Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Isabela Island – An update on Florena and Isabela Islands.
Back on the speedboat again. My Galápagos tour is beginning to remind me of Fiji with all it’s boat transfers and island hopping. There’s the familiar cycadic rthyum of little taxi boat from the shore to the ocean crossing speedboat to back on the little taxi boat arrival to a new shore. I kinda like the routine.
Today is day six of being in, on and around the Galápagos Islands. We have seen and done so much already. Most of it’s not quite what I expected, but then again, I’m not sure what I did expect. I knew I was going to see giant tortoises; and I have! The first sighting of one was on Florena island. Coming face to face with a 140 year old creature that came up to your knees was something else. It looked like it belonged to a prehistoric time. I was a bit saddened to see it was in a small breeding centre and not roaming wild. And there weren’t 100s of them like I’d hoped to see, only around 20. At the breeding centre on Isabela Island, there were 100s, but again they were in captivity. Years of poaching in the early 1900s have left the population decimated, and now the national park is trying to repopulate the Islands to their former numbers. At a cost of US$7,000 to raise one baby tortioise to its adult release, I expect this will take some years. All of this disappointment was reversed though, when out on a mountain bike ride on Isabela Island we came across a tortoise along the road roaming wild! The best animal sighting ever! Hopefully one day, there will be many more roaming free.
I guess I also expected to see an abundance of all sorts of wildlife roaming free. Whilst for the tortoises this hasn’t been the case, it has been for the other species I have seen. There isn’t a lot of variety of land species for reasons I’ll explain later, but for the species that do exisit they are everywhere! And so tame! The prime example being the sea lions. These mischievous and inquisitive creatures can be found in their hundreds on every beach we’ve been to. You see them swimming gracefully through the clear waters near the shore. On top of boats anchored in the bay. Sleeping on park benches intended for humans. I even saw one trying to climb up the spiral steps of the Florena lighthouse! He had got half way before I think he realised it was going to take some time to reach the top.
And then there are the crabs, scurrying over the black lava rocks. Tiny black ones. Vibrant red ones. Thousands of them. I love their colours and all their various markings.
The creature that has most fascinated me though has been the Galapogos black marine iguana, the worlds only sea going lizard. Yesterday, we had the once in a lifetime experience of swimming with them! Just off the coast of Isabela is a small bay that they like to reside in. We doned our snorkelling gear and off we went. The first big marine life we saw was a very large sea turtle walking along the bottom. As big as many of the land tortioise we’d seen in the breeding centre. A few moments later a black marine iguana swam by, floating on the waters surface, only two feet away. Such an unreal sight to me. These dinosaur like, scaly reptiles, which I’ve always associated with inhospitable desert land, there in the water with me. And there were at least a dozen of them. At one point, we were swimming through a lava tunnel, basically a channel in the ocean floor created by lava flow. I was concentrating on staying within the walls, when I emerged from the end, I looked up and right in front of my face only a foot away there was a black iguana swimming by. It gave me such a fright!
Later that afternoon, we went to Las Tintoreas, otherwise known as shark alley. This was my favourite island so far! Uninhibited, by humans anyway, it was a beautiful landscape of rocky lava outcrops, covered with a whitish lichen, contrasted with the occasional green shrub and surrounded by blue ocean waters, it was picture perfect in my mind. What made it even better was the thousands, yes thousands of marine iguanas! I’ve never seen so many species of one kind together before. I loved their ability to camoflouge themselves in the black rock and the dusty sand. You literally and to keep doing a 180 degree sweep with your eyes along the ground to keep from stepping on one. They all looked so different. I was mesmerised! And took several hundred photos!
But this was Shark Alley, not iguana island. That name came from a small part of the island where a lava tunnel had created a resting place for the Galápagos white tipped shark. At low tide you could find literally several dozen of them resting in its narrow, shallow waters. Quite the sight. Apparently, you used to be able to snorkel here. I’m glad that had been stopped!
On a nearby island was the rare Galápagos penguin. We normally associate penguins with Antarctica, but these are the only penguins that live in the tropics and the most northerly penguin in the world. We came across a small colony of around 20 out for a swim that came very close to our boat. A very small penguin, they were so cute!
During our days on Isabela and Florena Islands we also saw a few salmon coloured flamingos, more frigate birds and blue footed boobies. In total, these are the species you find in and around the Galapogos. There isn’t much else. When you see the landscape you can understand why. The Islands were created from volcanos erupting from the sea from several hundred millions to 400,000 years ago. The landscape is made up from rugged lava stone and large volcanic craters. The one on Isabela was 10km across, making it the second largest volcanic caldera in the world. It’s inhospitable. It’s dry. Some Islands don’t even have a source of natural water, or like Florena, there is only a trickle. The animals that arrived here, floated here from the mainland on makeshift boats of logs and twigs. Only those animals cabable of going months without water and food made it here. And of those only the fittest survived.
Today, the four inhabited Islands are sparsely populated. Florena had a mere 120 inhabitants. Isabella had several thousand. Still the infrastructure was minimal. No paved roads. Food and drink was expensive. But I guess in a way, I was surprised to see them inhabited at all. I expected them to be desolate. Florena almost was, and I know that some still are. Still, they were more built up than I imagined.
So, who knows what awaits us at the last island on our visit – Santa Cruz. More tortioises I hope. Sea lions for sure. More people I expect. I’ll let you know!
