Date: 08/02
City: Galapagos Island, Ecuador
Kilometres ridden: 0
Cumulative kilometre: 33130

In the morning we got a great breakfast, fruit, toast, eggs, fruit juice and coffee. After breakfast we got ready for our next excursion on the North Seymour Island. We hopped into the zodiac and went to the island. The first animal that we saw was a baby sea lion who was just relaxing on the stones.

We continued along the coast and all of the sudden we saw two male frigate birds with their red ball thing inflated – I just looked it up in the internet – throat pouches called “gular pouches“. There were two males competing for a female flying over their heads. The male in the middle who did not have his throat inflated was looking after the chook.

We also saw some frigate birds flying with the red throat pouches (still called “gular pouches“) inflated.

We continued and saw a Galapagos Dove digging for food and a Land Iguana enjoying some bits of a cactus.

He tried to eat it, but then spit it out and used his claw to drag it over the ground. After a while he turned it around, dragged the other side over the ground , then he ate it. This time hardly any spikes were left. We saw some more land iguanas, some looking for food, other just relaxing.

And then I saw a special species, the Galapagos paparazzi  ;), having said that, it seemed like the iguana was posing just for us.

A bit later we found an Iguana in a cactus eating the flowers he could reach. It seems like he was not affected by the spikes of the cactus at all.

Towards the end of the island we saw our first blue footed booby close up and then another one sitting on two eggs. On the right picture you can see that the Iguana doesn’t eat the blue footed bobby eggs, so they coexist nicely.

We continued to the end of the island seeing a sea lion and three land iguanas close together, it looks like they coexist nicely as wellJ

And then we saw the mating dance of a blue footed booby. That was great, so I switched my photo camera on and got a ’empty battery’ message! !@#! I couldn’t believe it! But I had still my video camera… which I left on the boat, bummer. So below there are three pictures of a blue footed booby dancing, I got them from our guide Fabien. On the left there is the male, he is dancing and showing his feet. If the female is attracted, she starts to dance as well; otherwise the male will get the message after a while and give up. In our case, another male was waiting patiently a couple of meters away, just in case that the current male was not successful.

Two hours on the island were gone in no time. We went back to the boat to change into swimming gear and went out for snorkelling again. No pictures from the snorkelling, my camera got a small crack when I had the motorcycle accident seven month ago, so I’m reluctant to put it under water. After we came back from an hour of snorkelling (which was too short J) we got lunch served, the cook is fantastic.

Then we had a snooze and during this time we sailed to the North West coast of Santa Cruz, ready for another excursion. Here we were looking for marine iguanas. They have a flatter face and a longer and flatter tail then the land iguanas, they use the tail for swimming and the face is flatter so they can feed on the small algae that grow under water. Did I mention the red crabs? They look great on the black lava stone on the beach. The marine iguana and the crabs are coexisting as well.

Then we found a Lava lizard – the female has red markings on her throat. And marine iguana and lava lizard are coexisting as well as you can see at the tail of the iguana.

We had a look at some cacti’s (not sure about the name), but they look very cuddly. On other islands, where these cactuses don’t have predators, they lose the spikes at the bottom part when they grow older, so they bottom looks like a trunk.

A bit further down we had a look at a lake where we could see flamingos again. Currently it is not the right season, so we only saw a couple.

On our way back to the zodiac I stumbled across a crab on a black stone…Did I mention that I like this colour combination? J

So back to the boat and changing into snorkelling gear- life can be hard. We snorkelled at the El Eden inlet, it was fantastic, again, no pictures from it. When we came back, we sailed to Puerto Ayora where we could visit the City in the evening. It was good for us, because we needed an ATM to get more money, sun cream and to replace the scissors that we lost at Quito airport. Below is a picture of the jetty and a street which plenty of restaurants.

After all the strainious shopping, we had to relax, so we had a short drink before returning to the boat. Below is a picture of the bunch- our current travel companions. From the left to the right, Caroline from England, me, David from Canada, Fredy from Switzerland and Sigrid.

What a day, looking forward to see how the other days pan out. 😀