Floreana Island
This island is known as ‘Mystery Island,’ for many people have disappeared here since the pirate’s times in the early nineteen hundreds. Ecuador took procession of Galápagos in 1832, and immediately we turned it into a penal colony. Later, whalers used this island to collect food and fresh water. James Cornett, one of the whalers, set a barrel to drop correspondence with the hope that another whaler ship would collect and deliver those notes by hand. And this morning, we dropped off our own postcards (no stamp needed) and collected some of them to hand deliver – the most important thing is to keep alive this tradition.
Champion is a tiny island off the coast of Floreana, where our adventure continued with glass-bottom boat tours and deep- and shallow-water snorkeling with great success. Champion is also the home of the Floreana mocking bird. There are no more than fifty individuals left in wild, and that is the reason we offered a Zodiac ride before lunch to look for them.
We continued the afternoon with a couple rounds of kayaking, followed by beach activities for our younger explorers. Our final activity was a hike from an inorganic to an organic sandy beach – the latter being a very important nesting ground for the Pacific green sea turtles.
Kayakers had an amazing opportunity to explore the coastline, while our younger explorers had the opportunity to built sandcastles while parents walked along the beach.
Today was an extraordinary experience from sunrise to sunset, and the list of animals we saw in a single day is really impressive: Darwin finches, yellow warblers, flamingos, turtles, frigates, blue and nazca boobies, brown noddy terns. And in our water activities we saw hundred of fishes of many different species.
