Lima - Galapago Islands

We eventually arrived into Lima at 8am a day late as our flight from New York had been cancelled and we ended up staying another day in the city...
We had to wait another 6 hours then for our connecting flight to Quito so we could get our Galapagos trip connection the following morning...so we were exhausted!

We had booked a taxi to our hostel the Secret Garden and all was going well - checked in, signed up for dinner and free booze for the night, until we remembered our (very expensive) Galapagos Islands trip that started the following day at 7am and we had still to arrange pickup and flights etc to the islands!

Thankfully though the manager of the company True Colours - Peter, had left me amil which Ger only happened to notice on the communal notice board.. pure random! God love Peter for he had left a hand made brown handbag for me with all our letters, boarding passes, maps etc and he said said he himself would be at our hostel at 7am to pick us up. He was well sound ... so we lashed into the free beers on the rooftop patio to celebrate!

The following morning as you can expect was hard going and only for Peter taking our luggage and generally being our guardian angel and mother we probably wouldnt have made it to the airport! We did though and the flight was grand as its only 2.5 hours from the coast.

Once we arrived we were all separated and given our yellow/red stickers for each boat cruise, it was like being back at school on a school trip away but we didnt mind as porters were assigned that carried our rucksacks for us - very posh indeed for us two!
Our boat was called the MY1 Coral and we got the bus to take us to Puerto Ayora first before boarding the boat for lunch and start the cruise. The place was gorgeous and the sun was even shining, our first view of island life and it was fab!

The boat was lush, we forgot what it looked like and because we booked it early we got a cabin on the top deck - it was huge compared to the ones in the bottom of the boat so we were well pleased!

Once on board we sat down to a great lunch and afterwards our first trip out was to the Charles Darwin Stationand Santa Cruz island and the gigantic tortoises.. We were dumbstruck when we seen these lads, they were just huge and you could walk in and around them no bother at all! We spent ages here just looking at them and how slow they move, given they are about 100 years old though they were doing well in our books!

Our first day over and it had been awesome we all headed back to the boat and the 3 course dinner and cocktails were waiting, we felt like royalty it was great. There was about 30 of us on the boat and it had been a great start!

The next day we were headed for Espanola island......this island was just full of animals and all the cameras got a fair beating that day! We got to see the famous marine iguanas, blue footed boobies and their flirty dancing, albatrosses on whats called the albatross airport on the island, nazca boobies, swallow tailed gulls, sally lightfoot crabs, yellow finches, hawks, herons, pelicans... the list was never ending and they were all so tame that we were able to just walk through them and past them or even just sit beside them if you fancied... it was truly amazing! And most photos are of all of them flirting with each other.. the place is well cool total cattle market for animals!

We spent a full day here visisting the islands and then in the afternoon we all got into the sea from teh white sand beach and were joined by hundreds of sea lions! These guys were everywhere on the island and they came so close to you as they wanted to play with you, such a great day!

None of us could believe how friendly all the animals were, we got to swim with the sea lions and there were loads of tortoises as well just swimming right past it was amazing, even if some did look meaner than they were!

Everyone back on the boat and again a fab dinner and drinks and more overnight sailing to the next island the following morning for more of the same - Floreana Island!