We arrived today to Florena Island, the first island colonized by Ecuador in 1832, when the Galapagos became our Archipelago. We started with a pre-breakfast landing at Punta Cormorant. With our photography group, we found three lonely flamingos looking for brine shrimp in the brackish water lagoon. We continued to a gorgeous white sandy beach and there we saw a few fresh sea turtle tracks all over the place. This beach is known as Flour Beach, due to the fine grain coral sand that it contains.
After breakfast we went back to Floreana, this time for Zodiac riding. In fact, we visited a little nearby island called Champion Island as we cruised around this beautiful volcanic formation, in search of the rare Floreana mockingbird. A strike of luck made the small bird land before our very eyes! We also found blue-footed boobies, Nazca boobies, brown pelicans, Galapagos shearwaters, red-billed tropic birds and several juveniles Galapagos sea lions.
As we were sailing away, we spotted the place where we would do our snorkeling activities. As we came back in our wetsuits, we followed several schools of fish and some young sea lions that wanted to play with us. Several of them probed our Zodiac as a landing spot. Wildlife in Galapagos tends to be very curious and come towards us instead of going away.
In the afternoon we all went to look for postcards and letters inside an old wooden barrel, in Post Office Bay. Just as the whalers did in the 1800’s, we picked up some mail to hand-deliver when going back home, and also left some of our own postcards; one day somebody will deliver those to continue with this ancient tradition. Then we chose between different options, some of us went kayaking while others enjoyed a relaxing time on our Zodiacs along the coasts of Floreana. This was a nice second day of our journey to paradise…
