Santiago Island
Today we spent the whole day at Santiago Island, visiting three different sites: Espumilla Beach, Buccaneer’s Cove and Egas Port.
Before breakfast we offered our guests the opportunity to go kayaking or hiking. Morning is the perfect time for these activities with fair temperatures, a breeze and the best light for pictures. The group of hikers found a lot of Darwin finches as well as a Galápagos hawk and some shore birds. The kayakers explored the coastline finding blue-footed boobies and some fur sea lions.
Later in the morning after breakfast most of us went deep-water snorkeling at Buccaneer’s Cove, this was like a wall dive, since the site was very deep, however we saw a lot of undersea life! The best sightings were an eagle ray, a marbled ray and a white-tipped reef shark.
In the afternoon we repositioned National Geographic Islander to Egas Port, a very historical place near a salty water lagoon. It was common in the past for whalers to come ashore in this area in order to salt meat and collect provisions. At the beginning of the walk we had a short shower but afterwards the clouds vanished, the sun started to shine and a nice rainbow was formed; while walking we came across the two endemic species of sea lions and a lot of marine iguanas.
