic but there are some green areas.
We always checked to assure the boat had not left and abandoned us. It could get sort of lonely out there after a few days.
Flamingo.
Sea iguanas.
Sally Lightfoot crab.
Back to the boat for the day. This is the means of travel to and from shore.
Sunset.
Probably a good place to break this session. See ya later.
