Today we board the ship for our 8-day Galapagos island tour! No plans in the am, so we slept in until it was our turn for breakfast at 8am. The hotel is small and only at 30% capacity, so they try to space out breakfast, so everyone eats alone. After breakfast, we packed up and walked into town for some souvenir shopping and another visit to the fish market to watch the baby sea lions begging for scraps. We headed back to the hotel to pick up our luggage as we were supposed to be at the main pier by noon to meet the rest of our group, who are all flying in on the same flight from the mainland.
We got to the pier around 11:45am. Two obvious Americans sitting on a bench at the front of the pier with our giant purple suitcases drinking Pepto Bismol (oops on drinking the water). Not too hard to miss.
We waited and waited, and when no one was there by 12:30, we started to get nervous. We came all this way - definitely don't want to miss our cruise! I walked up the street to find wifi when I heard someone call my name. It was our Boulder scuba friends sitting at a table eating lunch! I used their restaurant wifi to contact our travel agent who promised to try to find our ship people. By about 1 o'clock, we were told someone would come find us. Finally, someone came to get us and we had a personal escort on a zodiac to our ship.
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| First Look |
They just sort of dropped us off with no direction and no one spoke English. We were a little confused and a little concerned that no one really seemed prepared to meet us, so we went exploring and ended up just hanging out on the top deck waiting on the rest of our group. (What we later found out is that the plane was late and it was an hour+ drive; our primary English speaking guide was picking up the rest of the passengers and no one knew what to do with us in the interim)
We watched as the zodiac arrived with the rest of our group. The ship, the Archipel 1, holds 16 passengers, we are
currently at half capacity with 8 people and supposedly we pick up additional people on day 5 when we revisit Santa Cruz for refueling. In addition to Damon & me,
our group consists of a family of four – Pam (about my age), her daughter, Serena, (28),
Serena’s boyfriend, Matt, and Pam’s son, Keetan (11). There is also a couple from Germany, Elsie (30) and Marvin (35). So far –
all seem like cool people. Elsie and Marvin are on the tail end of a six month backpacking trip through South America. Living the dream.
We had a quick lunch on the boat and then took the Zodiacs back to shore so we could, you guessed it, go visit the Charles Darwin Research Center! Again! While 90% of the Darwin tour was identical, we did learn a few new facts AND when we visited the giant tortoise pen, they were much more active. The pen, we learned, was all males and one was trying to exert extreme dominance by climbing on the back of another tortoise who was having no part of it.
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| It's not what you think... |
The tortoise on top (aka, the a-hole), tried challenging another huge tortoise (big dude) – they stretch their necks as high as they can, open their mouths and hiss at each other. First one to retract loses.
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| The challenge |
Since the a-hole was completely on top of the other tortoise, giving him an extreme height advantage, he won the match. Until lower tortoise, who was not really happy to be used as a step stool, cleverly crawled (with the 500 lb a-hole on his back) over to a low branch, crawled under it, and clothes-lined the other tortoise so it fell off its back.
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| Crawls under a branch to knock the other tortoise off |
It was fascinating to watch, and I wonder if it is a regular occurrence. I would put up the video, but these are tortoises, and it look like 5 full minutes for the 10' walk. Once free of a 500lb nuisance, the tortoise "took off" and the jerk tortoise went back to another tortoise to climb on its back. Finally, the big dude goes back for another challenge, and then climbed on top of the previously dominant tortoise. They may move slow, but they also have some fight!
We did get to visit Lonesome George again in all his taxidermized
glory before walking back to town, picking up some wine & rum for the boat, and then taking
the Zodiacs back to the ship.
A note about our Ship – it is called the Archipel 1.
The Archipel is a catamaran that has 8 passenger cabins (16 people) The upper deck has some a nice covered area in the shade for relaxing at couches or tables, plus some lounge chairs in the sun. We have so much space, just the 8 of us!
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| Back of the upper deck |
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| Front of the upper deck |
This is going to be awesome until the rest of the group joins us… the main floor has the cabins on the outside and then a small bar, 2 dining room tables, and a small “living room” area for briefing. It is a cool little ship. The rooms are tiny – ours is a king bed and maybe 3’ wide space between bed and bathroom. We have a tiny closet and a tiny little dresser, but I think it will be fine as I don’t see us spending much time in there. We have a huge shower so that is good! We have a crew of 8 plus our naturalist, Victor. The crew all have multiple jobs and don't seem to speak much English. They mostly stay below deck unless we are getting ready to do something, in which case they are all ready to go. "Below deck' is the catamaran pontoons. In one pontoon, is the full kitchen plus some sleeping quarters and in the other pontoon is the engine room and the rest of the sleeping quarters.
We got back to the ship in time for dinner and a short
briefing that consisted of “we have a 12-13 hour cruise ahead of us, over open
water, it’s gonna be rough, would suggest everyone takes their meds now and go
to sleep. Plus, it was hard to stand or
do anything with all of the rocking. Damon and I had our trusty scopolamine
patches on and were hopeful, but this small boat was getting knocked
around! We all went to bed around 8:30
and slept on and off until 7am. It was
so rocky that I just stayed in bed with my eyes closed willing myself not to get
sick. I don’t think I fully realized how
big the swells would be and how much bigger they would feel from this tiny ship. We are in the cabin closest to the front, so we feel the up and down impact pretty heavily. I'm not going to say that I was lifted from the bed on the downward swells, but I can say without question that on the ups, we were pushed into the bed and on the downs, we felt light as a feather, right before we sort of slammed into the next swell. Gotta love those scope patches. They are wonderful.
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