San Cristóbal

This morning we ate breakfast at Don Jorge's dining area.  We had eggs, bread, instant coffee, butter and strawberry jelly. We made arrangements with Luis, Don Jorge's manager, to have a taxi pick us up tomorrow morning for a tour of the highlands. ($50.00)

Our cabin at Don Jorge's

We spent today walking around part of the island. We started off by visiting the Galapagos National Park Visitor Interpretation Center in San Cristóbal. This is an exhibit that tells the history of the islands and what is being done to save the islands, the flora and fauna, from the destruction caused by man and other environmental factors

Path to beach side.

Pepe is a giant tortoise and is about 62 years old. He is used as a breeding tortoise in trying to reestablish his species. Most of the giant tortoises were used for food by the pirates and other sailing vessels that stopped on the islands to get food for their voyages and by the first groups of people who settled here in the early 1800's.

Pepe

From the Interpretation Center we walked along a beautiful trail that went to several look out points on the island. We have an island guide to all the plants and animals and we have been trying to identify what we see along the way. We saw our first blue footed booby, frigate birds, finches, geckos, cactus and a variety of plants and flowers.

Blue Footed Booby

We spent five hours walking around this part of the island. We had one altercation with a male iguana. We were walking across the lava rocks to a light house and came upon a group of female iguanas and their babies. Dad started snarling at us and climbing over the lava rocks towards us. We quickly moved away. The other iguanas we encountered just laid on their rocks watching us.

Iguanas

On our walk along the beach we encountered lots of sea lions. They seem to sleep during the day and talk all night long.

The Sea Lions are everywhere!

We have been trying to post our blog entries but the internet service here is not very good. The internet goes down all the time. So we will keep trying to post our blog entries.

I forgot to mention that it rains every afternoon. At least two or three times for about 20 minutes at a time. It is humid here so it takes a long time to dry our wet clothes.
The end to another great day.