Santa Cruz Island
Santa Cruz Island has many visitor sites to explore and we certainly didn’t want to miss any. Therefore we navigated toward the other side of the island, and had a wet landing on a black lava flow to explore the land of the endemic dragons living in the Galápagos. Dragon Hill is the name of this very arid but alive place, including a huge area of incense tree forest, and bright yellow Galápagos cotton flowers. The red iron oxide in the soil here makes it very soft and perfect for the land iguanas, which prefer the area as their nesting ground. Many of these reptiles were seen during our hike, along with some Galápagos mockingbirds and a wide variety of finches.
I am proud to mention that the efforts of the National Park Service has shown excellent results in this visitor site, since we control the population of some introduced animals and repatriated a few hundred of juvenile land iguanas; the numbers of these reptiles are now known to be naturally self-sustained, at least on this side of the island.
After lunch, we navigated to Eden Islet (a satellite islet of Santa Cruz), where our undersea specialist, Cindy Manning, organized a very interesting activity for our younger explorers; they collected plankton samples and used our microscope to show our kids all the small critters found in the ocean. Then we explored the coastline by Zodiac and many blue-footed boobies and pelicans were spotted.
While some rode Zodiacs, others preferred to kayak along the coast. After a successful day we navigated to Daphne Islet to enjoy sunset with some champagne on the bow of the National Geographic Endeavour.
