Española is one of my favorite islands. Why? Well, it is the oldest island of the 17 major ones forming this archipelago. It is about five million years old and has a great biodiversity of animals. Everywhere you go you see many kinds of sea birds, reptiles, land birds and an awesome dramatic landscape decorated by a very long cliff where birds glide along and pass by a blow hole, which is a natural formation where ocean water is thrown up into the air through a fissure when the breaking waves hit the shore. Today we started at 7:00 a.m. with a good breakfast. Later our guests learned how to kayak and snorkel in a very interesting lecture given by our expedition leader Carlos Romero. These two water activities are so delightful, because you get so close to the marine environment, like swimming with the playful Galapagos sea lions, for example, which is one of the most fun activities.
At 9:30 a.m. after delivering the snorkeling gear to our guests we disembarked on a majestic white coral sandy beach covered by several harems of sea lions. In each of them we could clearly see a beach master, a kind of boss, a dominant male who gets about 20 to 30 females to him, plus juveniles and babies in his kingdom. A few months ago we saw many baby sea lions being delivered in the same beach and now they look bigger and so healthy. When you walk along the beach you find hood mockingbirds, so fearless and their curiosity very admirable. They come very close to inspect our bags. Pelicans, frigates and boobies are seen soaring along the coast. Some of our guests went to snorkel around Gardner Islet, and had a lot of fun watching sting rays, sharks, and big schools of multicolored fish. Kayakers had also their chances to explore the shoreline filled of surprises. It was a great morning exploring Gardner Bay.
In the afternoon our captain moved our ship to Punta Suarez. It is a very diverse place with many endemic species of animals such as mockingbirds, large cactus finches, green-reddish marine iguanas, sea lions, hawks, nazca boobies, very colorful Galapagos doves, sea gulls, red billed tropic birds and one of the main attractions - the blue footed boobies. They were mating and the ritual to fall in love is one of the most beautiful things to see here in Galapagos. We landed on this magical place and our photographers were just astonished. Nature is a word that means everything here. The real value of the Galapagos Islands is shown in places like this, to describe all the animals, all the landscape, all the plants would take more than this page, the only word we can take to describe this site is “breathtaking.”
After our walk of three hours we came back to our ship. Very happy faces were seen, very pleased spirits were felt. The sun came down quickly, illuminating the sky with red and orange colors. We are on the equator, a place where the energies are equal, where days and nights are the same, where not all four seasons occur, a place where animals live in harmony with humans.
