Today we started a little earlier. We had a 45 minute bus ride to the north side of Santa Cruz, then a 2 hour boat ride to the island we were visiting today. On the way, we had several surprises. The first was a group of dolphins (maybe herd, I am not sure what you call it when a lot of dolphins are swimming together). There must have been close to 100 of them. It was nuts! They started playing with our boat and the wake our boat was leaving behind. You would look down at the front of the boat and see 5 dolphins swimming along with us. They were jumping like crazy as well. Tera and the boys got soaked like you would in the splash zone at Sea World from one of the dolphins jumping. It was fantastic! Here are some pictures Tera got of the dolphins jumping and swimming with us.
This shot is amazing! 3 in the air at one time! Good job Tera!
This was our destination. This island is one of the youngest islands in the Galapagos. However, it has the most photographed formation in all of the Galapagos...Pinnacle Rock. You can see in a few of these pictures below. It looks like a triangle at the top. It was big and the landscape surrounding it was beautiful! We hiked to the top of a mountain and had an awesome view. Here are some of the pictures we got!
After the hike, we got back in our dingy and headed to try and find some Galapagos Penguins. We found out they are the 2nd smallest penguin in the world. This penguin you can only find in the Galapagos. We were blessed and found 2 standing right beneath Pinnacle Rock. Here they are.
After we saw the penguins, we went snorkeling again. We saw another shark and many other fish. At one point, we got the dingy to pick us up and take us to beach. We were there for about 30 minutes while the others finished up. We saw a few sea lions there and just hung out on the beach. There is a picture above that has two beaches. We were on the beach on the right hand side.
We then returned to the boat, ate lunch and headed back. When we got back, we did a little more shopping, ate at a local pizza place and came back to pack up. We get up early again tomorrow and head to the Charles Darwin Research Station. They have a lot of tortoises there including baby ones. They are doing a lot of research on the islands and we are super excited to visit and see the animals they have there.
It was a great day and everyone had a good time! We hate that we have to leave tomorrow. There is so much more we could see here. But, we must leave.
We head back to Quito, Ecuador tomorrow after the tour. Then, back to Phoenix on Monday. We will have some free time tomorrow afternoon in Quito so we are trying to figure out what we are going to do. They have a huge gondola that heads to the top of one of the mountains so we might go over and ride that to the top and check out the view.
I will try and post more tomorrow. Off to pack a bit more and then head to bed.
Grace and Peace
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