Galapagos: Santa Cruz (Part 2 of 2)

After today's first round of activities, our guides each took a group to El Trapiche, a working farm in the highlands of Santa Cruz island. The highest elevation of Santa Cruz is 2,835 ft or 865 meters.

This device crushes sugar cane and collects the juice.

Following the sugar cane theme, instead of chronological order of our visit, here is where the sugar cane is boiled down, just as with maple syrup.

Some of it ends up as yummy brown sugar, and some is fermented into "white lightning."

It's potent stuff, as the ignition test -- tossing a glassful onto a fire -- proves.

Another major product of the farm is coffee. After picking, the beans are separated from the berries surrounding them.

The beans are then pounded, and the husks discarded by threshing.

Then they are roasted.

One delicacy is a pinch of the brown cane sugar combined with a roasted bean, popped into the mouth.

El Trapiche also grows bananas -- not the mass produced Cavendish strain, either, but tasty bananas.

And there are free-range chickens. And chicks.

We all came together again for lunch at the Narwhal, also located in the highlands.

A barn owl was taking his daylight siesta above the bar.

Our next stop was the El Chato ranch, part of an ecological reserve. Visitors can hike in from a nearby village, but our buses delivered us there.

The tortoises are free to come and go, through the park and through private land, along migratory routes that can take them to the sea and back.

We wandered through the open areas of the reserve. Our groups quickly dispersed through the acreage.

Some tortoises hang out eating the foliage. Some love the mud.

Deep into the mud.

But these awkward looking creatures, who walk with their front feet turned almost 90° inward, can, when motivated, lurch up and turn on the afterburner. This video clip is five smaller clips stitched together from one session where Joan and I were the only ones observing this particular tortoise.


The opportunity came to walk through a short lava tube with one of the guides, in our case, Vanessa. First, we negotiated a wooden staircase down into the tube.

At the bottom it was an easy, flat walk. Darkness and, for me, not bumping my head were the only issues.

Vanessa gave us some explanations of the tube's geological origins and its discovery.

Then we climbed back up into the light.

There was time for more tortoise-watching. Sometimes they watched back, briefly because we weren't that interesting.

Back at the pavilion we could rest our feet, perhaps get a drink. Our friend Rick took this shot of Joan and me.

The pavilion had some exhibits, including a tortoise shell, in its two halves, that visitors could check out, as Rick is doing here.

After being driven down to the docks, but before boarding our zodiac, we asked permission to photograph Miguel Andagana, the cigarette man we had first met in the morning.

Then we were back aboard the Islander as the sun grew lower.

And lower.

We had a great dinner with Ros and Rick,

and were treated to a performance by musicians and dancers of EcoArt, engaged in a "rescue work" of traditional Andean culture. (Some of these photos are without flash, which I find intrusive.)

 The musicians were in the background, of course. The gentleman with the guitar is one of the founders.

 Galapagos theme skirts!

Towards the end the performers pulled members from the audience, including Joan, to the stage.

It made for a big celebration! Having two left feet, I didn't mind being left out. Perhaps it showed.

Tomorrow we'll visit South Plaza, a small islet off Santa Cruz, and Santa Fe island.