Day Thirty Eight - Galapagos

This morning we were up for breakfast at seven again. We had a dry landing first thing to Punta Espinola. On this island there were so many sea lion pups all over the beach. I think I've fallen in love with sealions, they're such awesome animals!!

Further along the beach we came across a really bad smell, like rotting flesh! We discovered the smell was the graveyard of iguanas we had stumbled across. There we literally hundred of corpses all in different stages of decay scattered along the beach line. This was due to the El Niño effect meaning there was not enough food the feed them all, so it was literally a case of survival of the fittest! This was a little gross! We also saw lots of pelicans in the bay and tonnes of beautifully coloured crabs.

Snorkelling today was in a bay with a really rough tide. When we first got in, I got stuck on a really shallow rock, and kept getting hit by all these waves meaning I was hitting into this multiple times!! I eventually managed to move away from the shallows and the snorkelling was amazing. I managed to see a marine iguana in the water feeding on the seaweed, which was cool as we'd only ever seen them on land before! We swam with maybe seven or eight sea turtles at one point, and a lot of the group were already further on so it was very quiet! It was amazing swimming and then discovering all these lazy slow turtles paddling through the waves. It was very beautiful!

Lunch again was lovely, and then we went back into the dinghy for a ride around Tagus Cove where again we saw blue footed boobies, a few sealions and even a couple of penguins huddled in the coves! We saw lots of Lava Gulls clinging to the rock edge which was very beautiful!

Back on the boat, we had a 1 hour journey to our next destination to spend the night. It was a very very rocky ride!! We were told we may be able to see whale and mola mola fish on the way (huge fish with a massive head!) but unfortunately again we didn't see them!! We had a drink this evening on the top deck, making sure we held it tight to avoid it going all over the floor! Me and Brendan had a quick dip in the jacuzzi, as the boat was so rocky, the water was literally sloshing out the sides!!

We went down for dinner at half 6, and Hansel showed us lots of photos from his previous trips. A lot of the photos came from islands we hadn't visited which was when Brendan decided we would have to come back!!! Dinner again was very nice, and we had a relatively early night ready for our last full day!