On our first full day on Santa Cruz, our base for our stay in the Galapagos Islands, we headed to the wet highlands of the island, where the Galapagos tortoises like to hang out. The tortoises move freely in the highlands, even going onto private ranch lands. Rather than fighting it, some of the land owners have turned to tourism, and the ranch we went to, Rancho Primicias, is one of the main ones. We took a taxi from Puerto Ayora and for $40 he took us the 30 minutes or so to the ranch, stayed while we visited and then took us back.
Once we arrived at Rancho Primicias, we paid $5 per person, were given some boots to walk through the muddy grass, and took off in search of tortoises.
We didn’t have to search long, because they were EVERYWHERE! We would walk towards one tortoise, and then easily spot the next one a few yards away.
The tortoises were happily hanging out, munching on grass, or relaxing in a pool of mud, oblivious to the humans wandering around them.
While we were there, there was only one other family and a single guy on his own (who traded photo taking with us and got us this great one – doesn’t it look like the big guy is posing for us?)
We didn’t spend long at Rancho Primicias – maybe 40 minutes or so, but we really enjoyed it! Seeing these tortoises in the wild was a highlight of our trip.
On the way back to Puerto Ayora, very close to Rancho Primicias, was a lava tunnel that was created when lava flows and the outer shell of the lava cools faster than the lava running through the center, leaving behind this shell. Our taxi driver dropped us off at the entrance and we walked through the tunnel, which was well-lit and, at the beginning, pretty big.
However, as we neared the end, the walls got a bit narrower, and right near the end, the ceiling was so low that we had to belly crawl under it!
Our driver was waiting for us at the end of the tunnel and then we proceeded back to Puerto Ayora, where he dropped us off at the Charles Darwin Research Station, best known (to tourists anyway) as the home of the breeding center, where dozens of tortoises from all the islands of the Galapagos are hatched and raised until old enough to likely survive, then released onto the island from which they (or their parents) came.
We walked along a walkway full of informational signs (I love me some informational signs), which focused on the tortoises, along with other endemic species, with a conservation focus.
Finally, we arrived at the breeding center, and got to see tortoises that had been hatched in the last few years (they were grouped by year and island), along with a few fully grown residents of the center.
Though the babies were of course cute, they just sort of looked like your average turtle at that size. What I found the most fascinating was the grown tortoises from different islands that lived at the Center. The tortoises from an island like Floriana have evolved to have saddle-shaped shells, and have the ability to raise their neck and head up high, to reach leaves from trees and plants. Meanwhile, the Santa Cruz tortoises have always had enough food at ground level, so they never evolved the ability to raise their necks, and thus have flatter shells.
It was a fun day devoted to those amazing, unique tortoises that are such good ambassadors of the Galapagos Islands.
Adventures with more Galapagos animals are coming in our next blog post, so stay tuned.
