The following morning we found ourselves in a nice quiet bay and breakfast was an altogether much better affair. Our first stop of the day was a wet landing on the island of Santa Fe (also called Barrington), a fairly small island but great for watching sea lions - well tripping over them on the beach. Along the island's northern shore is the forest of giant 10m high Opuntias (Prickly Pear Cactus). Here we got to see the endemic subspecies Santa Fe land iguana, a Galapagos Hawk, Galapagos Mockingbirds, pelicans, blue-footed boobies and lots of colourful lava lizards. Snorkelling in the bay we saw some rays and fish. The afternoon visit was to South Plaza. At only 1km long and 100m wide, it is one of the smallest islands in the Galapagos but has one of the largest populations of Land Iguanas. It also hosts a large number of Marine Iguanas and even hybrid land-marine iguanas that occurs nowhere else in the Galapagos. We saw more sea lions, blue-footed boobies, gal shearwaters and lots of other seabirds.

Cerro Dragon (Dragon's Hill) on another part of Santa Cruz was our first stop on Day 2. It has a population of giant land iguanas hence the name. It is also home to marine iguanas, sally lightfoot crabs, Galapagos pintails, various finches (of the famous Darwin's Finches collection) and other birds. The land iguanas were like little dragons and we watched a couple of males having a bit of a brawl at each other for some time. The afternoon was a dry landing at Bartolome Island (also called Bartholomew) - created by two volcanic cinder cones with a sandy inlet (double-sided beach) in between. A hike to the summit of the island (one of the cinder cones) provided a panoramic view of the island and Santiago in the distance. Andy particularly liked this island because it was a fantastic example of various geological features common to several of the islands including spatter cones and lava tubes. Personally I thought it was like a moonscape. There wasn't much life surviving here that we could see apart from the rugged lava cactus. We took a panga ride along the coastline around the base of the volcanic tower of the other cinder cone where we came across a few of the rare Galapagos Penguins. There are only 800 pairs and we saw about 1/2 dozen of them. Under the base was also good snorkelling; plenty of fish and a few people got a glimpse of the expert swimming penguin as it rocketed past at high speed.

Intro | Travelling there | Santa Fe/Cerro Dragon | Black Turtle Cove/N Seymour | Espanola | Rabida/Santiago/Floreana