An early morning wake-up call allows for beautiful light and finding the local inhabitants engaged in their early morning rituals. The young sea lions awake and get themselves ready for a foraging excursion. Once inland, all the other inhabitants of the neighborhood start moving about. Snakes and endemic Santa Fe land iguanas start charging their batteries with the already warm sunlight. By noontime, they will go back to their burrows because the equatorial sun is unforgiving at this time of year.

The motoring to San Cristobal Island is enjoyable, and everybody is going through the preliminaries of the last day and departure. Our last official excursion at a visitors' site does not disappoint. A dreamy, white sandy beach littered with basking sea lions, a few marine iguanas, brown pelicans, and blue-footed boobies bid us farewell, performing their amazing aerobatics. Did I mention the amazing landscape?!

Finally, a circumnavigation to Kicker Rock while enjoying a sip of good wine and a cocktail brings an end to a very successful week on board National Geographic Endeavour II in the Galapagos Islands.