Santa Cruz Island
By eight o’clock in the morning in the Galápagos Islands, everybody is excited and ready to disembark. We are going to spend all day on Santa Cruz, one of the inhabited islands. Today is our “Galápagos Tortoise Day”; it’s the first time that we are going to see them on our journey. So we head up towards the Charles Darwin Research Station. There we find hundreds of baby tortoises that have been successfully reared; gigantic ones that can weigh up to 250 kilos and the two most famous tortoises in the world: “Lonesome George” and “Super Diego”. George is the last survivor of Pinta Island and Diego has helped repopulate Española Island (from fifteen individuals to now over one thousand tortoises).
The afternoon is a completely different story; we got the chance to experience seeing tortoises in the wild. The tortoises are moving freely surrounded by lush vegetation; among them we found a big male tortoise that was really busy trying to eat all the plants from the ground when he suddenly stopped, once he noticed us. We remained quiet by his side until he decided to continue. Even though we found only a few of them in the highlands, we left with a gratified feeling.
By eight o’clock in the morning in the Galápagos Islands, everybody is excited and ready to disembark. We are going to spend all day on Santa Cruz, one of the inhabited islands. Today is our “Galápagos Tortoise Day”; it’s the first time that we are going to see them on our journey. So we head up towards the Charles Darwin Research Station. There we find hundreds of baby tortoises that have been successfully reared; gigantic ones that can weigh up to 250 kilos and the two most famous tortoises in the world: “Lonesome George” and “Super Diego”. George is the last survivor of Pinta Island and Diego has helped repopulate Española Island (from fifteen individuals to now over one thousand tortoises).
The afternoon is a completely different story; we got the chance to experience seeing tortoises in the wild. The tortoises are moving freely surrounded by lush vegetation; among them we found a big male tortoise that was really busy trying to eat all the plants from the ground when he suddenly stopped, once he noticed us. We remained quiet by his side until he decided to continue. Even though we found only a few of them in the highlands, we left with a gratified feeling.
