Galapagos day 12 – Cruise day 7 – James (Santiago) Island

Our last full day on the boat, today was a jam-packed and enjoyable adventure. We rock up next to a large, forest-covered volcano. Ocean waves hit against the sheer cliffs made of compacted rock, covered with visible soil, then greenery.

We took a dinghy to land at Puerto Egas (James Bay) of James Island (also called Santiago). Again, we came in onto a black sand beach and walked around on lava rock and terracotta tuff cone. Inside the tuff cone, water from the ocean filters in and makes an expensive, good quality salt.

In the 1960s, a man named Salinas opened a salt mine here. The last owner was Hector Egas, who the bay is now named after. He tried to found a settlement in Santiago, but it was hard with little freshwater and few ships. He eventually went broke.

Another change in the island is the disappearance of the 74,000 goats that used to live there. Juan told us how he volunteered with the goat eradication project on a neighboring island. Nineteen hunters, two volunteers, and a chopper with a gunman covered 30 square kilometers. Juan said he did it for the real life ecology experience.

“By participating, you learn there are a lot of things about conservation that aren’t necessarily right. You see how we can screw up nature and it’s too late or too early to do something about it.”

On Santiago, the goat elimination was successful. But the result was the appearance of invasive mallows, which the goats used to control. Juan didn’t consider it a serious problem. He said it’s a low level of vegetation and only during the rainy season, so it’s not taking space for anything else. When dry season comes, they will put on herbicide so the next generation of seeds don’t germinate. It will take five to six years because of the many layers of seeds.

On the beach, we found a few week old sea lion and marine iguanas who had drawn designs in the sand with their tails. We walked on a path through white cordial, thorny fortia, incense trees and shore petunia. Along the path, we found the discarded skeleton of a baby sally lightfoot crab. They grow out of and discard everything, including their eyeballs.

Darwin himself spent nine days on this island, climbing the Sugar Loaf Tuft Cone. As we watched the sea lions, Galapagos fur sea lions, pelicans, dolphins, marine iguanas, oyster catchers, a Galapagos hawk and a ring plover, among other birds and animals, I imaged Darwin seeing the same scenes, but so much more isolated from civilization.

Juan showed us a place along the lava cliffs that is called Darwin’s toilet. It’s a round hole in the rock in which frothy white ocean water builds up, then suddenly “flushes” and drains out, before filling again.

Later in the morning, as we sailed towards Bartolome, on the other side of James Island, we saw the beautiful scenery of rocks shaped as an elephant and a bishop. We passed Bucaneer’s Cove, where Darwin, and many pirates landed for fresh water. The ensconced nature of the cove helped keep the criminals hidden.

Best of all, we saw a couple of bryde whales. Together with one other tourist boat, the Flamingo, which doesn’t treat its waste and emitted a smell like a massive fart, we circled round the whales, allowing us to see them rise out of the water several times, often quite close by. It’s truly amazing to look out over the blue waters and suddenly see a submarine-sized mammal emerge. At the same time, a manta ray glided toward us, a Pacific Green sea turtle paddled by, and a sea lion was swimming unusually far from shore. I felt surrounded by large aquatic life and it was so rewarding to see them in their natural habitat.

In the afternoon we rode up to Bartoleme. Walking across the high sand dune on the inlet, we reached a bay on the other side, where we could see white-tipped sharks floating in the clear water, just a few feet from us.

We returned to the ochre sand beach where we’d landed and went snorkeling around pinnacle point, a large vertical outcropping. Again, the water was murky (the National Park determines which places are allowed for snorkeling, and at least at this time of year, most of them seem to be murky), but we did come across several schools of fish. Most fun was finding a penguin in the water. In the process of fishing, he flitted by me, just a few inches away, at least three times. Given the uniqueness of penguins overall in this region, it was especially nice to get so close to one.

Some of the group came close to white-tipped sharks. I didn’t and was just as glad not to, after one boatmate told us about a tourist getting bit by a bull shark a week before our trip starting. He was diving at dusk (which is the shark’s feeding time) and a bull shark is much more dangerous than a white-tipped. But still, I preferred to not get too close.

Our final activity of the day was to climb up the tall terracotta tuff cone on Bartholeme, to a lighthouse that offered a beautiful overlook. This required climbing 366 stairs, which I ran up as much as possible, trying to give my heart the exertion it has lacked in the past week. At the top, I was able, again, to get a true sense of the volcanic and geologic activity in the area. Looking out over the very small island, I saw a real-life relief map of spatter cones (smaller parasitic cones). It looked like a mars-scape that was formed yesterday. Only a couple of plants grew in that environment, the leather leaf, prickly pear, salt wart, sperch and the beautiful silver great mat plant. We waited up on the overlook until all the other tour groups had left. We watched the sun begin to descend, then walked down into the sunset.

On the boat, we drank a farewell cocktail while saluting the staff. And for dessert, we had a banana-nut cake covered with marshmallow crème and carmelized syrup, fruit and cinnamon (it tasted much better than it sounds). Our final treat was our guide making the mating sounds of a giant tortoise, a request he’d been putting off for the past several days.

And now it’s almost time to go. This evening we have to pack everything up and accept that tomorrow night, another couple will be calling our temporary abode their new home. We have one small morning adventure to go, then it’s on a plane to Quito.

Galapagos day 11 – Cruise day 6 – Isabela and Fernandina Islands

We spent today in some of the most remote and least visited parts of the Galapagos. Again, we saw the world at its early stages. And because it hadn’t had much time to develop, the wildlife concentration was less than elsewhere. But the sense of seeing millions of years of history in the making was there. Not a lot of boats make it to this part of the Galapagos, because the gas expense to motor around the Western side of Isabela is high. It’s nice to be in places with few other tourists in order to truly feel the remoteness.

In the morning we landed on Urbina Bay, a black sand beach on Isabela Island, made from basalt. Walking around, we saw a baby giant tortoise walking through the forest, orange tipped hermit crabs fighting for a shell, and large yellow-gray land iguanas.

Darwin described the land iguanas movements as “lazy and half torpid. When not frightened, they slowly crawl along with their tails and bellies dragging on the ground. They often stop, and doze for a minute with closed eyes, and hind legs spread out on the parched soil.”

My favorite plant was the Galapagos cotton. It had tiny little buds of cotton on the bush, as well as a beautiful, tropical yellow flower with a magenta interior and long, yellow, thick stamen.

During lunch, we sailed north to Punta Espinosa on Fernandina Island. That pristine island, almost entirely lava, has only one little trail where tourists can visit. We got off the dinghy on a little, hidden staircase in the midst of a mangrove. The trail went along the coastline, where black marine iguanas perched on the black rocks, spitting salt through their nostrils, the many little sneezes alternating with the crashing sounds of the waves.

Darwin described these animals as “hideous-looking creature, of a dirty black colour, stupid and sluggish in its movements.” He said that he repeatedly threw one into the water and it repeatedly returned to the same spot on land. “Perhaps this singular piece of apparent stupidity may be accounted for by the circumstance,” he wrote, “that this reptile has no enemy whatever on shore, whereas at sea it must often fall a prey to the numerous sharks.”

Our feet crunched against the sand full of something like looked like dark purple pretzel sticks. They were the legs of pencil slate sea urchins, which had fallen off when that area was underwater.

We watched flightless cormorants do their mating dance, sea lions, and Sally light foot crabs, whose red color burned against the black lava.

Due to the movements of tides, part of the trail was already underwater by the time we returned and I was glad to have my dual water/land Tevas on.

The evening was one of the most beautiful of our sails. Our guide spotted common dolphins (actually less common than bottle-nosed) and we watched them jump and swim speedily away, an entire little community in the blue, solitary world.

We cruised nearby northern Isabela Island, an area of jutting rock faces reaching up to the stratus and waves crashing so strongly onto shore that white spray flew up along the edges like geysers.

We gathered in the bow around six when we crossed the Equator. Just afterwards, the yellow-red sun dipped quickly and visibly into the horizon, disappearing behind smooth dark-blue waters.

As darkness fell, a thin sliver of a moon glimmered in the sky. The rest of the moon was illuminated around the edges, and a ribbon of yellow reflection extended from the horizon to our boat deck, glimmering in the darkness.

We crossed the equator once again around 10:30, heading back into the southern hemisphere and towards James Island, the final destinations of our visit. While a few days ago, I would have chosen a shorter cruise, now that the trip is nearing its end (and I know that real life awaits), I wish we could extend it a while.