Day 1 – AM – Las Bachas beach – Santa Cruz island

First day in Galapagos Islands Las Bachas beach – Santa Cruz island

Wow wow wow lots of animals !

In the Galapagos islands it gets very hot in the middle of the day, so when walking on the islands you either go early as in 7.30am or after 4.30pm by national park laws you must be back on the boat at 6.30pm unless you have a license to do research which we did not have.

Our first walk was at 4.30pm and was a wet landing where you get off the panga in about a foot of water and walk to the beach this only happens where there is no quay or small jetti to land at, if there is a jetti or quay then these are called dry landings or as one of our guides(Martin) said in rough sea try landing.

As soon as we got there we saw a large grey heron, lots of Sally lightfoot crabs, a small plover and then what I had really wanted to sea a pair of courting marine iguanas. They were amazing about 100 yards away, the male is the brighter coloured one and does not show these colours until they are about 25 years old he was bobbing his head up and down a spitting wow wow wow.

Another male marine iguana came closer and was eating all of the green algae from the rocks I just could not believe it I had seen 4 marine iguanas on my first day I was nearly crying with joy – I thought it cant get better than this!! I have been wrong on my occasions especially on this trip.

We then walked further along the beach and came to a small brackish lagoon with 3 flamingos feeding, we were so amazed about the flamingos we failed to see the 2 female marine iguanas resting 2 feet away from us – we stayed and watched them for about 20 minutes, they just lay there then suddenly 1 by 1 they got up and swam across the lagoon to the pile of lava rocks in the middle of the lagoon apparently these rocks hold their heat most of the night and being cold blooded animals they sleep in the rocks to hold their body heat. It was amazing watching them swim they are so agile and swim just like a crocodile.

On the way back to the panga we spotted some strange tracks like a quad bikes, they were infact green sea turtle tracks as it was the mating and egg laying season and they had recently been up that dune to lay their eggs.