We navigated around Santa Cruz to visit some satellite islands to Santa Cruz. In the morning we had a dry landing to explore the natural habitat of the Galapagos land iguana. These are yellow dragons that evolved from the green South American iguana. We found several of them eating prickly pears and some preparing their nesting territory. The color on this uplifted island (South Plaza) was just outstanding, the contrast of the red succulent and the green cacti with so many birds flying around the cliffs just made this site such an incredible expedition.
After lunch, we navigated towards Santa Fe island, where some of us decided to go kayaking while others went snorkeling with many different species of fish. While snorkeling we saw several sea turtles, a big variety of fish and some of us saw a Galapagos sharks swimming around the area.
After snorkeling, we got ready to explore further into the island, after a wet landing on a white sand beach, we searched for a very unique species of land iguana found only on Santa Fe Island. The introduced animals that used to inhabit Santa Fe devastated the population of this endemic iguana. After several eradication projects of the alien species, the iguanas are coming back gradually. We were amazed to see 4 of them on the long hike while others also saw some during the short hike along the coast of the island. The Galapagos hawk was also seen; in fact we met some scientists who were camping on this beach, studying the population of Galapagos hawks in this visitor site.
After a beautiful day on the enchanted islands, we returned to our vessel to continue our expedition in Darwin’s natural laboratory of evolution.
