Today was my first working day at the Hacienda Esperanza and it's was tough! At 4:00 am the rooster woke
me up and we had to be back up at 6:30 am to work around 7:00 a.m. We hiked up the mountain to the top of the Hacienda and it was really tough because it was steep and there were many rocks on the way up. I was second to last up with about 6 of the volunteers going up but that's okay since they had been up pretty much every day for the past several weeks.

We finally made it to the top after an hour and a half and what a view when we finally made it up to the top. Our job today was to use machetes to chop down guava plants which are very invasive and prevent the growth or kill the good plants. The volunteers said they planted corn about three weeks ago and they have already grown a lot. We took a break under the trees in hammocks and then I searched for a few tortoises. I found about 3 of them, but they were pretty hard to find. The second half of the day was more strenuous by cutting down the actual guava trees with rusty machetes. Not fun, but what was fun was when the trees actually fell down and we yelled "Timberrrrr." We finished up around 12 and then made the trek back to the Hacienda to eat lunch. I was exhausted so I purchased lunch for $4 at the Hacienda. I didn't know you would be able to do that here, but it's nice because I didn't feel like cooking after a hard day of work!

After cleaning up, the group went to El Junco Lagoon, a fresh water lake at 700m above sea level and is one of the few Fresh water bodies in Galápagos. It was really cloudy so we weren't able to see much. We then went to the Galapaguera which is part of the national park where giant tortoises live in semi-natural conditions and is also a breeding center. They had a great trail to follow with information about different plant and trees native to Galápagos. There were also little baby tortoises in small cages. So cute! We had a taxi wait for us while we finished up and it was only $10 per person for about 2 hours to hire him to take us all over. After that, we went to town to La Malecon (to the boardwalk) to get some coffee and relax. I just bought my ferry ticket to Santa Cruz and to Isabella, other islands close to here. Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can change my flight to fly out of Santa Cruz instead of San Cristobal in order to save some time by not having to travel several hours by boat! I had freshly made chicken empanadas too for dinner and we turned in early because of the exhausting day we had.