Today we visit one of the most beautiful and interesting islands in the Galapagos as we locally call it “Floreana”, named after the first president of Ecuador Juan Jose Flores. This incredible place has an incredible amount of wildlife and human history, since it has been visited over hundreds of years by humans, from pirates to the first settlers.
With the first light of the day we prepare for our first outing before breakfast, this is a visit to Punta Cormorant, which is a visitor site boasting one of the few populations of flamingos and recently a small nesting colony of blue-footed boobies. We had a wet landing on a thin volcanic sand beach and then prepared to start the walk inland, as we got deeper into the dry vegetation some pink dots started to appear in the distance almost as if they were hovering on the brackish water lagoon that started to reveal itself before our eyes, we made it closer and could see several flamingos filtering. The trail took us to the other side of the point so we could see a beautiful white sand beach which happens to be one of the most important nesting sites for the Pacific green sea turtle.
We came back and had a great breakfast, the ship repositioned to Champion Islet, ad right after breakfast we readied ourselves for several options, some of us went looking for the rare Floreana mockingbird, the glass-bottom boat was available and after the deep water snorkelers explored the underwater realm of champion islet, they had a blast!
In the afternoon our guests enjoyed several rounds of kayaking and some went for a boat ride around “Post-office” Bay and “The baroness cove”, several of our guests spotted sea turtles surfacing to take a deep breath and white-tipped sharks resting in the bottom of a very shallow bay.
We had a wet landing at Post-office Bay and learned about the human history of the site and the famous visitors the island has had over the years. We all became part of the ancient tradition of mail hand delivery as our guests committed themselves to only hand deliver the postcards they took and left some to be picked up in the future.
