Yesterday we boarded our seven o’clock ‘ferry’ from Santa Cruz to San Cristobal. Almost two-and-a-half hours of sheer hell!
It was a rather dreary morning with heavy skies and the usual smirr we’d become used to here in the Galapagos, a gift of the ‘Humboldt Current’.
Back to our ‘ferry’. A fifteen meter fibreglass motorboat hull, gutted and filled with twenty scantily cushioned upright seats arranged in two longitudinal rows of double seats. The sea wasn’t particularly choppy, a few white froths just appearing on the tops of some waves, but still quite a swell.
As we left the shelter of the bay and the two substantial outboard motors revved up, we got an immediate taste of the morning ahead. For my part it was trying to keep down the flavours of everything I’d eaten that morning. Although Vanessa held on bravely for the first hour, it was sadly to the back of the boat.
The one consolation of motion sickness is that one minute you’re feeling like you’d be better dead, the next you rapidly get back to feeling almost normal again.
We hadn’t actually booked any accommodation here, so we just walked across from the pier and sipped some tea, it does still take a little while from that ‘almost normal’ to actual normal.
As we looked around there was no sign whatsover of the cloud clearing as it usually did on Santa Cruz; it seems that our friend the Humboldt has even more of an influence here on San Cristobal. At least the room we finally obtained here was as light and airy as our last room had been dark and dingy. Not that we spend much time in our rooms, but in Santa Cruz we avoided ever going back until it really was time for bed.
The weather didn’t brighten at all that day, except for a slight blink of the sun on the horizon just as it was setting. Still we saw a blacktip shark being playfully herded ashore by a young sea lion, a Blue Footed Booby and many turtles.
Today started even worse than yesterday, but, apart from the wind, it did eventually brighten up and we went to Playa Loberia where we snorkelled and were graced by the presence of two giant marine turtles and swam with the seals. And hundreds of brightly coloured fish. Although the bay was fairly sheltered, the wind and surf did still kick up a lot of weed, so the water wasn’t as clear as it could have been.
Still we loved it.
