Galapagos Islands and Peru Part 3

Friday morning and our last chance to explore the islands.  I have a busy day planned: two hikes, one before breakfast, and some kayaking. We're anchored by Genovesa Island and the early hike is to the Darwin bay area. This was a short, but for me difficult, hike. Birds everywhere and they paid no attention to us at all. I got so many pictures it's going to be hard to pick just a few. After breakfast I went on a kayak trip, paddling around the bluffs of an island.  Here I saw my first fur seal, not a sea lion. Ocean kayaking is a lot different than on the streams back here where I get to land on a gravel bar and fish for awhile instead of constant paddling.

I got back from the kayaking just in time to go on the last photo hike, this one was to Prince Phillip's Stairs. After climbing his stairs, we went in search of the supposively illusive short earred owl.  We found eight of them and I even got a fairly good picture of one. As I mentioned earlier, too many pictures today, so I limited myself to about twenty for this.  Hope you enjoy them.

Red Footed Booby

Darwin Finch

Tommy on a navigation tower. See how frightened the birds are.

Galapagos Mockingbird

Short Earred Owl

Two male frigate birds

This does it for the islands. Saturday was a travel day, thirteen of us flew to Lima where we met up with eight new people.  Three ladies that I had enjoyed a meal or two with were the only ones I knew fron the ship, but I soon made friends with the others from the ship and the new people.  Most passengers were going home and a few were going on an Amazon River cruise. Six of the new people were going on that cruise after Peru.

The galapagos were a real surprise to me.  I expected to see lots of animals and wasn't disappointed at all.  What I did not expect was that we would get so close to them. To go onto an island we had to be accompanied by a naturalist and the size of the group with each was limited. Also, the naturalist had to be Ecuadorean, which I think is a good idea. All of the crew and my fellow passengers were easy to get along with and this helped for a very enjoyable journey. I'll start a part 4 of this blog for Peru.  Once again, I'll probably do two or three parts as I have a lot of pictures I want to share.