Today we woke up in Puerto Ayora, the largest settlement in Galapagos and the place where the Charles Darwin Research Station is located. The station has a successful captive breeding program to reintroduce giant tortoises into the wild. Here for example we have repopulated 2,000 tortoises on Hood Island from an original stock of 15. Tortoises take two years for their shale to harden and during this period they are extremely vulnerable to predation from introduced rats that will eat right through. To prevent this from happening the eggs are harvested from the nesting areas and the hatchlings are incubated controlling the temperature so as to get most of them females. Once they reach the age of six they are reintroduced to their original habitat and this assures their survival. Here we saw the different shapes of tortoises as the drier islands produce saddle shapes, while the moist islands produce dome shaped tortoises.
After this visit we had some spare time to visit the town of Puerto Ayora with its fish market and shops. Guests could relax and shop for souvenirs, afterwards we visited a farm in the highlands where moonshine was made from sugarcane and the whole process of coffee making was described. We had lunch in a different farm of the highlands and later we visited another farm next to the Giant Tortoise Reserve where dome shaped tortoises were to be found in the wild. This was a long day but well worth it.
