In our final Isabela landing we visit the land turtoise breeding center. Of the originally 14 land turtoise species, four are extinct (the famous "lonesome George", last of his species, died last year). 20-30 years ago, a couple more species have been close to distinction, with as few as 10 or less animals left. Turtoise extinction has been almost exclusively been due to human intervention, starting with the pirates who used turtoises as living food stock, all th...

Our second-to-last landing on isabela leads us to a very unusual place. On a rocky coast, a natural channel filled with sea water exists, maybe 100 meters long, 2 meters narrow and rather shallow. Surrounded by sea iguanas, both sea turtles and black-tip sharks are breeding in this channel nearby. We see 5 or 6 sharks resting on the ground, and sea turtles swimming across them seemingly careless. Close to the end of the channel there is a group of sea turtles ma...

In the afternoon we land on a young lava field on Isabela Island. Young means a few hundred years, and the lava is very dark (dark grey, sometimes almost black). The field is a huge terrain where the basalt has cracked and broken. Sometimes the stone looks like frozen waves, making parts of it look soft, sometimes it has many little cracks, creating a very rough surface that you couldn't walk upon with bare feet (Apparently it's called "Ah-Ah"-Lava because you go...

This morning we went into a mangrove forest with our Dingies. We saw a couple of penguins and many cormorans on the way and lots of sea turtles in the mangrove forest. Some of them swam next to our boats for minutes. It's easy to tell the difference between female and male turtles - the latter are much bigger and slightly brighter. And by bigger I mean really BIG - one was easily over 1 m in diameter. After that we snorkeled in nearby waters and we saw more sea ...

Today we had another awesome landing on Isabela Island. Animal of the day: Iguana. After passing a few trees behind the landing rock, we see a SEA of them - easily 100 Iguanas on the same spot, lying in the sun, crawling over each other. Amazing! We have to make a lot of noise and wave our hands to make them move a bit so that we can even pass. Later we see how Iguanas dig their nests - very much like construction workers in Berlin. They wander around, suddenly ...