Day 1 in Galapagos - San Cristobal

The next morning, we caught our flight out, stopping in Guayaquil before landing on San Cristobal Island, where we met our tour guides, Pablo and Franklin. They took us to check into our hotel, which was actually fairly nice, except for the roaches, and the fact that the only water in the shower was scalding hot. But our room did have a hammock and a nice mural of sealife in it. Our mural was tame compared to another room though, which supposedly had a wall full of naked merfolk.

Our room on San Cristobal

We had a short break before our first activity, so we went down to the dock and the beach, where we discovered our first sea lions lying on the rocks, and swimming around in the water right on the beach! We also saw our first baby sea lion here.


After our walk on the beach, we went by car to the top of one of the volcanoes on San Cristobal.

View from the top of the volcano

And then, our return trip was a downhill bike ride. This was pretty fun at first, even for Kate, who took a spill into some bushes early on. However, it turned out that the "easy downhill" bike ride quickly turned into riding up huge hills and then down them again. We were still a bit worn out from all of our hiking in the cloud forest and ended up having to walk our bikes up some of the bigger hills. The main portion of the ride ended at a beach which had oodles of sea lions, and we spent about an hour watching them all.

Sea lions sleeping

Our favorite sea lion that we named "Little Troublemaker", picking a fight
Kate on the beach, with sea lions on the rocks behind her

After a nice relaxing hour on the beach, we found out that we had to bike back to town. Our legs were not happy about this, but luckily it was mostly downhill. That night, back in the room, Kate was lying in bed, and was pleasantly surprised when Yoel started scratching her back lightly, only to look up and realize that Yoel was halfway across the room. Yoel was put on roach killing duty for the rest of the night.