December 30th, 2021
The ferry back to Santa Cruz left at an ungodly hour of 6 am, which meant I needed to be at the pier by 5:30. The reason for the boats leaving an hour earlier than the ones coming the other way is in case tourists need to make a late morning flight. Even though there were probably 4-5 boats doing the same trip, for some reason they all have to leave at the same time. I couldn’t make sense of why a few of them couldn’t leave later, for those not catching a plane but I imagine it just makes logistics easier.
A sea lion greeting me at the pier early in the morning.
I was on a different vessel this time and it was a bit
bigger and the seats in the lower deck faced forward unlike the boat coming
over that had two benches facing each other.
As we pulled up in the water taxi, I noticed the seats on the upper deck
where the helm is located and asked the captain if I could go up top and the
permission was granted. In the end,
there were only two other passengers up top, so it was fairly luxurious. There seemed to be some problem getting one
of the 250 horsepower outboard engines going but eventually we were off. It was surprisingly bumpy for that early in
the morning and I even got splashed from some waves even though I was on the
upper deck but all in all, it was a nice ride.
The quiet bay at Port Villamil:
Floreana Island. It has a strange history. In 1932, a couple from Berlin decided to escape modern world and settled here but later that year another woman, a self described baroness, arrived with her 2 male gigolos. Soon there were disappearances and accusations of murder in what became known as "The Galapagos Affair". Weird stuff.
Back on Santa Cruz, the most populated island of the group,
I walked back to my guesthouse from a few days ago and checked in. I asked the owner Edison what my options for
activities for the afternoon were and he suggested the Highlands Tour. This included a giant tortoise sanctuary, some
lava tubes that you can walk through and some lava craters. Sounds good, so he ordered me a taxi.
My taxi driver was a friendly 25-year-old local and we
chatted a bit (with my broken Spanish) en route to El Chato Ranch, the sanctuary
that included some lava tubes. It was
about 10-15 minutes out of Puerto Ayora, on the road towards the north side of
the island. The driveway was about a
kilometre long through a tunnel of trees that had been pruned to touch each
other about 20 feet above the road. In
the fenced off fields on either side were Galapa-cows and some giant tortoises.
Both me and the taxi driver got out of the pickup truck in
the small parking lot and walked over to the main building where I bought my
entrance ticket and was told that it would be 5-10 minutes until the next tour
started. There was a cafeteria, small
cafeteria and a private restaurant but there was hardly anyone else in the
place except for one family from Maryland with their two daughters around 6-8 years
old.
The tour began with the five of us, me and the American
family, and the tour guide was great. He
was a young local guy who had gone off to study tourism at the university in
Guayaquil and returned to his home island.
He was full of information as we wandered around the grounds where giant
tortoises were roaming around.
As we approached what looked like an entrance to a cave, the
guide asked if we’d like to see a lava tube. The two girls were immediately scared and
expressed their intent of not wanting to go in…until mom claimed that there was
ice cream inside. Interesting ploy, and
it worked. These tubes are created when
lava is flowing from an eruption and the outside layer is cooled by the air and
it hardens. Meanwhile, the lava in the
middle continues to flow and eventually empties out and leaves the hollow
tube. Pretty cool.
I looked at pictures of these tubes online before coming
here and this one was by far not the biggest one that I had seen, but what was
cool was that there was a tube on top of a tube. Strange to think of how that was formed. Another neat thing was that where they had
hung light bulbs a foot or two off of the tube floor to light the path, somehow
seeds had made their way into the tunnel and were only able to survive, yet not
thrive, right underneath the little bit of light.
Exiting the tunnel, we were greeted by an interesting
noise. A strange kind of grunting. Well wouldn’t you know it, we had a bit of
action going on. Not to be outdone by
Peru where I saw two alpacas getting it on at Machu Picchu…Ecuador comes back
with a couple of giant tortoises doing the nasty! Once again it was the male making the funny
noise and the female looking around as if nothing was going on. Good to see that the sanctuary is working.
Lovin' the mud hole.
After the sanctuary, the taxi driver took me about 5 minutes
further up the road to check out a couple of huge craters, called Los Gemelos
(the twins) located on either side of the highway. They must have been at least 100 meters deep
and about 3-400 meters across and full of vegetation including some fairly tall
trees. Pretty cool looking. I snapped some pictures and then we were back
on our way into town and then headed down to the seaside in town.
It was a nice way to spend the afternoon and I had a relatively early night as tomorrow the plan is to go scuba diving…for my first time in 6 years so I am definitely rusty and will be feeling a few nerves before the first dive.
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