Galapagos day 3

We left San Cristobal early in the morning for our first 3 hrs boat ride to Isla Floreana.

Clearly, having learnt the lesson the hard way 2 days before, this time we popped one of those heavy pills for sea sickness and made sure we would sit at the rear of the boat.

It did work, although we felt sleepy for the whole morning.

Our visit in Floreana (an island that counts 112 habitants in total) begins with the visit at the turtle sanctuary where we were able to see dozens of turtles wandering around in the forests and feeding with huge leaves.

We learn that the actual Floreana turtle became extinct years ago due to over hunting by sailors and the ones we are seeing have just been re-introduced to the islands later on from other islands in the Galapagos.

The reason why these creatures were hunted was due to the fact that they could survive for over 1 year without food or water, which is quite handy when you are crossing the oceans without touching ground for months.

Some interesting stats about turtles: They can live up to 180 years, they have 5 heart beats per minute and the big ones can weight up to 250 kgs. Ah and by the way, they don’t swim. The ones you see in the water are a completely different species, so if you see one walking around very slowly, don’t push it in the water out of charity.......

Back at the pier it was time to visit a colony of iguanas. It is quite easy to take pictures of iguanas. They barely move and some of them have some spectacular colours.

They tend to stick together, sometimes one above another, warming up in the sun and spitting the excess of salt they absorb from the sea water.

Immediately after lunch we went back to the boat for a new session of snorkelling. In actual fact one of the prerogatives of this organisation was to always plan snorkelling activity immediately after lunch.....considering how freezing the water is at the Galapagos, we didn’t think this was very clever.

To add insult to injury for this session the guide informed us that he would not join us as the water was too cold and he had a bit of sore throat......

It didn’t matter. We went in anyway as we were told that it was very likely we would bump into turtles (the sea type)

And so we did.

The sea turtles we saw didn’t seem to bothered to swim next to us. In fact we were able to get very close. They tend to swim very close to the shore, where they can feed due to the high presence of food brought by the currents. They float around 1 meter below sea surface following the movements of the waves. We did the same. It was great. We even forgot it was freezing therefore our swimming session lasted almost twice as long.

It was time to go back to the boat, pop another pill and get ready for another 3 hr ride to Isabella Island, which apparently is the best of all islands. The question in our mind was: how do you beat swimming with turtles?