Monday, May 7, 2001 -- Floreana Island

The pre-breakfast outing (6:45 a.m. wake-up call) today was to the Post Office Barrel in Post Office Bay. This is a tradition dating back to whaling days, when sailors would leave letters in a barrel, which sailors who were returning home would hand-deliver upon their arrival back in (usually) England. Today, people still leave and take cards, although I bet most people don't hand-deliver. We left a few cards, and took one destined for Chehalis (Cathe's sister lives there). I know Shannon did receive her card from the barrel, so it still works!

The original Post Office Barrel

Before landing, we cruised to a shallow part of the bay that is used as a sea lion rookery. There are four penguins who live on Floreana, or (more accurately) on a nearby rock, and we saw one of them swimming in this bay. He was very cute. Some of the young sea lions decided to start chasing him around the bay, which they obviously thought was really funny. I'm not sure the penguin agreed.

At the post office barrel, it was a little muggy and a little buggy, but it was interesting to hear the different places for which the cards were destined. A lot of people put cards for themselves in there, and if you hand-deliver, they'll buy you breakfast or something. There was a great bird hanging around the barrel who really wanted to have his picture taken. One of the guests had a fancy camera with a huge telephoto lens, and this little flycatcher flew up and hovered directly in front of the lens. Later, I was able to get a picture of him, as he sat on a branch, with my tiny camera with less-than-naked-eye zoom. We saw the other three penguins (or, at least, we saw three penguins; I can't guarantee that the one we saw earlier wasn't one of them) swimming in the bay.

Flycatcher...very shy

After breakfast, mom and I did the "easy" snorkel in the lee of a small island. The "advanced" snorkel was around the same island, and offered no different or better wildlife; and the easy version was still in deep water. This was the day that we had sea lions playing all around us, which was more fun than you can shake a stick at.

Sealion checking things out

One got so close, it kicked me in the head as it flipped away from me.

The head-kicker

One of the young sea lions played a little game with me: I would dive down and blow bubbles, and then he would dive and swim under me, blowing bubbles all the way. We used up our entire underwater camera on the critters, and I'm sure if we'd had more film, we would have used it too.

This guy would hang like that until someone did something funny

Lunch today was a huge, traditional, Ecuadorian banquet, with a pig and everything. Sorry...no photos, although we did take video. I quite enjoyed the llapingachos, which are cheese-filled potato patties served with a peanut sauce. The ceviche was pretty good, too. After lunch, we visited Punta Cormorant, on another part of the island. We landed on an olivine beach, which does have green, olivine crystals in the sand, walked to a brackish lake to see flamingos, and then over to a white sand beach to see green sea turtle nests. Off the beach, we were able to see two kinds of ray, including a ray feeding frenzy.

 

New Animal Tally
Greater flamingo	White-cheeked pintail duck	Golden stingray
Spotted eagle ray

Tuesday, May 8, 2001 -- Isabela and Fernandina Islands

We had a long steam northward in the night, crossing the equator. We got up at 7:30 to watch the circumnavigation of roca redonda, which is, as the name implies, basically a roundish rock. After that, we sailed past the collapsed caldera of the shield volcano Ecuador, which rises sort of in an arch formation. Somewhere in here, we crossed the equator again, this time heading south.

There was no setting foot on land all morning, but we took a great zodiac cruise along the volcanic shoreline. Isabela is a relatively young island: Espanola is estimated to be 4 million years old, Isabela less than a million (700,000 yrs.) and Fernandina only about 300,000 years old. We saw our first flightless cormorants on the cruise, which are basically the same as our cormorants, but their wings have atrophied. They still spread their wings out to dry, but they look very silly with stubby little hand-sized wings. Evidently, when they got to the Galápagos, they found that the fish they eat were so close by, they had no need to fly to get them, so their wings just shrunk down to nearly nothing.

Sealion, flightless cormorant, and Galápagos penguins

We also got a peek at a feral cat, which is a huge problem in the Galápagos (as in many islands and island chains), where there formerly were virtually no mammals to prey on the indigenous critters. Lindblad sponsors an organization that is working to eradicate feral pigs and goats from some of the islands, and you can actually get a volunteer job to babysit iguana and bird nests, keeping the cats away.

We got to see lots of nazca (formerly called masked, but renamed for the tectonic plate on which the Galápagos sit) and blue-footed boobies, Sally Lightfoot crabs, marine iguanas, and several green sea turtles swimming in the water. Most excitingly, we found four penguins lounging around with some sea lions and cormorants. As usual, we have a series of photos in which we moved ever nearer to our quarry.

There is something about Galápagos penguins that is just so cute.

In the afternoon, we took a "long walk" (maybe two miles) on Fernandina across a big lava field (pahoehoe, the ropy lava, and saw fields and fields of un-crossable a'a, the rough, jagged stuff) and along a beach where there were lots of sea lions resting and pupping. We got to see another Galápagos hawk, which is of course very exciting for me…love those raptors. Even though it was overcast, it was an incredibly hot day, especially on top of the lava. Since the lava flow was relatively recent, there was almost nothing growing on it, except for a few lava cacti. It is interesting to see what plants are the first colonizers in different areas. In the wet highlands of the Galápagos, non-native guava trees are among the first to spring up after land has been cleared, and people spend a lot of time trying to get rid of them.

Once we landed, we walked out on a point to see a fairly large colony of marine iguanas (a new kind, although I don't know what they were called (but if I had to guess, I'd say "Fernandina marine iguana")).

Colony of marine iguanas

They looked very crabby, and spit salt water at us. Evidently, they have a gland that allows them to extract the salt from the water, and they "spit" it out to expel it.

Marine iguanas

There was a very young sea lion waiting for his mommy in a large tide pool, just napping and scratching himself on the rocks. The guides call it a sea lion kindergarten.

Nursing sealion

We were supposed to take a zodiac cruise out to see penguins, but as we got back to our panga, we heard that there were dolphins in the channel between Isabela and Fernandina, and so voted to go out to see if we could find them. We ended up going across the channel almost to Fernandina, and found ourselves in the middle of a pod of probably more than 100 bottlenose dolphins. It was spectacular! I have seen a fair number of dolphins in my life, but to be in a small boat with so many surrounding us, breaching and spyhopping and riding our bow wake was beyond description. Our guides were at least as excited as we were, so when the hotel manager called to see if we planned to come back to the Polaris, the guides just said, "no way!" We stayed out until sunset, and the Polaris lifted anchor and came out to get us. This allowed the folks who had not left the ship to see the dolphins, as well, which was nice. There were a lot of comments like "you don't see Carnival doing this!" It is definitely worth checking out Lindblad's web site for a few photos.

 

New Animal Tally
Flightless cormorant	Feral cat	New kind of marine iguana
Bottlenose dolphins	Fur sealions

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last modified: January 30, 2002