We left the hostel quite early today (we changed hostels a couple of days ago to a place called 'Miconia') and took a water taxi across to Las Grietas - a swimming hole between a canyon. Because we were there so early, there was only one other person there when we arrived, and more arriving when we left. It was a pretty spot with heaps of giant fishes swimming around.

When we returned to Puerto Ayora, still wet and towels around our waists, we found a taxi driver willing to take us up to El Chato, the giant tortoise reserve. What we didn't realise was that our driver was also going to be our tour guide. So we were quite stunned when he jumped out of the car too and organised gum boots for us to wear and then started walking around the reserve with us! He showed us the many giant tortoises - including Rafael the 100 year old dude who ever so kindly farted in the mud for us. We tried on some tortoise shells while we were there, too, and boy were they heavy! Jeremy managed to do some push ups with shell on, but mine was too awkwardly shaped to move/I can't do pushups full stop. After wondering around and looking at all the old dudes munching on grass and s***ting very large turds, our driver took us to the lava tunnels and promised to meet us at the other end.

The tunnels were very cool - we'd already spent some time in the tunnels snorkelling in Isabela, but the land ones were quite large (side note: "these balls are quite large") except when they weren't: At one point we had to crawl through the mud through a gap that was less than the height of Jeremy's knees. After we washed off all the mud at the end of the tunnel (400m long), we convinced the driver to drive us to the Los Gemelos sinkholes in the Scalesia forest (dandelion trees) - they were cool, and we felt like we were in Jurassic Park, so we asked the driver where all of the dinosaurs were. We spent $85 on this day and considering we did nothing yesterday ...

The rest of the day was spent in a flop. We had lunch, napped, and eventually returned out for dinner at a very fancy place that served eggplant parmas and smoked salmon, camembert, almond, and pineapple salads.