The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

This was our home for the week.

Sorry, it’s actually completely hidden behind the big blue boat there except for the top of its mast. This is it.

It may actually be the smallest ship for week long trips in the Galapagos, carrying only 12 passengers. It is a motorized sail catamaran.

On occasion we would actually sail between locations. This was usually when we were doing a short navigation in the afternoon or evening and had both the wind and current in our favour. 

The boat was 10 meters wide by 21 meters long.

It towed along a small dinghy used for tendering to shore and boat rides along the coast.

Our room is about 2.5m x 2.5m x 3m, including the bathroom, and is located here, near the front of the boat.

This is the little staircase that goes down to our room. The kitchen is on the right.

It has a double bed up top and a single bed on the bottom.

You can almost stand up straight on the bottom.

The bathroom has a drain on the floor between the sink and the toilet. The sink converts into a hand held shower head.

There was a nice sundeck up top where we spent a lot of time, especially Kerri. Matt didn’t like it when the boat was rocking too much.

 They actually had extra canvas to extend to create  some shade. Although these pictures don’t show it because we were sailing.

This is the indoor sitting area where we had our nightly briefings so we’d know what the plan was for the next day.

The food was plentiful and delicious. Everyday we had a full breakfast, a snack between the morning hike and snorkel, then soup followed by lunch, a second afternoon snack between the afternoon snorkel and hike and finally dinner. There was also a dessert following both lunch and dinner. We miss the food already.

The eating area is an open air section at the back of the boat. We would usually be anchored while eating so not too much rocking. Although right after dinner we would set off for our next destination and it would rock pretty good when against the current.

This is Capitan Henry.

This is Pececito, the chef, in the kitchen.

This is our guide, Patricia.

We had a great time on the boat, even with all the rocking. At night we would lay down and get rocked gently (or less gently) to sleep. On the last night you got a moment of weightlessness on the top of each wave! On the bad nights we both would take gravol (Matt needed that in addition to the scopolomine). It was an amazing time and we were lucky to see so many different things. But as Patricia mentioned to us, anytime you go to the Galapagos you have to go with a blank slate as it changes so quickly that even an hour may pass and you may see something completely different.

This is a lava tunnel we went into in Santa Cruz. This one was quite short, while others on the island have been found to go for kilometres. On the way here there were some male tortoises fighting in the road, however as we approached the fight broke off and both hid until we were past.

There was not much headroom.

Some roots from trees above had made it down into the tunnel.

There were artificial lights inside, which were causing ferns to grow.

We started our day in the cloud forest in the highlands of Santa Cruz. We went to los gemelos, a pair of sinkholes.

It rained.

This is a bracken fern.

This is the trunk of the scalesia tree, which is covered in moss.

This is a millipede.

Overall, it was very green.

We visited a farm which has a lot of wild giant tortoises.

Some of them were afraid of us and hid inside of their shells.

It is a good way to hide.

They go into the pink pond to cool off.

Their faces seem kind of alien.

The shells are bone with an outer layer of keratin. The keratin layer forms in rings, but you can’t count how old the tortoise is by counting rings because they can generate multiple rings in a year.

Unfortunately in the really old tortoises the keratin layer tends to get polished or even worn right off, exposing the bone. So you can’t use the rings at all to tell how old a a really old tortoise is.

They had an old tortoise shell in the gift shop. The keratin had worn off, leaving only bone.

On the inside you could see the bump in the tummy that shows it was a male.

And the ridges on top where it connected to the spine.

Kerri barely fit inside.