Southern Exposure

Friday, January 23

We woke up early, had a quick breakfast at the hostel and took a cab to the airport for our 12:30 pm flight. We were quite impressed with the free wi-fi at the airport and the service of the local Tame airline. We had a quick stop over at Guayaquil and on a 2.5 hour flight they fed us twice!

We landed in Baltra, which is the only airport in the Galapagos located on a tiny island a quick boat away from Santa Cruz, the most populated island. There were five other people who were joining the cruise. A young couple from Holland, a mom and a son from Quito and an Italian fella. A handler guy from the boat met us all at the airport, we took a semi-ferry to Santa Cruz and were split between two cars and taken to a tortoise farm.

Our driver/guide was a hilarious if a bit annoying Cuban man (married to a Galapagos native) whose accent and jokes were an absolute imitation of Borat, pretty idiotic and obnoxious.

The tortoise farm was the first amazing surprise. I’ve only seen land turtles this big once in a Philadelphia Zoo, but these were just roaming around the farm and you could come very close to them, though they would hide their heads as soon as they spot you coming up.

The farm was on a private property, but the turtles were protected species that occupied that territory. In the 1500’s when the first explorers landed in Galapagos there were thousands of these tortoises around, but they were almost extinct by 1800’s, their meat used for food and shells collected as trophies.

Our next stop was the Charles Darwin Center in Puerto Arroyo.

There we watched a short movie about the center’s conservation efforts, saw Lonely George (the only tortoise of it’s kind in existence),

the turtle nursery,

some striking looking iguanas,

and headed for the pier to catch a small boat to our yacht.

We were dropped off on our yacht, the San Jose, but nobody was there to greet us. The only people were the other seven passengers – three older Brit couples and their private guide. They had originally charted this boat for an eight-day cruise but half of their group dropped out so the owner of the boat advertised this cruise with tourist agencies to fill it up for the second part of the leg. That’s how we got a last minute deal to join the cruise for half the price.

I had a cup of tea while waiting, and we chatted up with one of the couples. We found out that the guide that was leading this cruise was absolutely worthless, but the food and accommodations were outstanding. Soon thereafter our host/attendant/waitperson showed up and showed us to our rooms.

Later that evening we had a nice dinner in the main dining room, and a meeting with the guide about our plans for the next day. We met a fellow Seattlite names Brian, who had been trekking along Europe and South America for the last year, and was on the yacht from the beginning of the cruise.

We were out cold by 9 pm, looking forward to our wild life adventures tomorrow.