After the bright lights of Santa Cruz we were heading to Isabela island and Puerto Villamil, a small town of about 2,200 people, and a place described to me by a fellow traveller who’d already been there as ‘being more like the wild west with sand blowing down the main street’. This definitely sounded like the change we were after from Santa Cruz!
Now, on arriving, I’m not sure I’d go quite as far as the wild west, but there was certainly a layer of sand on all the roads (in fact we saw a crew of workers clearing away the sand on one road and thought that was definitely a ‘job for life’ in this town)!
We’d also heard this was a much easier place to get up close and personal (whilst maintaining suitable ‘social distancing’) with the wildlife.
So one day we hired bikes and headed off along the coast in search of wildlife and a bit of history. And we found it!
Our trip took us past giant tortoises, which with skill and tenacity we were able to get close enough to photograph (well, that or we simply walked slowly up to them)!
We also saw a few different types of lizards and some of Darwin’s finches (not sure which ones!), plus pelicans and crabs, but photos of those weren’t quite as easy to come by!
We should also give mention to the man made feature we also cycled to, known as the ‘wall of tears’; it was a massive wall (albeit only a small section remains) that was built out of rock by the prisoners of a penal colony on the island in the mid 20th century, for no other reason than as punishment, and resulting in the death of numerous prisoners.
The following days were followed by snorkeling in a lovely little mangrove cove and taking a boat trip to snorkel around Los Tuneles, a series of collapsed lava tunnels that are host to some of the Galapagos marine wildlife.
These snorkeling trips were nothing short of magical and something I will never forget. A quiet morning snorkeling by the mangroves with just a couple of other people about and swimming with my first turtle, sea lion and marine iguana all at once. And I do mean all at once, I didn’t know where to look!
And Los Tuneles where the turtles were about as big as me, and were all around us. Oh and we also swam into an underwater cave with sharks! Ok, so they were reef sharks no bigger than myself and no threat to us, but it was still amazing to see them.
We’d taken a few dive lessons before leaving the UK, unfortunately not enough to go out diving in the Galapagos, but the snorkeling here has definitely made us want to do our diving certificates when we get back to the UK, even knowing that we’ll probably be diving in cold murky waters to view sunken shopping trolleys, instead of turtles and exotic fish!
Anyway, here are a few snaps (some ours, some courtesy of our guide’s GoPro from our Los Tuneles trip).
Oh, and did I mention the Flamingoes and Blue Footed Boobies?!
Sloth Journeys 