Galapagos Cruise: Days 4-8

We're currently in LA with a few hours to kill before our 21-hour flight to Bangkok, so I might as well get caught up with the blog. :)

We spent the next five days of the cruise exploring Floreana, Isabela, Fernandina, Santiago, and Bartolome Islands, getting up at 5am to see sea turtles nesting, snorkeling with penguins and sharks, riding through mangrove bays to watch penguins chasing large schools of jumping fish, and hiking to areas where we could view flamingos, penguins, flightless cormorants, blue-footed boobies, iguanas, sea lions, rays, pelicans, and more, participating in their feeding/breeding activities. Seeing penguins and flamingos in the same place is very surreal, haha. Oh - and we got to see small Galapagos dolphins (~1m) playing at a distance, and then the next day got to watch a huge pod of bottlenose dolphins follow the front of the ship's bow, jumping and diving. Amazing! Unfortunately, I did lose some clothes off the back of the ship that I hung out to dry - maybe there's a sea turtle swimming along in my tie-dye shirt somewhere. :)

Here are our favorite pics:

Punta Cormoran	Nesting Sea Turtle
Flamingos	Post Office Bay
Golden Rays	Lava Cactus colonizing new lava fields
Oasis on new lava field	Lava Injuries
Blue Footed Boobies	All together now
Galapagos Penguin	Boobies feeding
Blue Heron Chicks in Nest	Dinghy Ride
Dinghy in Sunset	Land Iguana
Marine Iguana returning from feeding	Sally Lightfoot Crab
Us with the Marine Iguanas	Flightless Cormorants
Marine Iguana	Lava Cacti
Galapagos Fur Sea Lion	Pelican
Pelicans feeding on fish head	Crabs scavenging fish head
Dolphin jumping beside Samba	Dolphin swimming in front of the Samba
View from Pinnacle Rock	Samba shipmates