GALÁPA-GOSH – PT. 6: Banana iguana.

A new day on the Galápagos Islands and a new Galápagosh for us…

Still on the island of Santa Cruz (on which we saw yesterday’s giant tortoises), this morning we were checking out a different spot thereon – Cerra Dragon (Dragon Hill in English, here) (in the afternoon we were headed over to the tiny Bartolomé Island).

What made this day special was the way we didn’t see just one Ecuad-awesomeness, but a full three! Oh my Galápa-goodness! Let me go through them one by one. In this post – #1…

The ‘Galapagos land iguana’.

Oh my guana! Check these resplendent reptiles out!

These iguanas are afraid of humans, so we had to take their pics from quite a distance. We still got some sensational snaps though. DZ’s hi-end photo kit comes in handy at times ).

But after a while it seemed the shy iguanas had gotten used to us and stopped running off, and just carried on about their business as if we weren’t there.

Since we weren’t scaring them anymore we got a bit closer… just in time to view this iguana’s attempts at picking a few berries off a bush. The whole enterprise took nearly 10 minutes. She was just so slow and clumsy, and needed several attempts at guiding the berries into her mouth with her tongue! This spectacle proved a hit with the audience – us. We wanted to go up and help her out, but thought that might be pushing her new boldness with us a bit too far…

Then another iguana appeared to march directly at olly_ru in a slightly menacing manner; at least, that’s what it looked like at first. But then… it turned out the reptile simply wanted to walk past her to get to where she clearly had some important business! Phew. But for a moment she had olly_ru – a serial-volcano-conqueror known to have been calm upon meeting Papuans! – wondering if she was about to be attacked! And it’s all been caught on video:

And cactuses everywhere – of all shapes and sizes…

It was a goodbye glance at ‘Dragon Hill’ for us, then back to the ship. It was time to get going…

And that was the first Ecuad-awesomeness of this day. The other two – in upcoming posts…

All the pics from the Galápagos Islands and Ecuador are here.