A Walk in Galapagos - by Nina Willmott

At 3pm it was a nice and warm, but not too hot. We walked up the main road, which is very neat and pretty although there are stalls advertising tours all over the place every five steps. If you go down some of the side streets you can tell there isn't that much money in the place and most of it is spent keeping the main road and promenade nice.

We walked to the start of a track that said it was to Tortuga Bay (Turtle Bay) and would take about 45minutes and was 3km long. We decided to go down it. At the start of the track you have to go up a steep incline and across a huge crack in the rock. Dad thought it was probably made when a lava flow cooled down and shrank and then split because of the shrinking. The crack was about 10m across and 20m deep and was bridged by a pile of rubble that had been pushed in and then flattened on top and paved. On the other side of the crevasse there was a big fence topped with spikes and barbed wire with an open gate in the middle. There was also a big sign that said the track closed at 6pm. We walked on.

 The track with cracks and crevasses either side.

The terrain was really rugged, with a crack or crevasse every three meters and pretty much all the plants had thorns on them. We saw cactuses that grew out of rocks and seed pods on the ground that I couldn't figure out what tree they came from. I speculated with Dad about how Charles Darwin ever got anywhere here. Zeke suggested that someone came with him from the ship with a really big machete.

Some of the things we saw along the way

I thought back to the day before when we went up into the highlands and went down a track Mum had read about. It was fairly well used and we saw about 20 tortoises. As we were walking down that track I came up with a way to scale tortoises by size. Pebbles are the tiny little baby ones, stones are the medium sized ones, boulders are the really big adults and Dad suggested another size on the end, which is FBRs. I'm not gonna tell you what the F means and you can probably guess it any way but the B and R are stand for big rock.

Pebbles, these are only about 10cm long.

Left, boulder, this guy would be about 1m long. Right, FBR, he would be about a meter and a half long.

Anyway we had bought our snorkel and flippers in the hope that Tortuga Bay would offer some snorkelling opportunities. When we finally got to the beach we discovered a long stretch of sand with the wind blowing big waves onto shore, where they crashed onto the beach. It was totally inappropriate for snorkelling. We had asked a guy at the entrance whether there was any snorkelling and he said there was, all you had to do was turn right and walk down the beach and around the corner and you would find a sheltered cove where you could snorkel. It was a long way to the corner but we decided to do it anyway.

On the way we saw a marine iguana determinedly swimming out to sea. When a big roller came in he would duck down under it, then bob up on the other side and keep swimming until the next wave came. Just before the bend in the beach there was a rocky spit that pointed out towards the sea but at the end curved around and created a small bit of shelter where mangroves could grow. In the mangroves the were literally mounds of marine iguanas lazing in the sunshine.

A Marine Iguana mound.

 We went around the corner and found a big well sheltered cove surrounded by emerald trees with a beautiful beach that was made out of the whitest, finest sand I’d ever found. It looked great except for the fact that the water was a murky, brown green colour. There was a sign on the beach that said mangroves are really important to the ecosystem etc, etc, but at the end it added that they are an important resting place for three different types of shark.

We plunged into the water for a snorkel. But we couldn't see anything really at all and it gives me the creeps when I don't know what is around me or below me. As we were swimming across the bay I told Dad about the sign and he said that hammerhead shark babies shelter here until they're big enough to leave. I was not thrilled to learn this as I very much doubted that they swam here on their own. Mum and me were not enjoying it very much so we turned around and went to the beach. We sat in the shallows and watched Zeke and Dad to see if they got eaten. Unfortunately they didn't.

When they got back Mum gave us each a muesli bar. I was quietly eating mine in the water when Dad called me. He was sitting on the ground under a tree surrounded by Darwin's Finches! As I watched he broke off a bit of his muesli bar, held it out palm up and a finch flew onto it and ate some, then another one flew onto it and shoved the other one off. They were the tamest birds I have ever seen. I tried it and although animals often avoid children I had exactly the same result as Dad. It was amazing! I called Zeke up from the water and although he ran up, none of the finches took fright and flew away. We scrounged a few crumbs for him and he had exactly the same result as me. Those finches were fearless! There was one particularly bossy female and she just kept on flying back for more. She would shove at males that happened to be on your hand at the time off and start hogging all the crumbs. They were like miniature B52s and their feet, as they gripped your fingers, didn't feel at all like you expected them to feel - they had a firm grip but they were feather weight.

Darwins Finches

They are just so tame!

And feather weight!  Behind me you can see the sheltered cove behind where the sharks are.

As we were walking back along the beach Mum noticed turtle tracks on the sand above the tide line. It was quite obviously a beach were female turtles haul themselves out of the water to lay their eggs. We decided that this was the reason why it was called Turtle Beach and why there was such a big fence at the entrance. We hurried back as we had no desire to be locked inside all night.

Today was amazing, seeing lava cracks, speculating about how Darwin got around, iguana watching, snorkelling, feeding finches and hiking 10km down a track in a tropical afternoon really wears you out, I'm gonna sleep well to night!

Facts about Galapagos:

• It is the only place in the world where penguins live in the wild above the equator.
• There are more than twice the amount of weed species than native or endemic species.
• Avocados were second on a list of top 10 weed species, this surprised me as they are not very high on my idea of a top 10 list of evil pest plants.
• The Nazca tectonic plate, on which Galapagos is situated, is moving under the South American plate at a rate of 6.4cm per year. 
• This is the only place in the world were you can find flightless cormorants in the wild. 
• Darwin was actually a geologist when he came here and he was amazed buy the volcanoes, not the animals, although he did notice the tortoises and woodpeckers differ between islands and someone had to point out the finches to him.

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