Isabela Island
Today while we were visiting one of the youngest islands of this archipelago, many different thoughts came to my mind. I thought about the way land was formed in the very beginning, when it was only volcanoes, lava and eruptions.
Today we were surrounded by volcanoes and lava formations. Some are only a few years old and some hundred thousand years ago. This morning we visited the volcano called Ecuador, because the Equator line goes right through its middle. The captain of the Polaris, Fausto Hinojosa, sounded the horn announcing that we had arrived to zero degrees of latitude, and then King Neptune himself appeared with three pirates to baptize the “Moors” that were navigating in his waters without his consent. They had to kiss a lobster and drink iguana blood to be baptized as “Galápagos amberjacks.”
In the afternoon we navigated to Fernandina Island, which had an eruption in 1995. We walked on a very young formation of lava, to see a few endemic species. In this island you see evolution in action.
We saw Galápagos penguins and flightless cormorants, two flightless birds that evolved to be more adapted to diving than to flying. I sat with my group to contemplate for a while a flightless cormorant coming from the ocean and jumping to a rock, shaking its wings and trying to dry them with the sun light, because cormorants don’t produce enough oil for their feathers. The people that were snorkeling saw a lot of marine turtles and also iguanas. Today was an incredible and very enjoyable day, visiting the youngest island of Galápagos.
Today while we were visiting one of the youngest islands of this archipelago, many different thoughts came to my mind. I thought about the way land was formed in the very beginning, when it was only volcanoes, lava and eruptions.
Today we were surrounded by volcanoes and lava formations. Some are only a few years old and some hundred thousand years ago. This morning we visited the volcano called Ecuador, because the Equator line goes right through its middle. The captain of the Polaris, Fausto Hinojosa, sounded the horn announcing that we had arrived to zero degrees of latitude, and then King Neptune himself appeared with three pirates to baptize the “Moors” that were navigating in his waters without his consent. They had to kiss a lobster and drink iguana blood to be baptized as “Galápagos amberjacks.”
In the afternoon we navigated to Fernandina Island, which had an eruption in 1995. We walked on a very young formation of lava, to see a few endemic species. In this island you see evolution in action.
We saw Galápagos penguins and flightless cormorants, two flightless birds that evolved to be more adapted to diving than to flying. I sat with my group to contemplate for a while a flightless cormorant coming from the ocean and jumping to a rock, shaking its wings and trying to dry them with the sun light, because cormorants don’t produce enough oil for their feathers. The people that were snorkeling saw a lot of marine turtles and also iguanas. Today was an incredible and very enjoyable day, visiting the youngest island of Galápagos.
