Last day was the Best!

Another fishing boat ride with about 20 people crowded to Isabella Island the largest here made up of 6 volcanoes. Lots of black cooled magma. On one of our walks our guide, Milton, explained the magma sits for a few thousand years.Now this white lichen is growing on top and breaking t down over thousands of years to soil. On some of the older magma mangrove trees are one of the first things to grow along the shore.
Great explanation by Milton regarding the black marine iguana here. The land iguana are yellow with rounded tails. But when they came here there was no plants or berries for them to eat. So over thousands of years they adapted, turned black to blend in with the magma, took to the water, and live on a kind of krill from the ocean. they are ONLY found here on the Galapagos. This is part of what got Darwin thinking when he was here in 1830s and later developed his evolution theory and survival of the fittest and adaptation. I also read he would grab the marine iguanas bathe tail and chuck them in the sea!! Not a very good environmentalist!

We visited a terrific land tortoise breeding center where we saw eggs (round about baseball size) and four different stages of turtle embryos..Also many babies being raised protected. And a pen of juveniles (not sexually mature for about 20 years). Then some gigantic males and smaller females in a pen, waiting to mate. interesting, the male mounts the female and if she objects, he can bite her head! But she can cover her privates with her tail to foil him! Milton said so me times they give up and mount other males or rocks!! To no end!
If successful, female will lay 5 to 14 eggs on a nest she has dug, urinate and defecate around it and then abandon it.  After about 2 months I think, the baby pecks his way out of the egg, lives for another month on the nutrients from the egg, and then dig, with help from siblings , his way out of the nest. Because of non-indigenous animals like rats, cats, dogs, etc. being introduced by man, babies hardly ever survive in the wild. Tortoises live for maybe 150 years. Unlike trees, the rings on their carapace do NOT indicate their age. As they age, the rings disappear.

Saw flamingos in a salinic lagoon that are only found here with. Peculiar adaptation ions.
Also saw close the famous blue-footed boobie. Spaniards bragged that this bird was dumb like a "bobo" because they could catch and kill a bunch in a few minutes. Because they had no knowledge or fear of humans, they didn't run away. So they called them blue footed bobos changed to boobies!
So many colorful and unusual birds here.











And then leaves we snorkeled in a sheltered tidal pool where we saw close up sea turtles sleeping on the bottom. Lucia, a lovely Czech woman traveling on her own for 3 months since she quit her job at the Tate Gallery in London and will move back to Prague, took great underwater shots that she said she would email me. We saw a manta ray swimming, many colorful fish and spiny sea urchins, two different kinds.

Our 90 minute ride back got us here about 4 . Lucia had gone the previous evening to Las Griestas, a beautiful swimming area by cliffs. So SUSAN had the brilliant idea and we took a water taxi across the harbor  to what I thought was a nice walk.

Instead it was a dripping sweat walk over ankle-breaking chunks of lava rock and uphill to a cliff where even I balked at going down and trying to swim. Although on a Sunday and Election day to boot, many Ecuadorians were there swimming. And then some brave ones were leaping, one guy did a back flip! Into this deep pool between the gorge. We had a slow, hot walk back and I treated Betty to two drinks at Happy Hour with onion rings (that was dinner tonight!) before we crossed in the water taxi! She won't listen to MY suggestions any time soon!

Rafael will take us to Balta to the airport tomorrow as we say good bye to the Galapagos. If done again, we would have stayed Lanigan on each of the islands. Isabella especially seemed really undeveloped but with a few cool places to stay, I think.