Galapagos Day 9

A more comfortable 7am breakfast meant that we landed on South Plaza Island at 8am this morning.  The island is long and thin and slopes upwards across its width from the shore where we landed to steep cliffs on the far side.  With Galapagos carpet weed (a red and green succulent) and the cactus plants, it made an attractive setting on what was a sunny morning with some cloud.  It was also quite windy, and the strength of that wind gradually made itself clear as we climbed up to the cliff face that runs along the far side of the island.

South Plaza hosts the Red Billed Tropic Bird, a largely white bird with some black markings and a long trailing tail (see the extra).

In the afternoon we arrived at Santa Fe Island where we moored for the afternoon.  We spent an hour snorkelling of the coast with the sea lions before eventually landing on the Island to look for new species, We totally failed to locate any of the Rice Rats or Snakes that we were looking for, but did see some of those elusive Cactus Finches (see the extra).

At both locations there were sea lions everywhere.  We are getting quite used to walking past them now, although some care is always needed.  I’ve given you a shot of a youngster as a blip.  The other species that we saw everywhere was the Land Iguana.  There were actually two different species of Land Iguana today, the South Plaza Island version is more colourful and so that’s what I’ve gone for as my blip.