Bartolome and Santiago Islands

Bartolome was wonderful today! I don’t know if it was because of the season, or maybe due to a confabulation of stars, the planets and the moon, but the seas appeared like a mirror, and one could look down several feet into the depths, seeing the fish and the sea floor as if it was on the other side of a transparent glass.

Those who opted for the glass-bottom boat saw exactly the same wonders that the snorkelers enjoyed, because of the amazingly good visibility. We even had a couple of penguins going underneath the boat, flying through the water. Earlier in the morning we had conquered the top of the same island, Bartolome, and in the afternoon we walked the shoreline Charles Darwin explored in 1835.

Along this one complete day, we saw several Galápagos species, from sea lions (old friends of ours by now) to fur seals, from penguins to blue-footed boobies, from white-tipped reef sharks to green sea turtles. We also enjoyed all of the possible geological formations of the Galápagos, from spatter cones to paho-hoe lava flows, from tuff cones to cinder cones. It is unbelievable that we could have seen so much, and learned so much in one single day!