Santa Cruz Island
The day has arrived! We have been waiting for this time to reveal to us the existence of the mythic giant reptiles, the famous Galápagos tortoises!
Rain in the form of a fine mist comes this time of the year, locally known as Garúa. Our ship, the National Geographic Endeavour, has anchored today at Academy Bay, and we head to the National Park headquarters, where a program of raising tortoises in captivity has brought these gigantic creatures back from the brink of extinction.
As we visit these facilities, we learn about the baby tortoises repatriated to a number of different islands and the program of eradication of alien species, which is an ongoing project of the Park Service. These two programs are a successful conservation strategy for the Galápagos Islands.
The air is cool in the highlands of this extinct volcano, where we find enormous sink holes, which are the result of collapsed magmatic chambers. They are surrounded by vegetation unique to this place, the Scalesia forest, home to the woodpecker finch—the most specialized of all finches, due to its unique way of feeding on worms that live inside the bark of these trees.
Today has been quite revealing in the mysteries of the Galápagos Islands.
