Today was an outstanding day on Santa Cruz Island. The weather was perfect! The sky was clear, the sun was shining, but it was not hot –at the end of the day it even felt a little bit cool. Conditions couldn’t have been more suitable for our excursion’s goal: getting to see Galapagos giant tortoises.
Some of our guests decided to visit the Charles Darwin Research Station and the Galapagos National Park Service facilities. Their flagship program is the restoration of giant tortoises, whose populations were decimated first due to overhunting, and later by predation and/or competition with introduced animals such as goats and rats. The Station provides scientifically based advice to the Park Service, a governmental institution, and together they put into practice several methods to help recover this species. We learned, walking by the tortoises´ corrals, about management tools such as eradication, breeding in captivity, rearing in captivity, repatriation, among others.
Everybody met at mid-morning to go sight-seeing or shopping in the many souvenir stores along Puerto Ayora’s main avenue that runs by the ocean. Close to midday, we gathered at The Rock (a local restaurant) in order to board the buses that were to take us to the highlands.
We could tailor-make our day. Those who prefer more exercise were able to ride bicycles to “El Trapiche”, an old-fashioned sugar-cane farm. There were others who preferred to learn more about the community, so a stop at a local school was organized for them. And there were others who just wanted to relax and enjoy, so we took a bus-ride to “El Trapiche”.
At this farm we could witness first-hand how sugar cane is ground and processed. Its syrup may have two destinations: either end as molasses or as moonshine. We tried them both!
Afterwards, our bus-ride continued, and coffee-plantations, tropical cedar and avocado trees, and cattle grazing on the grasslands passed by our bus’ windows like movie frames in fast-forward. Twenty minutes later we arrived to a place described by one of our guests as “Eden’s Garden”: Aquelarre, a farm turned into a restaurant.
After a delicious lunch, everybody jumped on the buses again to finally meet our target: giant tortoises in the wild. We went to “El Manzanillo”, a cattle-ranch that happens to be right at the crossroad of the tortoises’ migratory route. We saw plenty of these ancient reptiles, some of them still on the move looking for food, some resting, and some just basking in the little mud that has remained despite the severe drought the Islands are going through.
