Today we had an early start, and by seven o’clock we were disembarking on Santiago Island for Espumilla Beach, a peaceful area surrounded by mangroves, and home of hundreds of land birds.
For a welcome we had some blue-footed boobies diving just at our disembarkation area, trying to catch some breakfast with their dives.
The hike went through a beautiful Palo Santo Forest; we climbed to get a rewarding view of the area with a hidden brackish water lagoon. As we were walking we could hear mocking birds, warblers, and Darwin finches. When we arrived back to the beach we found two curious juvenile Galápagos hawks. They observed us with the same fascination as we looked at them through our camera lenses. It was just nine o’clock!
We came back for breakfast and got ready for our next activities. Some of us went snorkeling with manta rays, white tipped reef sharks, different species of fish, and sea lions, but some of us went to explore the shores from our Zodiacs. You never know with nature…bottle-nosed dolphins came and had an encounter with one of our Zodiacs! About a dozen appeared a couple of feet away from our Zodiac; they came to the surface a couple of times and then disappeared back into the water!
After lunch we learned about Charles Darwin in a very interesting talk, and then once again we disembarked on Santiago Island, but this afternoon at a different location: Puerto Egas. This place use to be a salt mine, and you can still find some remains of those times. But as we got to the shore the landscape became the most beautiful location with lava fields and ash, sand and vines, and our reward, the Galápagos fur seals. We came back with the best light, our path surrounded by marine iguanas and sea lions. What a day! What an island! What our paradise our planet is!
