Galapagos: San Cristobal Island – Days 48-52
There was very little excitement for the inter-island ferry today, and we had to be at the boat at 6:30, so we woke up at my least favorite time of the day: before 6 A.M. I don’t know why 6 is my cutoff; 6:15 isn’t a fun time to get up at, but before 6 I hate everything.
So we woke up and grabbed our packs and headed out to snag some coffee on the walk to the harbor. We didn’t find any coffee. What a morning it was turning out to be. We found the dock and plopped our packs down next to some snoozing sea lions and waited for a bit while the dock filled up. We had our bags right next to the ramp down to the boat to be the first on, as we’d gotten some advice on where to sit on the boat. A water taxi pulled up and everyone boarded that to take us on a 30-second, 75-cent water taxi ride to the ferry. We stubbornly grabbed the seats nearest the ladder so we could board the ferry first (I realllly didn’t wanna be seasick). The actual speedboat had benches around the edge facing inward and room for about 3 people in the very back by the engines, facing forwards. We grabbed those ones as instructed – success!
The ride was smooth and very pretty for the first hour or so, then got pretty choppy. We were both feeling perfectly fine though, thanks to our seats (and probably the meclizine). One girl was getting ready to puke so Meg gave up her nice seat for her and squeezed in next to me. After a while we passed another island and left the open ocean behind us, so the rest of the ride was smooth sailing! The harbor and town on San Cristobal was totes gorgeous! There were sea lions all over the place! Swimming around our boat and basking on the docks all while yelling at each other very loudly in the sea lion language. They are 100% just playful dogs that have adapted to the water.
This was the first place on the trip where we just showed up without a place so stay, although we did have a couple in mind. First things first though – breakfast. We stopped at a cheap little local diner and had a pretty solid breakfast! I had a bolon – a baseball sized sphere of fried plantain, cheese and egg – not too bad! It also came with fried eggs and some steak, all said it was one of the better breakfasts I’d had in a while. We found the hostel we’d heard of – Casa de Laura – and were shown a room by the owner. The room was clean and had it’s on mini-fridge and porch – score! We took it immediately (fortunately it was available for the next 5 nights).
The town on San Cristobal (called Puerto Baquerizo Moreno) was quite a bit smaller than Puerto Ayora; it was pretty much a 5 x 3 block grid. Our first stop was Playa Loberia – supposedly the best beach on the island. We turned the 20 minute walk into a 30 minute walk by not going the right way – a fairly common occurrence – but in the end it was still well worth it!
The beach itself was pretty big with sea lions basking all over the place! We set up shop amidst the sea lions and started reading, which didn’t last long for me. I got bored in about 15 minutes and strapped on my mask and snorkel and waded out into the bay which was protected from the huge ocean waves. Underwater there were quite a few fish, but I wasn’t really interested in those little guys – I was on the prowl for sea turtles!
It only took about 30 seconds and I found one eating algae off a rock. I was super excited to have found one so fast but it turned out they were all over the bay! Once Meg got in the water I did the turtle sign to her and she swam over to me and we watched the turtle eating algae a few feet from us, totally oblivious to our presence.
We swam around the bay and spotted a lot more turtles, and then a sea lion! He was spinning and doing figure 8s in the water, but once he saw us he came to investigate. He was a very curious fella and came right up to me and booped my nose with his nose! We swam around with him for a while until he left, then we went back to the towel to heat ourselves back up (that water’s cold!). Still tired from the early morning, we napped on the beach for a while then walked back into town.
We stopped at a place called Cris for some tasty burgers, then grabbed some groceries for the week on the way back to the hostel. We did not stay up late!
End of D48 cribbage score: Ben 79 (12 skunks) – Meg 58 (12 skunks)
Lounging around island style was the plan for the day! We chilled in some hammocks at the hostel in the morning and set out to town around 11 to pretty much wander. We stopped at the SCUBA shop to confirm we had a place on their boat for tomorrow – we did not. Meg had emailed this company a while ago, they sent us a form to fill out to sign up, we sent it back to them. The guy at the shop looked confused at his computer for a while, then said their boat was full. Like jesus dude, figure your shit out. It’s not hard. Obviously I was fuming a bit about this, but then we started scrambling around the neighborhood looking for a dive shop with an opening to kicker rock in the next couple days. There seemed to be a hundred dive shops, but nearly all of them just book you with a company that, ya know, has a boat. It’s the strangest thing, but we eventually found a company with their own boat heading to kicker tomorrow, so we signed up (and ended up saving $20 per person!)
We walked over to the other side of town and found a cool little hut with food and coffee and a view of the harbor – jackpot! I ordered another bolon which was considerably worst than the last one. The coffee would be good hopefully though! Then some lady came out with two cups of hot water. Oh no. Next, thud. Ah yes, the jar of instant coffee. DIY coffee – cheap and the worst. Just mix it up behind the counter and serve it like real coffee! Some people, man. We dumped depressing mudwater out and went back to the hostel to blog a bit and have some tuna sandwiches for lunch. Yeah, not our finest food day so far.
With a moderately productive afternoon behind us we decided to check out another beach on the island! We hoofed it all the way across town and 5 minutes later came upon Playa Mann – the local sea lion hang out.
This was a cool beach since there were approximately an equal number of two-footed creatures as four-flippered ones, and the sea lions were spaced out snoozing between all the people! We stopped at a restaurant on the harbor for dinner because we saw that they had some craft beers! Woohoo! I had an IPA and a stout that were passable, but tasted excellent due to the lack of recent competition. The food wasn’t bad or great there, nor was the cribbage with Ham sweeping the 2 games of the night. Phooey.
End of D49 cribbage score: Ben 79 (12 skunks) – Meg 60 (13 skunks)
Waking up on a diving day is generally great and today was no exception! We had some fruit and yogurt then stopped at a little restaurant for some to-go empanadas on the walk to the shop. The pre-dive meeting was basically non-existent. No coffee there either; clearly this outfitter was a tad more laid back than Diving Iguana on Santa Cruz. We boarded their boat at the dock – not the nicest but it would get the job done. One positive thing about diving kicker rock is that the ride there is only 30 minutes, much shorter than the previous dives, and it was all on the leeward side of the island where the water was calm.
At the dive site we suited up and dropped in – yep, the water was still real cold! Wakes you up fast though.
Kicker rock is actually two huge rocks jutting out of the sea with a 15-foot wide channel between them. Our first dive was through the channel, so we descended to 60 feet and immediately were met with a few schools of sharks! We knew they weren’t man-eaters – Galapagos and white-tip sharks don’t really attack people – and they were kind of small, maybe 5 feet long, but sure enough they were very sharky-looking.
We floated gently with the current as a few schools swam right by us, seemingly oblivious to our presence. It was exhilarating!
There were sea turtle gliding through the water all around us as well, and even though the water was a bit murky, we saw the outline of two humongous spotted rays floating above us. We did our safety interval (where we just float at about 5 meters depth to let accumulated nitrogen vent from the body and prevent the bends) in a huge school of fish, then popped back to the surface.
We had a brief surface interval that we spent talking to fellow divers Paul and Cece who have been living abroad and teaching English in Thailand and Panama for the last 5 years. Hmmmm…
The next dive was on the north end of kicker rock. We would be swimming around most of the rock looking for sea life on the wall of the rock. While the channel between the rocks had a bottom, on this dive the wall just dropped into the deep blue! I think this was our first dive like this, with no bottom visible, just a giant rock gradually disappearing into the deep – slightly unnerving.
There were enormous schools of fish that we would swim through, and a bunch more sharks just floating around the area as well! Since we were out of the protected channel, there was a fair amount of current during this dive, which also created some poor visibility – a couple of the divers said afterwards that it was quite a challenging dive – and while we thought the current was a nuisance, we had no trouble with it at all which was reassuring! Towards the end of this dive a couple huge sharks just came floating right by us, and we didn’t see them until they were right next to us due to the visibility. Definitely made my heart jump!
Once we had all re-boated we were dropped off at a remote beach where we relaxed for a couple hours before heading back to the harbor. It was a good way through the afternoon by then, and we were, as usual, completely spent from the diving. We headed back to the hostel for some relaxation, then went to an Italian place nearby for some pizza for dinner, and it turned out to be pretty excellent! The cribbage games were split 1-1 which was pretty much a victory for Meg!
End of D50 cribbage score: Ben 80 (12 skunks) – Meg 61 (13 skunks)
After diving yesterday we spend the morning lounging around and deciding what to do – we went hunting for some empanadas for breakfast and found a place with decent reviews online so we headed there. It was decent but the empanadas were just cheese, no meat. Bummer. Not bad though, and they had hot sauce!
We walked through town towards the interpretation center and frigate hill after breakfast. The interpretation center was just a museum with the history of the islands – it was actually pretty interesting but we didn’t figure out why it was called the interpretation center.
There is a trail behind the center that we took up to the best lookout point in town, frigate hill. The walk was easy and had a path and stairs, but it did give a very cool vantage point of the small town and bay, and true to it’s name, there were a bunch of frigates with their split tails riding the air currents. We took some pictures up here and ate some tuna sandwiches, then were going to head down the hill to a little swimming spot, but a sign caught our eye. The sign at the top of the hill was pointing onwards up the coast, saying there was a beach out there somewhere. We didn’t have any plans for the day so we figured what the heck!
The path was pleasant with some nice views, then we descended down the backside of frigate hill. It was pretty steep and we were in sandals, but we figured if we’re doing Nepal in a couple months, we best be able to do this!
And we did, at the bottom there was a place where sea lions came to hang out, so we watched those guys for a minute then kept on looking for our beach. The path at this point became a bunch of volcanic boulders and the trail consisted of a white wooden post every 50 yards, so this hike turned into a real adventure!
After an hour of hopping over rocks and trying to locate the next trail marker (and coming upon a handful of false beaches) we the trail opened up to a big sandy horseshoe bay! Surprisingly there were two other people there, but we found a spot to put our towel and grabbed our snorkeling gear. There were a bunch of basking marine iguanas at this beach and some small bobbing heads popping up to the surface of the water – more turtles we figured...
Nope. The water was full of swimming iguanas! We excitedly rushed into the water forgetting that it was really cold, but once we got used to it and got our faces in the water – dinosaurs! The iguanas were just lazy fatboys on the land but in water they looked crazy!
Their long tails propelled them as their feet just floated along. We watched them dive underwater looking for food and got really close to them a few times – quite a cool experience! After chasing the swimming lizards around for long enough we relaxed and read on the beach for a while, then we packed up to head back. The walk back seemed way shorter than the walk there, so we were getting back into town around sunset time, and we stopped off at another beach to watch the sun go down. This beach was in more of a local neighborhood so it had some food stalls serving some grilled chicken skewers and grilled ears of corn covered in cheese. We got ‘em both. Ate ‘em both. Real good stuff.
We headed back to the Italian place for dinnner and cribbage and wine. We’d bought some boxed wine (classy) at a convenience store so we ordered a coke and two glasses and filled the glasses with our wine sneakily!
Covert wine for the win! We got pasta this time which was pretty decent, and I won two cribbage games to Meg’s one, but hers was a skunk – not sure how that keeps happening!
End of D51 cribbage score: Ben 82 (12 skunks) – Meg 62 (14 skunks)
Last full day in the Galapagos!! Oh no. We had been (and perpetually are) behind on the blog so we decided to head to a crepe shop, primarily because it seemed to be our best bet to get some real coffee! We were successful in that endeavor and I made some progress on the blog while sipping on a darn good cappuccino. Meg did some research on her phone which is never too efficient, but with the tablet that’s really our only option, so we decided to bring another tablet with a keyboard to Asia. Around lunch time we decided to head back to Playa Loberia to swim with some turtles and sea lions again before we left.
We stopped off at lunch at a local place that was brimming with locals. They squeezed us in the corner and served us the soup of the day, rice, and chicken with a side of mediocre veggies. Classic. On the bright side, it cost us 6 bucks.
On the walk to the beach I found a rock! Wow! The road to the beach is all but unused, so we kicked the rock down the road for a while before we decided we needed a scoring system. Whenever the rock came to rest on the yellow line in the middle of the road the kicker of the rock earned a point or more depending on how far away the yellow line was. Voila! We’d invented passing rock! Meghann had a strong lead when we got to the beach, where we hid our rock for the walk back. The beach was excellent again, and we saw plenty of sea turtles and sea lions while snorkeling in the bay. On the way back to the hostel Meghann came out of gate hot with a real long kick landing right on the line for 3 points, but I slowly chipped away at her lead and ended up winning the inaugural game 12.75-10.625! Neat.
We dropped our snorkeling gear off at the hostel and headed out for dinner, stopping along the way to get our SCUBA logs stamped from the other day. The sunset was looking real tasty so we walked to the waterfront and grabbed a bench to watch the spectacle. Then we headed to a seafood place we’d heard about where the seafood “paella” and garlic tuna were both stellar. The walk back to the hostel was a bummer since we knew we had to leave these awesome islands tomorrow, and we also had 4 flights tomorrow. Sheeeeeeit.
End of D52 cribbage score: Ben 82 (12 skunks) – Meg 62 (14 skunks)
Our flight didn’t leave until later in the morning which was nice, so we got up leisurely and packed our bags up again. The airport was really close to the hostel so we were able to walk there in about 10 minutes. We flew from San Cristobal to Guayaquil, then to Quito, then to Bogota, then to Medellin. I think we got fed snacks or sandwiches on each flight, so our food intake for the day was pretty trash.
Each flight was a little under two hours (except the last) and each layover about an hour and a half, so it was a dreadfully boring day but thankfully uneventful with no flight issues. We took an uber from the Medellin airport into the city where we got dropped off at the Black Sheep Hostel around midnight – cool drive though, with an excellent view of the city in the valley for nearly the entire 40 minute drive. Black Sheep seemed cool, and the internet was lightning fast compared to Galapagos!! We were exhausted though so once we laid down on our bed we were out like a trout in the middle of a drought.
End of D53 cribbage score: Ben 82 (12 skunks) – Meg 62 (14 skunks)