“Guess what?!”
“Sorry? It’s 5:45 a.m. so it’s a little hard to guess! What should I be guessing about?”
“Well, it seems like we have an extra passenger… eehh… passenger 97.”
“What??”
That was the subject of conversation at the beginning of the day as we approached the island of Genovesa. Of course our intruder wasn’t a person, but a red footed booby that stationed itself at the crow’s nest of the National Geographic Endeavour and took a ride for about an hour until we dropped anchor at Darwin Bay. Then it left the ship leaving us with great memories and a couple of dozen pictures.
The morning came fast and soon we were landing for our first excursion at Prince Philip’s Steps where we expected to find some birds. And some birds we found… some thousands of them. Baby Nazca boobies we saw two weeks ago have grown and some are about to fledge, but red footed boobies are starting collecting nesting materials. These materials however were mostly taken by ravaging frigatebirds that are also nesting and surely courting.
If one has seen an apple tree full of ripe fruit, one could easily understand and picture how some portions of the trail looked with all the inflated gular sacks of the male frigatebirds waiting to be picked up by a female. Everyone who walked the trail at Prince Philip’s Steps was astonished by the display of nature in this place, so no one expected anything better for the afternoon. Yet, when the time came, we were eager to experience our next site.
The beach showed us that we will never finish seeing the splendor of the Galapagos. The colors that were portrayed by the birds, the trees and even the insects filled us up with such awe that as the day was fading, it was difficult to think the week had come to an end.
This adventure in the Galapagos might have finished, but the memories will last forever and beyond. To know that there is still a place where life goes on as it always has and evolution is developing as we walk through the forests, is bigger that what one could manage to handle in a week.
The dream of being in such a place came to be true. We shall work to keep it in good shape…
