Dos también

Today we went to two islands, just like yesterday. One thing about the Galapagos: the animals are NOT afraid. Just check out this picture of me and a sea lion:

Like I said, not afraid. Anyway, the two islands we went to were once again again a snorkeling island (that we actually didn't set foot on this time) and a hiking/ animal island. I'll start with the first one- the snorkeling expedition.

The wildlife started out with small fish. During this period, we saw a huge swarm of "Dory" fish swimming past. The school was so long that it took about 10 seconds for them all to swim past. Count in your head for the full effect.

Then, suddenly, the guide called out to us. Swimming over to where he was, we discovered two Galapagos white-tipped sharks! They were elusive, swimming fast away from us at times, but we persevered- or just floated there for a bit, depending on your perspective- and received great views of the shark. We would later witness another one sleeping in a small crack in a rock.

Not long afterwards, the guide pointed out another large animal. It was a grand, big animal, even for its species. It was a playful ball of cuteness- a sea lion! It enjoyed itself and swam in twirls and loops around and under us. It even seemed to befriend my dad, swimming downwards when my dad swam down. 

Our second island was the home of the colony of sea lions, with one of the members pictured above. I will present it to you as it was presented to us- in factoids.

- Each cactus has its own iguana waiting under it. It gets its food by waiting for the fruit of the cactus to fall off. As we observed by the "speed-up" of our kind guide, there is a scramble for the piece when it falls, with the fastest iguana and/or the closest one winning.

-Many animals have no predators here in the Galapagos. This is unfortunately illustrated by carcasses lying untouched. One animal even appeared to be petrified. It seemed to have been petrified at the moment of its death, because when we found it, its tail was raised!

-Baby sea lions nurse until they are about one year old. They start training for hunting at about six months, and play a lot to get more practice and toughness. We were lucky enough to see one nursing. When the mom wanted to be finished, she rolled over, but the baby crawled over her. The mother even waddled away, but the baby chased her and forced her to give up. It was an amazing spectacle.

Wildlife report:

Big. Crabs.

Baby marine iguana

Marine iguana

Baby seagull (Yes, it's that dead-looking lump of wet fur.)  It is possible that it was just born today.

More iguanas

Incredibly rare Galapagos pygmy seagull

Note: hoax.

Bonus photos!

Sea lion contrast. Some sea lions are very different from one another.

Sea lion that wants a hug. Cuteness Alert!

More Bonus! Because everybody loves bonus!

We saw two amazing and rare things over the course of our journey. One of them was mating manta rays. They splashed in and out of the water as part of the ritual. We saw one out on the boat that leapt about four times its own length.

We also saw an even rarer sight: a hammerhead shark. It was easily recognizable because of its hammer-shaped head, and our guide estimated that it was about 20 feet long. If you've ever met me, that means it was about four times my height! That thing could probably eat me; it was a good thing we saw it from high up on a cliff.

Spanish contest standings:

Aidan- 33

Mom- 4

Dad- 18

Dos

Hello, loyal followers! You are going to love today's wildlife report. Have patience, and you will be able to witness many things, not least incredible cuteness!

Today's theme was "Island Tour". We visited two different islands, each with their own unique land and water wildlife. That is, if you can call biting sand flies "wildlife".

Before we get started, here are some photos. Gaze upon them in wonder, for they took a really long time to upload.

This is me in our tent.

This is the Klingbeil-dubbed "Lump Island", noticed for its unique and slightly blocky shape. We never got to visit it.

The first island we visited was North Seymour. This was where we found all of the non-fly land animals. We hiked across flat, rocky land, that was sprinkled with red-tinted stones. The terrain changed abruptly when we arrived at the beach, to grainy sand and patches of black rocks that housed sea lions and crabs and curved out into the sea. The rest of this island can pretty much be summed up by the wildlife report.

Redundant title wildlife report:

Giant Lizards

(They eat cacti!)

Blue-footed booby

Hermit Crab

A Rare Red Footed Booby

Frigate Bird

Frigate Bird with pouch inflated

Frigate bird sleeping on pouch

Baby frigate bird

Baby frigate bird

Galapagos snake

Sea lions hugging

Sea lion up close

Red crab

We have little in the way of pictures for our second island, because nearly all of the interesting life was underwater. We saw an extremely colorful, coral-eating parrotfish, which, as you may know, is very large. We also saw a fish that looked almost exactly like the parrotfish, but was a bright orange and blue. Again, not much on land, but there was a surprise for us at the nearby lake...

Wildlife report part II

us

A flamingo at the lake!

Marine iguana

The marine iguanas were incredible swimmers. They could use their powerful tails to thrash through the water, even against the waves. They could even, as we observed, bodysurf and ride the tide.

We returned to the hotel (if you can call it that) by boat. That's all for now!

Spanish contest standings:

Aidan- 31

Mom- 4

Dad- 16

Una día interesante

We have finally touched down in the Galapagos! Today was the quest for the elusive giant tortoise. Or not...

Wildlife Report

Giant tortoise

Giant tortoise

Giant tortoise

Giant tortoise

Giant tortoise

Giant tortoise

Giant tortoise

And those are just the ones we photographed. We probably saw over twenty. Today was our day for wildlife, and not just tortoises- just within the very brief trip from the airport to the boat that would take us between two islands, we saw an iguana, a frigate bird, pelicans, and a shark. 

So here's the summary of our day:

First, we headed off to the airport. After taking a plane to the Galapagos- a surprisingly long two-hour flight- we drove to a boat that took us across the sea to another island of the Galactic Octopus, as my dad put it- a surprisingly short distance. You could easily see the other shore from your bank. The sea appeared to be nothing more than a river.

From there, we started the long drive to our tent (with a slight hindrance in the form of a giant tortoise in the middle of the road). Yes, we're staying in a tent. Along the way, we paused for lunch and subsequently took a hike. The hike was when we saw most of those tortoises. We also learned many fascinating things about giant tortoises. For instance, the males are about three times larger than the females, and all of them live up to 150 years. The younger they are, the more wrinkles they have on their shell.

Pictured below is one of the trees that we encountered, with a sign describing it. I'm not sure if I'll ever eat apples again...

In the final stretches of our hike, we encountered a pond covered in red algae. We spotted some ducks, baby ducks, and "water chickens" on the lake. The lake appeared solid, but ducks swam through the algae seemingly unhindered.

By the way, the restaurant that we ate at had a real shell of a giant tortoise in it. It had a surprisingly wooden texture to it, and was lighter than it appeared.

The rest was just more driving and chilling in our tent.

Spanish contest standings:

Aidan- 9

Mom- 2

Dad- 13

Aquí vamos!

Hola from Ecuador, and welcome to the much-awaited fourth generation of Wandering Aidan! Of course, the first day is always the most aburrido (boring). Today was one of the dreaded travel days, but you can expect interesting things tomorrow. Here in the mainland portion of the país (country) of Ecuador, the time difference is one hour ahead of Denver. However, it is the same as it is in Denver over in the Galapagos, where we will be spending much of our vacation. By then, we should have interesting pictures, but we don't have any photos for today, nor did we have much to photograph. We are staying in an ordinary hotel room, which will only be ours for tonight and a bit of tomorrow before we leave.

Finally, we have started a Spanish contest among our family to see who can use Spanish the most in regular conversation. The standings will be posted at the end of each blog day.

Thanks for reading, and welcome back!

Spanish contest standings:

Aidan- 3

Mom- 1

Dad- 4

Adventures on Sentosa II- the Sequel!

Here was the weather forecast for beautiful Singapore today:

12:00am-7:30am: Drowsy with scattered dreams. In other words, sleeping time.

7:30am-12:00pm: Positively cool and breezy! We only started sweating about twenty minutes in. Singapore is only about one degree above the equator, remember.

12:00pm-12:40pm approx: Rainy.

12:40pm-1:40pm: Cool from rain.

1:40pm-5:00pm: Extremely, ridiculously hot, with life-sapping humidity.

Anyway, today we revisited the island of Sentosa, an attraction-filled island that popped up in the first vacation documentation on this blog. In case you weren't here back then, one of the activities that we tried was a segway™ tour. The tour wasn't available until hours ahead, but we managed to secure ourselves a spot on the fun ride track. The segway™ controls are as follows: lean forward to move forward, lean back to stop, and lean the handlebars to steer. There are only two wheels, but it's an easy ride thanks to gyroscopes.

It's not all fun and games, though. We saw a kid who didn't know what turn he was supposed to make, got confused, and subsequently smacked into a thick tree. ... Okay, that was me. Let's just say that I got distracted.

Afterwards, we wandered around Sentosa for a while, and after not finding anything that spoke to us, went and saw a show at a place called "animal encounters". It was a show where birds performed various tricks. We didn't even know that there was a show when we arrived, but decided to make the most of it. Thank you for reading about our most recent outing! Tomorrow we will be heading home.  Up next: Ecuador and the Galapagos!

Bonus photo!

This was taken on the plane ride to Singapore.
Someone put up their foot right next to me!

Beach to City

Hello all.  Guest writer Lisa here today.  Aidan didn't have much to write about so I am filling in with my summary of Thailand.  We spent a few hours at the beach today and then flew to Singapore.  We had to get back to a major United serviced city in order to fly home and decided to visit Singapore instead of going back through Bangkok.

Last day relaxing by the pool

So for my summary of Thailand...
First off, Bangkok.  I knew it was a big, busy city but I wasn't prepared for how big and busy.  The chaos and grime was hard on my OCD type personality.  I don't have any good pictures to demonstrate the odd differences everywhere.  For instance, we traveled by river shuttle boat and saw shopping centers next to shacks (no exaggeration, barely four walls with cut outs for windows).  The streets are narrow and traffic is crazy.  But the sky train runs efficiently and is very clean.  And strangely, though there appears to be a lot of poverty (based on the number of dilapidated buildings), we didn't spot any homeless people or people begging for money like you see in other big cities. One of my favorite places wasn't any place we set out to see.  When heading towards the hotel shuttle boat station we came across this.

This was called a Thai Spirit House.  They are placed in the corner of properties.  This was a very large one with a beautiful tree but smaller businesses will have smaller ones too.

Chiang Mai was a more spread out city and not quite as chaotic.  But it was still far from organized.  Nobody seems to follow any traffic laws such as stopping at red lights or staying in their lane.  The sidewalks, if they exist, are narrow and overrun with street vendors.  One really cool thing about the city is that it has an old town area with parts of an old wall remain and the old moat has been turned into ponds and fountains.  We took a tuk tuk back to our hotel one evening and it was a highlight of our trip.  They no longer use pedal powered rickshaw like vehicles.  Instead they have moped powered tuktuks.  They are open on the sides and have neon lights and blasting music, the antithesis of the old fashioned type.

View from our TukTuk

The beach resort was beautiful.  There were a lot of European travelers there since there are direct flights to Phuket from some European cities.  We were surprised at the number of creatures we saw every day.  Just on a ten minute walk on the beach this morning we counted eight hermit crabs and 34 sand crabs.  There are many lizards also and prehistoric sized bugs (often dead, likely due to a serious pesticide program).

So we are in Singapore now.  Back to efficient taxi queues and not having to worry about being ripped off.  Aidan will blog about our one short day in Singapore tomorrow.

It's a rough life

It's a rough life here in Khao Lak. To prove it, here are some pictures.

I decided to go boogie boarding today. Once you get used to it, it gets pretty easy, as seen below.

 To add once more to the wildlife sightings, here is a giant snail and a sand-colored crab. This particular crab has evolved an incredible camouflage. Can you find it in the picture?

Pictured below is me relaxing with a smoothie at the bar located in the pool.

We encountered a beautiful inlet today, too. An inlet is where ocean water runs into the land past the usual shoreline. On the right, you can see a miniature cliff made entirely of sand.

Bonus!

Sorry, I don't have any bonus photos for you, but I do have a bonus wildlife sighting. While we were relaxing in the pool, we noticed another lizard scampering along the far edge... But this one was about two feet long! A hotel attendant was attempting to shoo it off with an uprooted umbrella stick from one of the pool chairs, which the lizard didn't seem to mind too much.