Santiago & Bartolomé Islands
Today was an impressive day. We started early in the morning with a hike to the top of the tiny island of Bartolomé. Surrounded by several of the major central islands, this island is a natural book opened to geology. At first sight, it looked fairly barren, with many lava tubes, spatter cones, small craters and tuff formations offering us a weird landscape as if we were on another planet. Suddenly that idea changed when we observed a snake on the rocks; it was immobile, probably regulating its temperature or waiting to eat a lava lizard.
Soon after our breakfast and once we were all geared up for the day’s snorkeling adventure, we headed to our destination – Bartolomé’s golden beach. Here, some of us crossed a sand dune to view sea turtles in the shallows, and most of us with our snorkeling gear began an incredible adventure. Although the water was cold, it wasn’t an impediment for our guests, who enjoyed swimming among white-tipped reef sharks, penguins, sea lions and tropical fish. At noon, we came back to the National Geographic Islander, and immediately began our cruise over to Santiago or James Island, the island with highlands but without inhabitants.
In the afternoon, we began our activities with kayaking along the coast of Santiago and snorkeling from the black sand beach. We observed many caves, a huge black lava field, sea turtles and boobies. The weather was excellent and the sea was very calm.
At 4 o’clock, we landed to walk along the intertidal zone of Santiago; we talked about the different attempts to colonize the island, mainly how life was during 1960’s when the Egas brothers established a company to export salt to the mainland, and the procedures applied recently to eradicate goats.
Along the shore, the first surprise was to observe marine iguanas, whose size was at least three times larger than the iguanas we observed yesterday at North Seymour. Of course their size is related to the availability of food. We observed many shore birds, Galápagos sea lions, and pioneer plants. Finally, at the grottos – those natural swimming pools which shelter many fur sea lions and sea turtles – we enjoyed a beautiful sunset, with the sun leaving in between Wolf and Darwin volcanoes on Isabela Island. It was spectacular, and a signal that it was getting late and it was time to go back to the ship.
Just before we finished our walk back to the ship, a short eared owl appeared in front of us; its day has just begun, but for us, our day was ending.
As I said at the beginning, today was impressive.
