Here we are, back to the civilization because we are visiting Santa Cruz island. Puerto Ayora is the name of the biggest town in Galapagos and is considered the economic hub. About 18,000 thousand inhabitants benefit from the industry of tourism. This is also home of the two main institutions working in conservation: The Galapagos national park service and the Charles Darwin research station. The latter is a non-governmental, non-profit organization that get funds from many organizations around the world and several companies that work in the Galapagos islands. We spent our morning at these two facilities learning about the work of conservation and our program to save and restore the populations of giant tortoises. We have several corrals with different morpho-types of tortoises: saddle-back, dome-shaped and intermedia. We collect the eggs from these corrals and from areas where they face the predation of several introduced animals and bring them to artificial incubators. Later when they hatch we protect them in boxes to avoid alien species from killing them, because baby tortoises have a delicate carapace, easy for the rats to penetrate their teeth into and eat them. The miracle happens when they are 5 years old and the shell becomes hard as an armor, so we keep them protected until that point and then we house them for 3 more years in adaptation corrals, then finally release them into the wild at the age of 8-10 years old. The experience at this center is amazing. Here you understand why Galapagos is so fragile and the enormous responsibility of preserving it for future generation.
After exploring the town of Puerto Ayora some of our guests headed to visit one of the local schools funded by Lindblad-National Geographic, while others went to visit one of the local farmer families to learn about how they are self-sufficient with the products they harvest from their land. They farm many products like tomatoes, sugar cane, and coffee, as well as cattle breading for their income.
After lunch in a nice restaurant in the Highlands of Santa Cruz we moved to “el Chato”. It is a natural reserve of giant tortoises. Here we crossed a lava tunnel, which is a spectacular volcanic formation that was formed about 1.5 million years ago when enormous lava flows came down hill to the coast. Then we got some time to appreciate one of the most sought after animals of the week, the giant tortoises. Darwin saw this creature and estimated its population in the hundreds of thousands and now they are endangered because pirates captured them for food and early colonists used its oil as exportation to the mainland to light streets in some of the Ecuadorian cities about 120 years ago.
The encounters with these animal is exceptional for our guests and these gigantic animals are very interesting. Here few facts about them: They can live up to 180 years, their metabolism is so slow that they can survive 4-6 months with no water or food, they reach sexual maturity at 35 year also.
After a wonderful day we came back onboard, very happy at having discovered many creatures and learning more about this incredible place.
