Santa Cruz Island
Continuing with our expedition around the Galápagos archipelago, today we visited Santa Cruz Island. This is the second largest island in the Galápagos yet the most populated.
Our guests were quite surprise to see people living in the islands after visiting the national park areas which remain as nature reserves.
In the morning our visit took place at the headquarters of the Charles Darwin Research Station and the National Park; at this site we could observe step by step the rearing center of giant tortoises. It was a cool morning with a nice breeze, which made our walk quite pleasant, besides the tortoises were very active, all the babies were outside their pens very close to us.
We were so lucky to see Lonesome George and Diego, the two most emblematic giant tortoises of the Galápagos. Diego was pretty busy attempting to mate with one of his girlfriends from the same Island.
Later in the morning as we were heading up to the highlands of Santa Cruz for lunch, we stopped at two sites: a small sugar cane mill and a lava tunnel.
At the sugar cane mill our guests tried some of the local drinks, including our Ecuadorian version of the moonshine, made out of fermented sugarcane juice.
At the lava tunnel, we could see part of the geology of Santa Cruz, especially a basaltic lava field we walked through, of course this was totally inside the lava tunnel, which looked like a giant subway station.
Our luncheon was in a local restaurant open just for us; the food was great, it replenished our energies to continue exploring the island!
In the afternoon we went on the search of Giant tortoises, this time it was the endemic specie from Santa Cruz Island, Chelonoidis Porteri, the one we were looking for; we successfully found seven of them, one was more the 400 pounds, very big and actively moving around and eating.
It was a beautiful day, very unique because for the first time in the week we finally got to see the symbol of the Galápagos Islands, the giant tortoise!
