Galapagos--swimming with the seals, and others
Trip Start
Apr 14, 2004
1
8
25
Trip End
Jul 27, 2004
ANGELIQUE,
Ecuador
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
every morning we arrived at a new island in the archipelago(that was entirely created by young volcanic activity), and the begining of the day involved a 6:45am wakeup call by way of the onboard bartender/janitor/server/bed sheet folder/charlie sheen ecuadorian lookalike (whose name really was charlie)...followed by brekky and then usually a quick boat ride in the smaller boat to the island for a walk or a snorkel with the marine life...there is so much marine life it is amazing...tons of fish, unreal numbers of sea lions and seals...
probably my favourite part of the galapagos was swimming with the sealions...they are so inquisitive and playful, it was such an amazing feeling to share their underwater home with them at such close proximity...so close, that they would bump into u occasionaly, and u had to fight the urge to touch them...a couple of aggressive ones even bared their teeth to me at a distance of not more than an inch from my mask...a couple of times we got warned by the guide to back away because we had gotten too close to the dominant male...and thats one large bugger that u dont wanna mess with...
half way thru the cruise, we had to drop off half of our passengers that were done their trip, and pick up new ones...so the night before this drop off we decided that maybe we should celebrate, but unfortunately, Jeff had basically single handedly drained the boat of its beer supply, so the 6 or so of us were outta luck...fortunately, stuart had been thinking ahead, and pulled out a bottle of vodka and a bottle of wine amidst much fanfare...i won the popularity contest that night as we did away with what was left for alcohol on the boat, while playing many games of asshole and shithead (imaginative names for a few standard travelling card games)...
the next morning after saying goodbye to our old friends, we said hello to new ones including a canadian roomate/dive partner for myself...i took the liberty of filling him and the other divers on what they could expect from our dive master, so that they would be a little better prepared than i was...
as most of our days will sound quite similar in type, i will summarise by mentioning a few notable events...one island we walked on was almost completely ¨fresh lava¨ from the latest eruption, and at one point you could see where the flow ended, which was pretty neat...another stop involved the charles darwin center and a trip to a seperate turtle park...both of these places contained such immense turtles that one might believe they were created by a hollywood production team...the center breeds them in captivity and releases them after a few years, when they have a better chance at survival...the park however, is a wild encounter with them, and was the scene of some interesting turtle to turtle interactions...
this natural park also contained a few underground lava tubes, and we walked thru one that was a few meters in height inside, but then at one point you had to crawl thru a 40 cm gap...a few people turned back at that point, but most of us kept on...
also worth noting, is how many stars you could see at night from the dark deck of the boat, even though i had no idea which constelations were which out here...absolutely stunning...
well thats basically all i can remember from my galapagos trip off the top of my head, so i guess that will hafta do it for this chapter...
