Galapagos - Tour of San Cristobal

In the Galapagos, like many of the places we have been recently, you have to have an agent to do anything.  Unfortunately, the agents only have a basic understanding of English, and we have even less understanding of Spanish.  

Through our agent, we organised to go on a tour of San Cristabal on Thursday.  We were told to be at the dock at 9am.  At 8am, our agent arrives at our boat and says "No today, tomorrow".  So we unpack our backpack and spend the day doing something else.  On Friday morning, our agent arrives at 8.30am.  "No today, tomorrow" he says.  Again, we unpack the backpack.  Saturday morning arrives.  We are extremely hopeful because 8.30am passes and we still haven't seen the agent to cancel.  But he arrives at 8.50am and says "No today, Monday".  That evening we head into town for a drink. We bump into our agent, who says "No Monday, tomorrow!".  We are irritated at another change, and question him whether everything will be open on a Sunday.  He says "Yes, Yes", but we aren't sure he understands us.  On Sunday morning, our agent arrives at our boat at 8.50am and says "No today, tomorrow".  Gary is now pretty unhappy.  "No!" he says to the agent "No tomorrow, we find another agent!".  "Ok, ok" replies the agent "today, today!".  We head to the pier a couple of minutes later.  The tour car is there, along with another three cruisers who are coming on the tour.  The tour car is a ute with a tray back.  There is one too many people to fit in the ute, so one person has to sit in the tray.  Perhaps this is the reason our agent wanted to cancel?  We take turns in the tray and it works out just fine.

Our fist stop is to a volcanic lake.  This isn't particularly novel to us - Auckland (our home town in NZ) is built on 55 volcanos.  But it is a nice walk and the view from the top is pretty. There are a couple of signs on the way that tell you what the shrubby plants are.  Gary, sounding very knowledgeable, tells the group "I'm no botanist, but that sure looks like a plant".  Classic. 

The giant tortoise sanctuary is next...and yes, they are pretty big.  The Señors and the Señoritas are separated, and the Ninos are hand raised.   The sanctuary has few buildings, and is a shrubby volcanic area like what we were expecting the whole of the Galapagos to be like. There are signs along the path that tell you not to touch the plants, which are poisonous to humans, but the main thing that the tortoise eat.   The skin of the tortoise, and particularly their feet and toenails, look like elephants.  Our tour guide lets us stray from the path for a quick photo.

 

Baby Tortoise

We notice that all the tortoise have numbers written on their backs.  We discuss the possibilities and decide that the numbers must be for identifying the winner of tortoise races. While wandering the sanctuary, the group discusses what Darwin might think about this human intervention into the breeding of the tortoise.

Our last stop is to a Sea Lion sanctuary - a beach on the other side of the island.  As we walk along the shoreline we see lots of the famous Galapagos swimming iguana.   We get pretty close to a big one.  He doesn't seem to mind.  The tour guide stokes another iguana that we pass on the way back to the path.  He encourages us to stroke him too.  But when one of the other cruisers strokes him, he makes a menacing growling noise.  Perhaps we will leave that one alone.

We snorkel at the beach, but don't see any sea lions.  This is very surprising seeing how many of them are in the main bay and lounging in town.  Perhaps the sea lions didn't get the memo about their sanctuary.  

We are dropped in town at Rosita's and have a great lunch chatting away to our new cruiser friends from the boat "Cynergy".

Our agent had told us that there would be a tour of the Coffee Bean plantation, but that didn't happen.  We ask our agent about it when we see him next. "Sunday, coffee closed" he says.  Figures.