Galapagos day 2

After sleeping like babies at the Pimampiro hotel, we spent the morning wandering around town meeting the locals

and a couple of hrs in one of the crowded beaches just outside town.

At 1pm we met the other 13 members of the tour and our guide for a quick briefing.

They were all Europeans, coming from Spain France England Germany , which gave us plenty of opportunities to practice 4different languages.

In spite of the huge age gap (from 18 to 55) we all gelled quite well and interestingly enough most of us were on a long break rather than a short term vacation.

I guess the “island hopping" type of tour is more suited to the adventurous types whereas the “1 week” all inclusive type of people tend to select the more expensive cruises.

That in our opinion is also better for conservation. By keeping the vast majority of the tourists on cruise boats they manage to minimise the impact of mass tourism on the islands, and in fact in our 5 days at the Galapagos we barely met any other tourists.

In the afternoon we picked up our snorkelling gears and headed straight out for 2 different sites: los lobos and kicker rock.

At los lobos the water was incredibly clear, which gave us the opportunity to see plenty of marine life.

Los Lobos bay

Unfortunately the guide run ahead of everybody else, hence we were not able to ask any questions about what we were actually looking at. To sum it up: lots of fish, clear water, very cold.

They then took us to the kicker rock, a 180 rock formation in the middle of the sea which is partially eroded by the action of the strong winds and the waves.

 

Due to the weather condition and freezing water only the braves jumped for the second snorkelling session. Personally I went in as anything is better than being on a boat with rough sea......

This second session was very uneventful as the water was not clear. The guide told us he might have seen the shadow of a turtle and hammer shark. We barely managed to see the shadows of our companions, although jumping in the rough see and swimming across a 180 rock canyon was still a cool thing to do.

All in all it was a good day, even though we could not see any of the big animals we were hoping to spot (mantas, turtles, sharks etc).

As the sun came down and we were heading back to the port Elena and I began to think of the 6 hrs boat ride waiting for us the following day....