Cerro Dragon & Sombrero Chino
Early in the morning we had a pre- breakfast outing, a dry landing on a very rusty and barren looking place called Cerro Dragon. We walked further into the island, encountering a brackish water lagoon with some white cheeked pintail ducks, common stilts and even luckier we felt when we found a flamingo feeding on small shrimp living in the mud of the lagoon.
It was a very amazing-looking landscape with all the pale incense trees, Palo Santos marching up the hill and some yellow colors from the flowers of the endemic Galápagos cotton, being some of the few colorful flowers around the area which makes a perfect place for the carpenter bees to stay around.
We were lucky to spot several numbers of land iguanas, some of them even feeding on prickly pear and becoming more active as the sun was coming out. These prehistoric looking animals had passed through different problems against introduced species and because of this, breeding them in captivity was a solution, having a lot of the hatchlings repatriated and making Dragon Hill one of the areas being recovered with the help of the National Park Service.
Our next outing was to explore the wonders of the underwater sea, around Guy Fawkes Islet. Having some encounters of marine invertebrates and some sea lions playing around, this deep water snorkeling allowed us to spot some reef sharks swimming around the area.
We came back on board, and navigated towards “Sombrero Chino,” a place with a very barren land but impressive underwater world, where we had a wonderful time snorkeling along the coast of Santiago Island, found right next to Sombrero Chino. Some trumpet fish were spotted as well as some sea lions swimming by the snorkelers.
Some of us even had the chance to kayak in beautiful waters between Chinese Hat and Santiago Island. During the kayak we had very exiting time watching the sea lion pups swim around our kayaks and performing jumps and flip for us.
At the end of the day, we were amazed again with the wonders the Galápagos had ready for us, knowing that each day in this paradise is a different story that talks about beauty of the most pristine nature.
