Santa Cruz Island
We dropped the anchor at six in the morning at academy bay, situated on the southern part of Santa Cruz Island; this is the second largest Island in the archipelago yet the most populated one. After breakfast, we went to Puerto Ayora, to visit the headquarters of the national park and the Charles Darwin research station.
I have to say everybody enjoyed the visit, since we saw so many hatchlings and adult tortoises, but the visit was not the same after knowing Lonesome George, the last survivor from the Pinta Island tortoises, passed away last Sunday morning; apparently from old age. Nobody was expecting this to happen; we have now lost one more species of tortoise in the Galápagos. We certainly hope DNA studies done to different populations of giant tortoises on the Islands, someday come across close relatives of George.
After the morning’s activities, we had some time to explore the town of Puerto Ayora, it was the perfect opportunity for most of our guests to go shopping or just to sit down in a nice café relaxing and seeing how people live in the Galápagos.
In the afternoon, we headed up to the highlands of Santa Cruz for our lunch in an open air typical restaurant. Before lunch, we stopped at a local place to try some Galápagos shade grown coffee and some sugar cane juice and alcohol. The family who owns this business has a small farm and keeps the custom alive of having trapiches. Which is a traditional machine to extract the sugar cane juice, and they also prepare their own moonshine.
At the restaurant most of us walked through a lava tunnel before lunch. It was so special to be inside such a giant natural structure, it felt like being inside a big subway station.
Finally after our lunch, we explored part of the highlands of Santa Cruz, looking for the “chelonoides porteri”; the endemic specie of giant tortoise from this Island. We successfully found about a dozen of them! And three were huge, reaching perhaps an average of five hundred pounds.
