Monday, July 18, 2011

42nd post ... about a trip where i was gone 8 days ... hmmmm

so here is a break from the galapagosness of the trip and a bit about the vacationiness .... after our hike, bike and kayak day, we came home to our galapagos home .... the safari camp was same and sweet as ever ... we snacked, showered, napped, read, wrote .... it was wednesday night, the middle of our trip, and i actually caught up on my journal writing .... sophie finished her first harry potter book ( i can now tell you, weeks later, that she is on book five ... that's a lot of reading done!)

we played chess before dinner and then we had our favorite galapagos dinner to date .... appetizer: salad and homemade chicken tenders .... dinner: mushroom pasta carbonara .... dessert: strawberry mousse, mandarina mousse, in a martini glass, with filaments of glass candy stretching up out of it .... fancy! gorgeous! delish!

over breakfast the next day, we marveled again at how well we were being fed! how extraordinary the food is at the galapagos safari camp ..... chocolate pancakes! .... fresh fruit plate! ... cheese and meats and fancy breads ..... and best of all, these cheesy, doughy, small, warm, round balls of breakfast perfection ... we were all in love with them  .... yum ...

ok ... back to the galapagos adventure part:


after breakfast, jaime took us to our yate narel drop off .... we got on the bus with alejandro and headed off to the boat ... onto the panga (don't forget to pout on your lifejacket) ... and to the boat ... and off we went to snorkel ... different than our other boat days, we were snorkeling first ....


 also different than our other boat days, there was no landing, no beach, no spot to rest .....the boat anchored in the channel between santa cruz and baltra ( i think ) .... we got on the panga and were taken around a point and told to jump in and swim back ... where we were dropped, you could not see the boat that we were meant to be swimming back to ... and it seemed very, very, very, very, very, very far to swim ..... we complicated thing by breaking one of our masks ... but alejandro had a spare for us .... have i said, lately, how well he took care of us?


luckily, this was our third day of snorkeling and the kids were confident ... if this had been our first day activity, it would have been much harder to talk them into the water!! in fact, one couple on our boat, traveling with their adult (though very young) daughter, were planning to snorkel, but then when they say where and what and how far, they changed their minds ... basically, i was super proud of my kids ....especially since two of them are usually more cautious than brave .... not criticizing there ... cautious is good ... and easier to parent than brave!!

 

 this photo below is arturo, our panga driver and first mate ... while he did some snorkeling (WOW he can hold his breath) alejandro stayed on the panga above water ....
 we swam for a LONG LONG time ... and it was the coldest water of our trip, i think .... part of the swimming time, sophie got out of the water and into the little boat ... it was similar to our biking the day before, we had someone following to pick up stragglers .. sophie wasn't straggling, but when she needed to rest, she did ... alejandro and arturo let her steer for a bit ...

 we saw no penguins, flamingos, sealions, extraordinary things ... but there was one shark sighting, multiple rays, and OH MY GOODNESS the fish ... the fish here were far more extraordinary than at the other snorkel spots ... maybe because the other big creatures weren't around to bother (and eat) them ....

 there was one particular school of fish that BLEW MY wee MIND ....  i think there were a million of them ... conservatively ... if you told me there were three million, i'd believe you ... it was an enormous school of not so big fish ... silvery white, not stunning in their look at all ... but the stream of them was thick and endless .... endless ... millions of fish ... andy and i were right next to each other, stunned together, and he kept swimming into them .... i have ten pictures of the fish parted, andy NOT in the frame,  where i tried to take pictures of him IN them ... to no avail ... that underwater camera's hang time to the click is infinitely long ... this is the only pic with him in the frame ...

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