The Galapos Islands are famous and mostly known for its Giant Tortoises.
Pirates and sailors used to capture these giant tortoises for food for their crews as these reptiles can stay alive for a year without eating!!
The males can reach a weight of up to 250 kg (and a height of about 3 feet tall). This is a tourist turtle farm, where accompanied by a guide (this is my guide) you can see tortoises in the wild.
Turtle nests are little hills on the beach. After burying up to a couple dozen eggs, the baby turtles wait two months to hatch and then stay underground for another month gaining their strength for their run to the ocean where they will be safe from the birds. This photo is of an unearthed turle nest and you can see the turtle tracks going towards the sea.
Crabs are the most skittish animals on the Galapagos Islands... but they are abundant and colourful!
Here is a Sally Lightfoot crab... coloured mostly orange with a light blue belly.
Our favourite crab was this tiny 2cm long hermit crab. It just looks like a cartoon (just look at its eyes!) and it had the poor luck to cross our path as we were sitting on the beach.
Our guide showed us that we could pick it up without danger. Dave and I were a little skittish ourselves at first... but then warmed up quickly to this little guy.
On Bartolome Island, we found another type of fear factor. Can you tell what these fish are? Maybe the next picture will help!
White Tip and Galapagos Sharks!... about two dozen swimming just a few feet from our feet in the shallow end of this unique beach!! Not to worry, they barely paid attention to us!
So, of course after that marine greeting, we just had to jump in and do some snorkeling!
Our guide showed us some of the marine life, like this Starfish.
And these very prickly sea urchins! There wasn't so much coral on the rocks in the Galapagos, but there were still some anemones to watch out for here and there.
We saw lots of brightly coloured fish!
And large schools of fish!
...some so thick, you couldn't see anything behind them!
This Rock fish did not look friendly at all... particularly its sharp and pointy fins.
And we saw more sharks in the water too!
Apart from the fish, we had lots of fun with underwater mammals as well, namely, the sea lions.
Basically, by twirling around quickly underwater and making lots of bubbles, they just loved watching you make a fool of yourselves. We were lucky to be able to entertain these guys for 10 minutes!!...but I'm glad we don't have a video of what we looked like!
The funniest thing about these sea lions is that they love to look at you upside down... I'm not sure if they see better that way, but it's quite funny.
We enjoyed these sea lion on land just as much as in the water. It was easy to take some pictures because most of the time, they were just lying on the beach warming up (and getting the nitrogen out of their system from their own deep water "diving" activities!).
