The Great Galapagian Cruise of ´09

November 2nd, 2009 by Haylee Fieldes

Hola!

I think this is going to be one helluva post as alot has happened in the past 1.5 weeks. I´ve been at sea on The Archipell II, a first class catamaran no less!

The first day (Fri) me and my intrepid friend Jasmine, caught the ferry to Santa Cruz island, the economic capital of the Galapagos with a bustling town home to 18,000 people (more or less) and gawped over how big it was compared to Puerto Baquerizo Moreno in San Cristobal, I mean they even have chocolate! We found our boat and were stoked to find out the cabin had hot water (gasp!) and they had all the fruit we could eat (awe!). In the afternoon we went with our other fellow cruisers to the Charles Darwin Foundation and did a little tour and looked for Lonesome George or, Solitario Jorge, in spanish… who was conspicuously absent… apparently he´s not so lonesome any more as they found a nest of eggs from one of his lady friends, there´s hope for the old man yet.

Sat we set sail for the other side of Santa Cruz and saw yellow land iguanas at Cerro Dragon and snorkelled back to the boat. Were met on the the boat with fluffy towels and hot chocolate… I could get used to that… In the afternoon we went to North Seymour island and did a little trek and saw heaps, HEAPS of Frigate birds and we also saw a sealion giving birth which was amazing! The little baby was so cute!

Sun we went to Isla Bartolome to climb to the top and get an amazing view of pinnacle rock which has been immortalised in Master and Commander (with Russel Crow) or so I´m told, basically it´s a weather-beaten finger of rock looming over a beautiful bay. The view was incredible, bright turquoise water with volcanoes and hills in the distance. The Galapagos certainly isn´t a carribean paradise but it has it´s own kind of austere beauty, I can see why they´re often called Islas Encantadas – The Enchanted Isles. After that it was snorkel o´clock and we snorkelled around the pinacle. I was lucky enough to be visited by a Galapagos penguin who was diving and zooming around me chasing a school of little fish. The penguins are very rare as they are the only tropical penguin in the world and only live on the Galapagos and they have a very small population. In the afternoon we headed to Rabida island which is uninhabited and is famous for it´s red sand beach, which really is a deep reddish-brown colour – very cool. We had a nice snorkel but I didn´t see any of the manta rays I was hoping to snorkel with. We set sail for San Cristobal island in the evening which was a 9 hour crossing and we were told to take our sea sickness pills as it might be rough – it was… but before the sun went down we heard people whooping it up on the top deck and came up to see a pod of 30 or more dolphines swimming and playing with the boat! I took off to the bow of the boat and saw 6 of them speeding along under us, there were so may of them! I stayed up on the bow after the others and the dolphins had gone as I kept seeing these tiny fins cruising through the water, I thought they were dolphins but I realised that whatever it was it wasn´t coming out of the water or breathing… up ahead of me a huge triangular shape lept out of the water – MANTA RAYS! Hooray! They were hunting on the surface and it was the corner of their wings that were poking out of the water and they were jumping out of the water and swimming under the bows of the boat. Now that was pretty awesome!

San Cristobal on Monday was cool (It´s the island the reserve is on and we´ve spent 2 weeks there so it wasn´t a big suprise) we went to the interpretation centre and stood weaving gently in front of some pretty awesome info… still had to get our land legs back. The afternoon was snorkelling at Isla Lobos which is wicked for seeing sea turtles – lots of them!

Tuesday we hit another uninhabited island – Española where we snorkelled around Gardner Island. It was good snorkelling and we swam into a cave where some sealions were sleeping and they jumped in the water to play with us, the sealions are great fun when you´re snorkelling, if you dive under the water and spin they mimic you and apparently when you go diving they mimic the divers and blow bubbles at them. I saw a sealion terrorising a baby stingray which was hiding under a rock while the sealion tried to chase it out. Funnily enough they´re one of the Marine Iguanas few `predators` in that when the iguanas are coming back in from the sea, they have to get back to land to warm up again and its pretty common for sealions to see them swimming and chase and try to play with them by biting their tails… unfortunately this tends to be terminal for the poor guanas. In the afternoon we landed on Española and went for a walk… I could´ve thrown a stick and hit 5 different types of animals, we saw enormous marine iguanas sunning themselves, blue-footed boobies nesting with their fluffy white chicks and we came to a clearing and saw something that resembeled a dodo at first glance… it turned out to be a waved albatross chick. Then we saw it´s parent come into land, they are amazing birds – with a wingspan of 2 metres they were enormous! They nest near the edge of the cliffs so that they can teach the chicks to fly by catching the updrafts from the cliffs.

Wednesday was Floreana island which has been the host to several failed communities, most notably in the early 1900´s (I think) 3 groups of Germans spontaniously arrived separately on the islands; a german baroness and her two lovers who wanted to build a millionaires´ hotel, a doctor and his partner (the doctor wanted to experiment with his theories of longevity thru vegetinarism) and a family who wanted to eck out a better living for themselves. Mystery ensued when the baroness decided to declair herself Empress of Floreana and then went missing with one of her lovers never to be seen again. Lover no.2 was found dead after being shipwrecked on another island partially mumified by the sun, the good doctor died of food poisening after eating dodgy chicken – his partner Doris was thought to have killed him and the Wittmer family stayed (alive) on the island. Nobody knows the real truth of what happened.
Floreana was cool, we walked through a lava cave and swam in the pool inside it in the pitch dark which was a little unnerving. The really amazing part though, was the snorkel at Corona del Diablo – Devils Crown. It´s a roughly circular black jagged crown of rocks rising from the sea off the coast of Floreana and is famous for diving and snorkelling. When we got there groups of boobies and frigate birds were going nuts on a huge school of bait fish and we jumped in the water. The water was fairly deep and quite clear, I went ahead of the group and snorkelled around the point and was about to swim into the ´crown´when I heard a clicking sound underwater… I looked up and it was dolphins! I swam for all I was worth and they were all around me, a huge pod of them, obviously chasing a school of fish. They came up very close and we saw the young calves with their mothers, it was a totally choice experience, we must have spent 15 mins swimming with them, we were very lucky as they normally stay in deeper water between the islands but they were hunting a school of fish in the shallower water near shore.

Thursday we went to Isabella which is the biggest island in the archipelago but only has the 3rd largest population. We went to the tortoise breeding center and saw the breeding program, the tortoises were actually really cute but very very slow. Surprisingly when they hatch they´re very small – smaller than an A5 page and grow to enormous proportions in around 150 years. The tortoises are under threat in the wild as feral dogs and pigs dig up the nests and goats and donkeys destroy the vegetation, the breeding centre hatches the eggs which are found in the wild and when the babies are old and big enough to look after themselves (around 5-6 years) they´re released back into the wild. In the afternoon we went to Las Tintoreras which are small islands near the coast that have a large population of huge marine iguanas and crevasses in the rocks where white-tip reef sharks go to rest, we saw about a dozen sleeping sharks. After that we went for a snorkel around the islands and swam into a crevass and saw one sleeping shark but the coolest thing by far was the enormous spotted eagle rays swimming leasurely through the water, they were really shy and every time I tried to get close they´d swim away. I also saw a Golden Cow-nose ray which was unafraid of me, it was a really beautiful gold colour (hence the name) with a scalloped head and it didn´t seem to mind me excitedly thrashing about after it.

Friday was a sad day – our final day and the end of the cruise, our final port of call was Santa Cruz where we´d started and we were taken up into the highlands to see the tortoises in the wild, which we did, apparently they just wander through farms up there doing their own thing. We came back to port feeling very sad to be finished the cruise. I had 4 days in Santa Cruz until I was to go back to San Cristobal for my last 2 weeks on the reserve.

Jasmine and I decided to go back to Isabela to climb Sierra Negra volcano, so we booked a 2 day trip and took a bone-shaking and white-knuckled boat trip across to Isabela… the boat looked as if it had seen better years, pretty much a modified fishing boat with three absolutely enormous outboard motors on the back, the crew handed out life jackets and the captain hit the gas, the nose of the boat came up and everybody gasped as the boat crashed and shook its way over the waves… I quietly prepared to meet my maker.

Isabella´s main port looks like a Caribbean beach town, all swaying palms, brightly painted houses and sandy sleepy streets. We stayed at a nice little hostel with a flamingo lagoon out the front and a view of the sea out of the back. The next day we started out at 8am and took a truck up to the start of the national park and then rode horses up a scarily eroded and rutted track. We rode for an hour in the mist until the path cleared and we were on some kind of cliff but we could only see the swirling mist below us – it started to clear and we could see glimpses of an immense lavafield below us, we rode to a lookout point and could see the whole of the enormous cauldera – at 10km across it´s the second widest in the world. You could see the lava tracks from the latest erruption which occured in 2005 and lasted for 8 days. People were climbing the volcano then to get a good (close) look at the erruption, apparently it was amazing to see at night, I love the complete lack of public liability here… things are still so gloriously dangerous (and therefore fun).

Today we´re back on Santa Cruz and catching up on all the emailing and money spending, I think when I get back to San Cristobal I´m going to arrange to do my PADI Open Water Dive Course… I´m hell-bent on diving with a manta ray.

As you can tell I´m having an absolutly dreadful time over here.

Chao!