Santa Cruz Island
Today we woke up with the National Geographic Islander anchored at Academy Bay, from where we saw the port of Puerto Ayora. We had breakfast and went to visit the Charles Darwin Research Station. On the way we had the opportunity to walk through the town and saw a great variety of plants, including poison apple, yellow cordial, giant prickly pear cactus, and candelabra cactus.
Today we were lucky because we found one of the very special finch species which is the vegetarian finch and lots of small ground, medium ground, and large ground and cactus finches.
Once in the Centre we had the opportunity to see the baby tortoises, Lonesome George, and the saddleback tortoises from Hood Island. At 11:00 am we boarded the bus which drove us to the highlands. As we drove up we could see how the vegetation changed the higher we went up.
Once we arrived, we walked through a lava tunnel which has stalactite and stalagmite formations. Right after this, we had a delicious lunch at a restaurant on a farm with a good variety of food. Soon after we went for a walk to find tortoises roaming through the forest and found the woodpecker finch. We also saw the Scalesia forest (daisy ).
Santa Cruz is the second largest island. Therefore it has a very wide range of habitats and species of fauna as well as flora. It’s amazing how much our guests enjoyed this walk and were able to learn and appreciate this unique Galápagos environment.
Around four o’clock we came back to the town and had time to explore it and mix with the locals.
