Day 7 (last day!) on the Samba

Well my Paris trip has come and gone and I'm still working on writing up the Galapagos trip!  Life comes at you fast I guess.   After coming back from Paris I was really busy at work and then I had two weeks of jury duty that ate up my life.  Now things are a bit quieter so here I am again.  It seems kind of silly writing up a trip from January in May but I'm sure 10 years down the line I'll appreciate reading about it.

January 30, 2017
This was our last full day on the Samba.  We spent the morning on Floreana Island which is one of the few populated islands on the Galapagos.  Once we landed we were met by a guy with a large truck that took us up to the highlands where we took a short hike through a tortoise zoo/sanctuary.  The zoo was not very impressive though but we saw so many larger tortoises in the wild on Fernandina it would have been hard to match that.

The truck to take us up to the highlands

A tortoise as the zoo

Part of the labyrinth of stones that around the pirate caves

I like the silly cartoon couple on this sign which does nothing to accurately depict the odd (deadly) relationship of Ritter and Strauch 

Part of Strauch and Ritter's cave

Our guide said that no one really knows the origin of this face carved in stone

After the zoo the hike continued to some pirate's caves at the top of hill.  The caves were also used by a couple (Dr. Ritter and Dore Strauch) that lived on the island together in the 1930's.  Another person in our group said that they watched a documentary about the couple and told us some of the crazy stories about the mysterious deaths on the island during that time period!  Also the story about the couple pulling out their teeth and sharing dentures is pretty brutal.

Colorful iguanas around the pier

Jeremy's new friend

After the highlands visit the boat moved to Devil's Cove for our last snorkeling trip.  It was probably some of the best snorkeling of the trip!  Devil's Cove is located around a rock formation that creates a kind of circular formation underwater.  The currents all converge around and through the rocks and it makes it a great place to see tons of sea life.  The visibility was great and we saw flounder, sharks, sergeant majors laying eggs and just tons of large schools of fish!  It was great.

Devil's Cove from above water (where it doesn't look too interesting)

After lunch we navigated to Santa Cruz.  During the trip Santiago gave a powerpoint presentation about the fish we had seen which was semi-interesting.  I think it would have been better before we had seen the fish so we knew the names of what we saw.

The dinner on the last night was nice- the crew dressed up in their formal white clothes and there were nice table cloths.  It was nice to say thank you and give them their tips!  We got to the port of Santa Cruz that evening where I was able to get data/internet service.  It was a little disappointing to learn about all the terrible news we were blissfully ignorant of (like Trump's travel ban).

Anyway, on a lighter note here is the picture of us getting to Santa Cruz!  It was interesting seeing all the traffic coming and going from our boat once we got to civilization.  There were so many water taxis and delivery boats coming and going!