Santa Cruz Island
Early in the morning, we woke up in the harbor of Santa Cruz Island. It is one of the four only inhabited islands, and it barely contains the largest human population of the archipelago (pop. 20,000). After breakfast, we visited the Charles Darwin Research Station, the internationally funded, non-governmental organization that does scientific research in the Galápagos, by providing logistics to scientists from all over the world. We then decided to visit the restoration program of the giant tortoise house. As they were endangered and close to extinction, the station incubated their eggs and bred young tortoises to release them later into the wild. We saw different kinds of tortoises, known as morphotypes: dome shaped and saddle-back shaped. We had an ice cream at the end of the visit.
After that, Exclusive Resorts chose to join a reforestation project set up by the Galápagos National Park in the highlands. The shrubs we were planting were the endemic Cafetillo, or Galápagos coffee. The area where we worked was the giant daisy forest, very scary for the unfamiliar with giant daisies. After the park personnel had eradicated the blackberry in a two-hectare area, we re-planted more than we thought, making the landscape unique again.
Finally we all met at a family-owned sugarcane plantation business, where we drank locally distilled alcoholic sugar juice. The “proof” is a term that we do not use in Ecuador, which led to much confusion among the drinkers. The term “proof” originated in the 18th century in England, when payments to British sailors included rations of rum. To ensure that the rum had not been watered down, it was "proved" by dousing gunpowder in it, and then tested to see if the gunpowder would ignite. If it did not, then the rum contained too much water and was considered to be "under proof." Gunpowder would not burn in rum that contained less than approximately 57.15% alcohol. Therefore, rum that contained this percentage of alcohol was defined to have "100° (one hundred degrees) proof." In this fashion, our happy visitors learned that the alcohol they were enjoying was around twenty percent stronger than a “100 proof” or 65°=real Ecuadorian degrees. Then we all managed to somehow get up to the restaurant for lunch.
After lunch, we explored the highlands of Santa Cruz. The humid zone of Santa Cruz is very interesting and very different from the lowlands. A canopy of beautiful giant daisy trees covered all. There we looked for giant tortoises in the wild, which was a wonderful end to another day in Paradise.
