Chinese Hat and Sullivan Bay
This far into the week we are more experienced Galápagos travelers and yet the islands keep surprising us. Looking around in the early morning some of us do not believe we are in the same archipelago, for the islands around us seem very different. But if you travel laterally in this archipelago, you travel through time. The place we are now, the center-west, is geographically younger and shows us how colonization of plants and animals works.
After breakfast we explore the coast with Zodiacs, and see a very rocky and barren coastline. The clear water means that we see the reef and sandy patches easy until twenty meters deep, and after a while we even spot a manta ray. We marvel at the strangeness of this scene and wonder what the snorkeling will be like.
The snorkeling is fantastic, we have perfect conditions and the activity is plenty. We see a big spotted eagle ray, a huge marble stingray, a white-tipped reef shark, dense schools of reef fish, colorful sea stars. But what is really the highlight are the marine iguanas swimming and diving to pluck algae from the substrate. It is such a strange sight for a snorkeler, used to fish and maybe a turtle, to see a lizard clenching the rocks and gnawing at the short algae while yellow tailed damsel fish franticly try to protect their little gardens. These small reptiles can last for quite a long time on one breath, feeding bouts of ten minutes are no exception.
Just before lunch we navigate through group of small tuff cones, their cliffs sharply formed by sea erosion and fissures. In one of them there is a crater lake, and we spot more than a dozen flamingoes wading in the lake. They are Galápagos flamingoes, residents of the archipelago. These birds still raise many questions for us, we wonder how they congregate, migrate and why their number is so small, to name a few. There is still so much to learn in this place.
Later in the afternoon we walk over the lava flow of an eruption that happened about a hundred years ago. We marvel at the different forms of pahoehoe lava. We see some pioneering plants like mollugo, lava cactus and lichens. There is hardly wildlife, but the feeling arises that we walk on one of the biggest artworks of nature.
