Post Office Bay on the north side of Floreana Island hosts an unusual post office. There is no building, no workers and no stamps. Instead, there is a barrel on a post. None the less this is a real post office and post does get delivered worldwide. The post office was set up at the end of the 18th century by whalers who often spent years away from home. The principle is that anyone can leave post there and no stamp is required. But you also need to check through all the other post that has been left in case you can deliver it. If for example, your ship was soon to head back to London then you would take mail addressed to London with you. Often the mail would finally be hand delivered. It was a slow system. Might take years. But it worked and it still works now. We left a few cards that may turn up one day. Some of the other travellers that were heading home soon took cards with them.
In the afternoon we went out on a glass bottomed boat. Really, if you want to look at the sub-sea life, you should dive or snorkel. Diane has never done snorkelling and was not too keen on learning on her own. My legs were not up swimming. So, we took to the glass bottomed boat. It seems like a promising idea. Unfortunately, all I can really report is that it is better than nothing. You can see a little of what is going on in the ocean. But not very much. I soon got a sore neck. In fact, I ended up spending more time looking at the birds around us than the fish underneath.
Next day, we were much further south. Like most of the Galapagos islands, Santiago Island also has many other names. These include James Island, San Marcos Island and Duke of York Island. Our first visit was a RHIB cruise in a bay at the north of the island. When we arrived, there was another tour boat there. This happened quite a few times. The tour operators work hard to try and stay apart so usually you get to feel like you have the place to yourself. We got close to a pelican that was fishing. It used the big sack of skin under its beak like a net. There were blue footed boobies dotted along the shore. They mostly just looked as us in that slightly enigmatic way. We also saw quite a lot of swallow-tailed gulls. Some of these appeared to be pairing up.
We were settling into life on board the Santa Cruz II. Up in the morning for breakfast of fresh fruit, nuts and yoghurt. One of the cooks made omelettes to order which I really liked. Then off for a landing of some sort. The weather was the same every day. Warm but not too hot. Cloudy with sunny intervals. Occasional rain. Light clothes and a raincoat were all we ever needed. Lunch was a buffet of salads with a few hot dishes. I tried to stick to the salads but often there would be something very tasty looking that would lead me astray. At lunch we got to choose what we wanted for dinner. The menu was generally very good. I often had pasta but there were usually some other interesting dishes. Then came the afternoon landing after which I would retire to the cabin to take all the photographs off my cameras. Sometimes I would have time to process a handful that we could show to some of the other guests. Pre-dinner drinks on the back deck. If we were lucky this would include the sunset. Each evening there was a presentation at the bar about what was going to happen the next day. Then came the evening meal which would often end with us chatting for a while with whoever we shared a table. Early to bed ready to repeat the next day.
In the afternoon we had a wet landing at a beach to the west. Wet landing means that you will get your feet wet. Some people have shoes that are fine in the water. We tended to land in bare feet and then put shoes on once we were ashore. The shoreline was packed with marine iguanas and fur seals (sea lions). As usual, there were brightly coloured sally lightfoot crabs running around and I also spotted some sort of curlew. Google claims it to be a eurasian whimbrela, but I really have no idea. The big excitement of the afternoon was a pod of Orca swimming past. I managed to get a photograph of one of them. On the way back to the RHIB, I spotted another land iguana.
