More Isla Isabela Adventures

Thursday, October 27, 2016
Puerto Ayora, Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
Wow, I am really behind in my postings! We have just been too busy to sort through the hundreds of photos and write comments.
 So, the next day, Monday, we had a civilized 11 am pickup for our trip to Los Tuneles so we took a little walk around town in the morning. Then we were picked up and taken back to the tour company's office to get our fins for snorkeling, and then over to the dock to get on our boat for the 1 hour ride up the coast to Los Tuneles, a series of lava rock formations featuring lava bridges (or tunnels) where the hot lava hit the ocean and home to a blue footed booby nesting area. The formations are just spectacular and the number of boobies that are on the rocks makes for great photo ops. Next, we went in snorkeling just around the bend from these tunnels around a similar formation. Now, our guide, Carlos, was great for the land portion of the trip but he was the absolute worst snorkeling guide that I have ever seen. He insisted that we all follow him and stay together, which is fair enough, but then he took off at full speed, making arbitrary 90 degree turns seemingly at random. Then we would all be stopped in a group and he would go tearing off after something without communicating what he was following. He was also constantly diving down into our pictures to try to get pictures of his own for his "official" trip album. And he kept us in the water way too long, 2 hours in cold water. One poor guy was shaking so bad I thought he was going to suffer from hypothermia. Eventually, we all just said "enough" and headed back for the boat. On the other hand, we did see a lot of turtles and quite a few white tipped sharks. Unfortunately, the sharks were all either moving to fast for me or were in dark caves, so I only got one decent photo of half a shark. Not so for the turtles, though. Overall, though, a very good trip.
 Next day, we had a 7:15 pickup (well they actually got us at about 7:35, but that is how these things go) for a hike up and around the crater of the Sierra Negre volcano, which last erupted in 2005 and has a crater that measures 7 by 9 km (we only went a couple of km around the rim). The weather was a little foggy and wet as we started out, but it cleared to become a spectacular day and by the time we were heading back down all of the clouds and fog around the rim had cleared and the views were amazing. It is hard to capture the scale of the crater in pictures and the views on the outside of the rim were also spectacular, though there was still some fog over along the coast. We got back in plenty of time to wander over to the dock area (which is a little bit out of town), wash some of the volcanic dust off in the ocean and catch our 2:30 boat back to Santa Cruz.

Comments

Julia
2016-10-29

Wow, great story and great shots!!

Robin
2016-11-01

Hi.
I would like to ask you what was the cost of your trip around Galapagos.
I'm going there in February with a group of friends and we are looking for the cheapest sailing tour for 5days but any informations could help...
Rgds. Robin

2025-02-10

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