Isabela Island
Today was the best day of this week so far! We spent all Wednesday around Puerto Villamil on Isabela Island. We began at eight o’ clock in the morning with a dry landing on the town’s pier where we boarded a colorful mixture of transportation vehicles – there were pickup trucks and local “chivas,” which are local buses. We went to the Giant Tortoises’ Breeding Center. We reached the center using boardwalk that goes through marshes and mangrove forests. We spotted several flamingos, Common stilts, Purple gallinules, White cheeked pintail ducks and other bird species found in the brackish water wetlands.
Once at the center we learned from our expert Naturalists about the different sub-varieties of giant tortoises that live on Isabela Island and how the Galápagos National Park Service has been working hard since 1993 on this island trying to recover the vanishing populations of these endemic reptiles. The main idea is to replenish and somehow reach the original numbers of tortoises there were here before human predation started in the 1600s. It was awesome to see all the different types of shells and adults and babies in their pens.
The flattened shell individuals or “aplastados” were the most remarkable of them all, especially because they were rescued by helicopter from a nearby volcano during an eruption that took place in the 1990s. Some of the animals still had the scars in their shells. Oscar, one the Park Rangers in charge showed us one of the crystal containers where tortoise embryos are housed during their different incubation stages from one to four months. Our guests could photograph this unique material. Once we were leaving the center, there was an empty tortoise shell where some of us hid and dressed up as a giant tortoise for a while.
Later on in the morning our bus took us on a great ride across the mangrove area to the “Wall of Tears,” which keeps fantastic secrets of the Ecuadorian penal colony that this island housed along with the North American base that was kept on Galápagos during the Second World War. We had great fun finding out and imagining how human beings could survive here under harsh conditions!
The highlight of the afternoon was of course the great greenery of the humid zone, the lunch at a local old coffee farm and the wet and muddy hike climbing to Sierra Negra Volcano.
Later on our guests enjoyed the beautiful little town and loved every bit of it even though it was pretty hot on Southern Isabella Island today – this is certainly one of the hidden jewels of the crown in the Galápagos Islands.
