Galapagos journals Day 4

Dear Diary,

Another day starts on the Galapagos and today we're on our first boat tour of the trip! We went to three places, a walk, a pool and a snorkel from the boat. The walk was through the barren, desert landscape, covered in cacti and scrub bushes, there we learnt the two ways a cactus can reproduce: like yuca, the leaf falls and the cactus grows from that or like most plants, the seed falls and it grows from the seed. The leaf grows much quicker and at 3 years it can be triple a 2 year old seed! 

The next stop was a natural swimming pool, and lots of jumps. It was in a huge canyon, joined to the sea, and formed when a volcano created this island. We swam up and down the deep, long and refreshingly cold pool and jumped off the platform, loving every moment of it! The velvet covered rocks felt soft underneath my feet and I loved swimming through the water with the seemingly bottomless water beneath me!

But my favourite stop was the open-water snorkelling from the boat. We snorkelled up to shark point, where, though there were no sharks, we saw huge shoals of fish and even one seal, the coral was amazing but my favourite thing was the giant sea urchin! It was huge and I liked the fact that at the base the spines were dark and towards the edge, they were whiter!

In the evening, Dan and I went out for another snorkel from a nearby beach and saw 2 baby sharks and a huge green sea turtle! I liked swimming with the turtle and dived down to swim alongside it - until I had to resurface and the turtle disappeared off into the depths.