Dragon Hill & Chinese Hat
We dropped anchor at the northern part of Santa Cruz Island. This site is known as Dragon Hill due to the amount of land iguanas that inhabit the area. In the spirit of exploration we set out searching for them around a hill and found many; some of them were inside their burrows while others were close to the trail posing for our pictures. We were also surprised to find a few flamingos in a salty water lagoon totally surrounded by giant cacti.
Later in the morning we wanted to explore the marine ecosystem of this site so we decided to go deep water snorkeling to Guy Fawkes rocks off the northern coast of Santa Cruz Island, this was a nice experience since we could snorkel along a wall full of marine invertebrates and lots of tropical fish.
After our lunch we repositioned the ship and dropped anchor right in between Chinese Hat Islet and Santiago Island. The landscape here is stunning, you can mentally picture exactly how the islands were formed. There is a huge dry sea of lava on Santiago Island with a lot of lava tubes-- a perfect nesting site for Galápagos penguins. We saw some birds resting on the rocks, and during our snorkeling and kayaking we saw more penguins, together with a lot of fish along the shoreline of Santiago.
We dropped anchor at the northern part of Santa Cruz Island. This site is known as Dragon Hill due to the amount of land iguanas that inhabit the area. In the spirit of exploration we set out searching for them around a hill and found many; some of them were inside their burrows while others were close to the trail posing for our pictures. We were also surprised to find a few flamingos in a salty water lagoon totally surrounded by giant cacti.
Later in the morning we wanted to explore the marine ecosystem of this site so we decided to go deep water snorkeling to Guy Fawkes rocks off the northern coast of Santa Cruz Island, this was a nice experience since we could snorkel along a wall full of marine invertebrates and lots of tropical fish.
After our lunch we repositioned the ship and dropped anchor right in between Chinese Hat Islet and Santiago Island. The landscape here is stunning, you can mentally picture exactly how the islands were formed. There is a huge dry sea of lava on Santiago Island with a lot of lava tubes-- a perfect nesting site for Galápagos penguins. We saw some birds resting on the rocks, and during our snorkeling and kayaking we saw more penguins, together with a lot of fish along the shoreline of Santiago.
