Galapagos

Since we were in Ecuador already, of course we had to make a trip to the Galapagos Islands. Everyone we´ve met in our travels who have been have told us that it would be the highlight of our trip. And it really was! I felt like I was living on a Discovery Channel program for 8 days - absolutely incredible.

When we got off the plane in the Galapagos, we hopped on a short bus ride to the dock where we would catch a panga ride to our boat. We were immediately greeted by sea lions lying all over the dock, including on the benches. We were amazed at how close we were able to get to them, but this was nothing (keep tuned to more posts).

We hopped on the pangas (small boats to take us to our big boat) and arrived to our boat, the Beluga. We quickly met the 13 other passengers we would be spending the next 8 days with and immediately liked them all. Throughout the week, we really enjoyed getting to know them all and sharing stories about travels. It was nice because they were all at least our age or older, so it was not like the very young tourists we met while traveling in Costa Rica. Many of them were also on long travels where they had quit jobs and were traveling for 6-12 months. The long-term travelers, however were from either the UK or Australia. We are learning that this is much more accepted in these other countries.



We had our first adventure on this very first day where we traveled from the island of Baltra to North Seymour Island. As I´ve mentioned in earlier posts, before our travels we were not all that interested in birds, but Costa Rica started us with more excitement for birds. The Galapagos multiplied this by 100 times even. What made these birds so exciting were that they were so big first of all and you can get so close to them. We also learned so many facts, but of course I can not remember all of these. This first picture is one of a female friggot bird and young in the background. The next is of a male friggot bird trying to find a mate with his red pouch. It was so cool to see them flying around with these red pouches hanging. The sounds that they made were awesome, too, but I was not able to get a video. I can make the sound, though, so just ask me when you see me next. :D The next picture is also of a friggot bird, but this time of one a bit older than the white one you saw in the first picture. It is almost grown, but only its head is still white.


Perhaps one of the most popular birds in the Galapagos is the blue footed boobies. They are all over the place and are easy to spot because of their very blue feet. Here we have a baby and an adult.