Santa Cruz Island
Academy Bay is where we anchored National Geographic Islander the whole day; meanwhile we all went to visit Santa Cruz Island.
Santa Cruz Island is the second largest island in the archipelago yet the most populated; all guests explored the local wildlife, symbolized by the chelonoides porter, which is the endemic specie of giant tortoise from this island. It was certainly a very successful day since we came across about thirteen of these giants, walking among us and feeding!
The town of Puerto Ayora is also where the headquarters of the Charles Darwin Research Station is situated. We could see part of this breeding program of tortoises that has been carried out for so long in the Galápagos with the mission of restoring the original populations of tortoises affected by whalers in the past centuries. The little hatchlings were the stars; it was hard to believe that these small tortoises, each about the size of a donut, were going to become giants reaching weights of nearly six-hundred pounds. Super Diego, the male Galápagos tortoise who came in the early seventies from San Diego zoo was also the star, now that lonesome George passed away a couple of weeks ago; at least we could see a picture gallery of him to commemorate such an important tortoise, the last of its kind!
The day was full of surprises and activities for our guests, a walk through a natural lava tunnel and the visit to a sugar cane mill were also in our program today, to maximize our visit in Santa Cruz.
We had a perfect weather today for hiking that made our visits very pleasant; a plus for our guests was the fact they could spend some free time in town just walking, watching how people live here, or shopping, contributing to the local economy.
