I mentioned in the last post that I missed the last week of the semester. I had a good reason for that: for years we’ve been planning to go to the Galapagos, and we finally did it!

We spent about a week on a boat, visiting various islands and seeing the land animals and birds and going snorkeling to see the fish. Then we spent another week on a dive boat.

We got to see a lot of really fun birds and animals. The Galapagos are famous for the finches. The islands are very remote, and finches were some of the only land birds who made it out there. Finding lots of ecological niches empty that would be filled with other birds on the mainland, they speciated to fill the gaps. They’ve evolved into more than a dozen different species with adaptations like beak shapes that let them eat various different kinds of food. We saw many of the species of ground finches, and some of the specialized finches like the Cactus finches and Vampire finches, but we’ll have to spend more time inland someday to see the tree finches.

I was more taken by the seabirds, though. They are shockingly unconcerned about people, so you can get within a few yards of albatrosses, boobies, frigatebirds, and gulls without upsetting them.

Even the sea lions were chill. I wouldn’t get anywhere near a sea lion in California, but here pups frolic around you, adults come up and sniff you, and many mornings you wake up to find one lounging on the water-level deck of the boat or on the zodiacs.

I’m still working on processing my underwater footage. I have a good workflow for photos, and mostly kept up with editing down the photos each day. But I don’t have a good workflow for editing video. Because I’m shooting with an “action camera”, I take video instead of still photos. The fish or I always move too much for me to frame a good shot. With video, I can sometimes extract a decent short clip or still frame. But it takes work to find that clip.

We spent a few days not on boats. We’re in the habit of giving ourselves buffer days in case a connection goes wrong, so we had a day on the mainland before going to the Galapagos, a day between the two boats on the island of Santa Cruz, and a day in Quito at the end of the trip.

I’d like to spend more time in mainland Ecuador. Even taking altitude sickness medication, I didn’t have enough time to acclimate to the altitude in Quito. A few more days there and I would have felt much better.