Santa Cruz Island
We continue with this expedition in this remote paradise, early in the morning we arrived to Santa Cruz Island, witch is one of the few inhabited islands in this archipelago, everyone in the ship was looking forward to set foot on the island, this was going to be our first full day on an island! We left the ship well geared up for our visits, as soon as we landed most of our guests were really surprise to see a well developed town in the middle of this paradise.
In our first visit of the day we could see and be part of the rearing center of tortoises of the Charles Darwin Research Station since we saw step by step all the stages this tortoises need to pass trough before they are released in the wild, it was almost impossible to believe that all the little hatchlings we saw that had the size of a computer’s mouse were going to get tremendous sizes reaching a weight of more than five hundred pounds.
Shortly afterwards we enjoyed a bus ride from Puerto Ayora, to the highlands of Santa Cruz where we could observe how the islands have different levels of vegetation, we started at the level of the sea where the vegetation was arid and we drove to a cloud forest where a really nice restaurant was waiting for us.
After our lunch, we continued with our activities on the island of Santa Cruz, we went to visit some amazing volcanic formations called the twins, these were just two super giant pit craters, right after these we had the great opportunity to hike on grass surrounded by big trees and many giant tortoises in their natural habitat, we even came across a vermilion fly catcher, a beautiful red bird that it is really hard to find in this area.
We continue with this expedition in this remote paradise, early in the morning we arrived to Santa Cruz Island, witch is one of the few inhabited islands in this archipelago, everyone in the ship was looking forward to set foot on the island, this was going to be our first full day on an island! We left the ship well geared up for our visits, as soon as we landed most of our guests were really surprise to see a well developed town in the middle of this paradise.
In our first visit of the day we could see and be part of the rearing center of tortoises of the Charles Darwin Research Station since we saw step by step all the stages this tortoises need to pass trough before they are released in the wild, it was almost impossible to believe that all the little hatchlings we saw that had the size of a computer’s mouse were going to get tremendous sizes reaching a weight of more than five hundred pounds.
Shortly afterwards we enjoyed a bus ride from Puerto Ayora, to the highlands of Santa Cruz where we could observe how the islands have different levels of vegetation, we started at the level of the sea where the vegetation was arid and we drove to a cloud forest where a really nice restaurant was waiting for us.
After our lunch, we continued with our activities on the island of Santa Cruz, we went to visit some amazing volcanic formations called the twins, these were just two super giant pit craters, right after these we had the great opportunity to hike on grass surrounded by big trees and many giant tortoises in their natural habitat, we even came across a vermilion fly catcher, a beautiful red bird that it is really hard to find in this area.
