Day 138 - Galapagos Islands

GALAPAGOS DAY 1 - BALTRA AND SANTA CRUZ ISLANDS (19/05/09)

This is the approximate route that we took during our eight days on the Galapagos Islands. The long stretches of sea were usually covered overnight so that we that we could spend the maximum time on the islands.

Our first night was spent in a very posh hotel in Quito where they had the backpackers holy grail - a buffet breakfast. We left at 8am and after a fairly short flight we were in the Galapagos on the island of Baltra by 12.30pm.


At the dock there were these benches for passengers to wait for their boat. However when we arrived they were already occupied by a family of sea lions, our first glimpse of Galapagos wildlife.

The San Jose boat, our home for the next 7 nights. The company we had booked with had no room for us so transferred us to this boat which luckily turned out to be an upgrade.

After having lunch on the San Jose we went out on a smaller boat, known locally as a panga, to visit the mangoves in Black Turtle Cove on Sant Cruz island. On the way we passed this volcanic shore line covered with cactii.

Our first sighting of one of the Galapagos´ most famous residents - the Blue Footed Booby.

We saw many of these Lava Herons throughout our trip, they feed on the thousands of crabs that live on the islands.

Swimming in the shallow waters of the mangroves live hundreds of Green Sea Turtles like this one. We were so excited about seeing these, little did we know that we would soon be swimming along side them ourselves.

A Brown Pelican in the mangrove trees, these birds are extremely common feeding on the almost limitless supply of fish.

After dinner we were looking at the stars and the brown pelicans which had landed on our boat when we noticed that the sea around us was full of sharks.