ECUADOR, GALAPAGOS ISLANDS: ISABELA ISLAND - PUNTA MORENO AND ELIZABETH BAY

 March 22, 2022

During the night we sailed from Puerto Ayora to Punta Moreno, located on the largest of the Galapagos Islands, Isla Isabela. We spent the morning boating around Punta Moreno, and in the afternoon we traveled a little further up the coastline to Elizabeth Bay, shown below.

We had thought that being on a triple-hulled boat meant more stability in the water, but that was not the case, and during my first night on the Alya I did serious battle with my nemesis, motion sickness. Thank goodness we had a private bathroom. In spite of scopolamine patches and Dramamine, I felt queasy to some degree the entire trip, which was a bummer.

However, the next morning I was able to keep my breakfast down and join the others on an inflatable motorized raft, which I learned is called a panga, for an expedition to explore the coastline of Punta Moreno on the island of Isabela. There it is in the distance, as seen from our catamaran:

  

The Alya had two pangas, and every time we left the catamaran, we split our group of 19 (8 couples, 1 naturalist, 2 panga skippers) between the two.

We were not allowed to actually land and disembark on this day, but we still had some amazing experiences.

First, we pulled up alongside a coastline covered with a dense mangrove thicket.

As we got close, we saw that the trees were full of pelican nests.

Pelicans are huge, clumsy-looking birds with what looks like a toupee instead of feathers on their wings--at least from this angle.