First four days in the Galapagos

Today, we made it to San Cristobal. It´s the fourth day of our Galapagos cruise and we are stopping in this town for pretty much the entire day. They switch off some of the passengers who only decided to stay for a couple of days and we´ll see a bunch of new people this afternoon after they get picked up from the airport.

The past couple of days have been really fun. Each island is very different, and we haven´t seen too much of the same scenery except for the sea lions, which are absolutely everywhere.


The last island that we saw had us hiking around an area that was the nesting grounds of the blue footed boobies and frigate birds. The frigate birds look quite threatening, but they don´t disturb the baby blue footed boobies that are all over the ground. The boobies nest right on the ground and sometimes right in the middle of the trail. Tourists can get within feet of the babies and the mothers and you can watch them feeding.

Also, yesterday morning was pretty fun since we got a chance to see Galapagos penguins. We swam with them while snorkeling and also saw some of the gray masked boobies diving right in front of us for fish in in the area that we snorkeled. Snorkeling is a big part of this trip and although the water is quite cold, it is still pretty fun. Some of the islands have better snorkeling than other, and I usually pow around with a Brazilian guy I met named Peter. We have been lucky to have spotted two white tipped reef sharks, whereas the other people in our group haven´t spotted any sharks yet. Even Ravi is snorkeling like a champ these days. He started off pretty shaky, but is doing a lot better now and by the end of this trip, I´ll have him rady to scuba dive.

There are always a ton of things to take pictures of on the islands. Ravi has taken over 500 pictures I am sure, and even I have taken a few hundred so far. I am trying to capture some of the people in our group and things other than the animals, but most of my pictures of interest are the wildlife, particularly the marine iguanas and the sea lions. They seem to be the most fun. Ravi usually likes getting the birds in his shots with his extreme close up from is telephoto lens.


So far, the cruise is pretty excellent. We have seen some of the other boats and ours seems to be much nicer than the others.... except for the larger cruise ships that come in every once in a while. There is quite a lot of competition to get to the land and see the sites before those larger boats deboard, and a hundred people are suddenly on the trail taking pictures of everything. The good thing is that they don´t scare away any of the animals since the animals aren´t afraid of tourists.