Galapagos Day 4: Cerro Colorado Tortoise Reserve

We got up in the morning with heavy hearts.  After breakfast we were leaving the ship for good.  Before leaving, I took pictures of the routes the ship does.

We had done the eastern itinerary in purple.

I want to come back though for the yellow western itinerary.

The trick is finding sail dates that match school breaks.

After breakfast, we all hung out on deck waiting for our group to be called.  Elena decided to hang out at the bar.

Eventually, the called the boobies.  We got in our zodiac with our guide Cornelia and sailed to the port of Baquerizo Moreno.  It was weird to see a town after all the wilderness we had experienced on the islands.  The sea lions were still there, but they were hanging out on fishing boats.

Elena was excited to see a prickly pear cactus, but it was a decoration in the middle of a drop off road.

We walked down one of the main streets until we came to our bus.  

The bus was going to take us on the 40 minute drive to the tortoise reserve.  Along the way, Cornelia told us about the town and the history of human habitation on the island.  She and her family live on Santa Cruz, one of the other inhabited islands.  It was an interesting drive, but we were all excited to see the giant tortoises.

The tortoises had been on the brink of extinction because of human interference.  Because they can live for months at a time without food or water, pirates and other sailors would stop by the Galapagos, collect a bunch, and then store them in the ship's hold during a long trip to have fresh meat in the middle of the ocean.  It's estimated that over a 100,000 tortoises were taken this way.  That has obviously been stopped now, and there are breeding programs on San Cristobal and Santa Cruz which are successfully reintroducing tortoises to the wild.  They keep a few of each species at the breeding centers as "insurance", but most of the occupants are little ones being protected until they are ready to take care of themselves.  We met a big guy almost as soon as we walked in.

Adult male tortoises can way around 600 pounds!  The females are still large, weighing in around 300 pounds.  They move slowly and deliberately, but they do move.  We stuck to the path to see what we could see.  It was paved at the beginning but then became rocky.

As we walked, we spotted a beautiful little yellow bird as well as some giant tortoises, including one outside a nest it had built to stay warm at night.

Our destination was the nursery, where the youngest tortoises were being kept.  They were in cages that could be double wire sealed at night.  One of the other human introduced dangers are rats, which like to snack on baby tortoises.

Each tortoise has a number painted on its back to identify it.  Next, we moved on to the larger enclosures where they keep the ones that are three to five years old.  These ones were walking around, enjoying their snacks and their water hole.

Cornelia explained that the tortoises' shells were kind of like fingernails.  The number of squares stays the same, but they expand outward.  She said it's not quite like a tree, with one ring per year, but you can estimate how old a tortoise is by looking at its shell.  As we left, we came across an older one sitting in the middle of our path.

She moved a bit to the side and pooped.  The guide told us we could walk by and not to be alarmed if we heard a shrieking sound as it was just the air escaping as the tortoise pulled her head into her shell to protect herself from us.

They can actually pull their heads in quite far, as we discovered when we encountered another one along our path that was facing towards us.

Most of the tortoises couldn't have cared less about us and just went about their daily business.

It was an awesome way to end our Galapagos trip.  After the tortoise reserve, we went back to town to grab some lunch.  Cornelia recommended a restaurant called Casablanca, and we invited her to join us.  It was a nice lunch, and we had time to pop across the street and do some shopping while we were waiting for our lunch to arrive.

Finally, it was time to head to the airport and say goodbye to the Galapagos.

There was quite a bit of traffic in Quito getting back to the AirBnb, but we had potato soup waiting for us, and after a nice dinner we all went up to bed, still feeling some of the swaying left over from being on the ship for four days.