Isla Isabela - Galapagos
There’s a national public holiday for Ecuador’s Independence Day so to make the most of our 3 consecutive days off volunteering 9 of us venture off to Isabela Island for a long weekend. It’s quite the hike at 2 x 2 hr ferries each way via Santa Cruz, if you can even call the boats we were on “ferries”. More like shitty speed boats with way too many people packed in, crappy engines that waft petrol fumes everywhere in the boat and people throwing up in small black plastic bags because the seas are too rough to stomach 2 hours in these conditions. At least here they keep the spew bags on the boat, unlike Laos where they just chuck them outside the bus window and into nature (silver lining).
We arrived early Friday morning, on an overcast day; most cafes/restaurants/shops were closed (it felt a bit like an empty movie set) and we were informed on arrival that all of the tours to the snorkelling places were fully booked: they really do give a shit about the environment over here and there is only a small number of boats allowed to each location each day so you need to book days in advance. So, at this point I’m thinking WTF!! 4 hours of travel one way for what?
Because I’m turning into my mother, I am reassuring everyone that “everything happens for a reason” and “if it’s meant to be it will be” LOL. Meanwhile on the inside I am feeling just as deflated as everyone else. Then, the sun came out and we ventured to Concha de Perla and went swimming with sealions in the wild… instant mood change: the “ferry” ride from Santa Cruz to Isabela now a distant memory. We see like a bajillion iguanas, flamingos, a penguin, a shed load of sealions, frigate birds, pelicans etc. Luisa and I manage to score tickets to go snorkelling at Los Tuneles the next day and the rest of the volunteer crew manage to snake tickets to Las Tintoreras; all is right in the world again.
The Los Tuneles trip was sick – the morning started off super overcast and drizzling so getting on a boat at 8am and riding out into the open water getting smashed by waves is certainly an invigorating way to start to the day. After admiring the blue footed boobies we suit up in our wetsuits and jump into the friggin cold ocean water. Within seconds there are sea turtles, white tipped sharks, golden rays, spotted eagle rays, black tipped sharks, stingrays and a bucketload of different fish to entertain me. At one point I swam over a giant green turtle that felt like it was longer than me but must have been somewhere between 1.2 – 1.5m long… It was a huge MOFO. Blew my mind that it could actually swim... but then again, so do obese people... but fat floats, so that actually makes sense… anyway, I digress.
We also saw a bunch of manta rays including one that was like 12m… HUUUUUUUUUGE! The boat captain was trying to get me to jump in the open water to take some GoPro footage and I was close to doing it but he was laughing, and between my shitty Spanish and his limited English I couldn’t figure out if it was safe or not, so erred on the side of caution and didn’t jump into the open water that was smashing the boat all around us from every angle to go swimming with a manta ray like 7 times my size.
Apparently, there was a 7.3magnitude earthquake the day before off the coast of Ecuador which made the waves a bit crazy, so we couldn’t actually venture into Los Tuneles in the end. So, after the snorkelling we headed back to Isla Isabela: I googled it later and there is nothing I can find online about this earthquake, so who knows what the real story is… some mysteries in life will never be solved.
On the way back to port we see more penguins – Isabela really feels like a dream; it’s so quaint, the streets aren’t even paved, most of the cafes and restaurants seem closed all the time and humans give right of way to the animals! For an Island that is basically 5 volcanos joined up, you’d expect it to be just a bunch of dried lava and have hardly any vegetation, but it’s got tonnes of sick cactus plants, the lava is literally on the beach so you have white sand, black lava, turquoise water and bright red and orange crabs scurrying everywhere…. What an absolute BEAUTY this place is.
