On the two hour boat trip to our next island destination, we were lucky enough to spot huge pods of bottle nose dolphins, who came to play off the bow of the boat, and two Bride Whales, one of which we followed for quite a while as it periodically surfaced for air. Floreana, which is the smallest of the islands we stayed on and in some ways the most fascinating. It was first inhabited around 1930, when a German couple decided to settle there. Not long after, another German couple followed them, with their young son and all was well with the small Germanic community. Unless you count the fact that the first couple, the husband being a dentist in his previous live, decided that as they would have no access to dental services in their new island life, they should pull out all of their teeth and share the set of metal dentures that he had made for them. Dental issues aside, all was well, until an Austrian Baroness arrived on the island with her two lovers. She quickly proclaimed herself Empress of Floreana and did all kinds of annoying things to upset the tranquil island life, things like bathing in the drinking water of the other families, you know, stuff that would get you kicked out of the Big Brother house in a heart beat. All this led to people steadily being poisoned and mysteriously dissappearing, generally all kinds of skull duggery which would have the Channel Four producers green with envy that they can't get away with that kind of thing, before the watershed at least!
The hotel we stayed in is run by the Granddaughter of the original German settles, the Wittmers, who's Grandmother seems to have been heavily implicated in most of the murders/accidental deaths of the 1940s. It's the kind of bedtime story that leads to a very troubled night's sleep, I can tell you. Anyway, we stopped at another couple of really cool snorkle sights, the first; Devil's Crown is a half submerged volcano crater, the second; Champion, where we saw Parrot fish, Scorpian fish, Damsel fish, White tipped reef sharks and lots more sea turtles. We were really lucky to be suddenly surrounded by Blue Footed Boobies diving all around us. They come from about 15m in the air and shoot into the water, catching a fish and swallowing it whole before they even get back to the surface. We were spinning round and round in the water trying to catch a good look at them, above and below the surface, when a huge Pelican almost landed on Nic's head, it was fantastic, I'm just sorry I didn't capture the look on her face on film, it was hilarious!
Floreana is also home to a Giant Tortoise breeding programme. The Giant Tortoises are endemic to the islands, and are under threat from introduced species, like goats and rats, killing their young and destroying their food sources and habitats. The National Park Service is doing it's best to revive the numbers of Tortoises to their previous levels, before the introduced species arrived on the islands and before Pirates and Buccaneers nearly made them extinct by using them as a food source. Speaking of Pirates and Buccaneers (anyone know the difference between the two? Answers on a postcard please, we never worked it out), Floreana also has an impressive series of Pirate caves, where Johnny Depp types used to stop off between raids to rest up and replenish their strength with a little tortoise meat.
Floreana gave us our first glimpse of the worlds only Northern Hempishere penguins. The Galapagos pretty much sits on the Equator, so they're not far into the Northern Hemisphere, but still, enough to cause some controversy at the next pub quiz discussion about Polar bears and Penguins! Apparently a penguin swam right past me on two seperate occasions while we were in the water, but they're speedy wee things and I didn't spot either of them.
