Floreana Island
The island of a hundred volcanoes is what Charles Darwin called Floreana Island. The different cones that we call parasitic cones give a nice and strange landscape to the island. This is an island that in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was very popular with whalers and buccaneers that disembarked here. Looking to find water and land tortoises, many people also tried to colonize this island in the past; some people from Norway, some from Ecuador and also some for Germany. However, not many survived the difficult life that the dry island offered, and many of them just gave up and returned to the mainland. Nowadays the natives call it the “mystery island.” The main reason is that over time, people have disappeared on the island, and we don’t know what happened to them. It is a mystery yet.
Early in the morning we visited a place popular in the eighteen hundreds called the Post Office Bay, where some of our guests sent post cards in a very traditional way. To mail them, no stamps are needed.
We had many different excursions today and the best part I think were the water activities. We had many snorkelers, and all of them had a good time snorkeling around Champion Island. The water was a nice temperature and thousands of fish seemed to be feeding at the same time. A fellow naturalist took the underwater camera and got a great video of this entirely different underwater world. Something that really caught my attention was this particular fish called the hieroglyphic hawkfish with such strange designs over it’s body, giving it perfect camouflage with it’s environment.
The island of a hundred volcanoes is what Charles Darwin called Floreana Island. The different cones that we call parasitic cones give a nice and strange landscape to the island. This is an island that in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was very popular with whalers and buccaneers that disembarked here. Looking to find water and land tortoises, many people also tried to colonize this island in the past; some people from Norway, some from Ecuador and also some for Germany. However, not many survived the difficult life that the dry island offered, and many of them just gave up and returned to the mainland. Nowadays the natives call it the “mystery island.” The main reason is that over time, people have disappeared on the island, and we don’t know what happened to them. It is a mystery yet.
Early in the morning we visited a place popular in the eighteen hundreds called the Post Office Bay, where some of our guests sent post cards in a very traditional way. To mail them, no stamps are needed.
We had many different excursions today and the best part I think were the water activities. We had many snorkelers, and all of them had a good time snorkeling around Champion Island. The water was a nice temperature and thousands of fish seemed to be feeding at the same time. A fellow naturalist took the underwater camera and got a great video of this entirely different underwater world. Something that really caught my attention was this particular fish called the hieroglyphic hawkfish with such strange designs over it’s body, giving it perfect camouflage with it’s environment.
