Even the little birds here are important. Darwin learned a lot from the beaks of finches.

You might have noticed that our blog posts from this trip have been pretty boring so far. Why is this? We’re in one of the most interesting places in the world. How come we’re making it seem so bleh?

It is because, dear readers, we all had to fill out forms and check the box and sign the line next to the part that said we would not make any money from the pictures we take on Galapagos. Now we must take pains to bore-down our accounts of this place so you don’t start throwing money at us in thanks for how interesting our blog is. Curse the day we checked that box!

Today we had pancakes in the morning. I washed the dishes…I can’t do this. We have to tell you about some interesting things.

We got up early in the morning because we’re two time zones (only two, isn’t that interesting?) behind East Coast time. Also we went to bed very early because we were tremendously tired last night from two full travel days. (Also, it gets dark early here — before 7 pm. It must be in the western part of the time zone. Also interesting, I think.)

Lanie, when the zipline is not locked up

We walked into town — our place is about a ten-minute walk to the main tourist strip On our path is a cool park with a playground. Lanie was very disappointed this morning because the cool zip line hadn’t been unlocked for the day (it apparently gets padlocked each night).

We booked a tour at a place that offered a two-for-one promotion. The lady at the desk just spoke Spanish. I always feel we get a better deal that way. It may be because I can’t understand they way I’m getting ripped off.

Then we walked out of town to a special place where there are two beaches: one long one that is beautiful but dangerous to swim in and one shorter one that is rather like the lagoon on Gilligan’s Island. Calm and not very deep. That one they let us swim in. To get there we had to walk a few kilometers on a cobblestone path through a forest of cactus trees. That’s right, trees. Many were four or five meters tall and had trunks like trees that you could touch without getting pricked. They had bark like regular trees. I’d better tone it down. This is getting too interesting.

This is what downtown looks like (the tortoise is only a statue).

After swimming we had to walk back along the long beach and back through the cactus forest and back into town and I had to take a taxi to our place so I could pick up the Dramamine and the girls’ fleece jackets. Nothing interesting about that. Only I got halfway into town before I realized Jen had the keys to the house. So I had to walk back out to the rest of the family and get the keys. Then I had to take another taxi to the house while the ladies went into town to get a little lunch. The lunch was pizza, albeit in interesting varieties, they told me. All the taxis in this town are white Toyota pickup trucks, almost the least interesting vehicles on the road anywhere. The town is pretty big, not the remote outpost one would expect on the Galapagos Islands. It’s got several pizza places.

All the rushing about in taxis worked out in the end (except I couldn’t find the Dramamine) and I made it back into town in time to catch the boat on the dock. On this trip I have learned a new Spanish word, muelle, which means dock. Our tour of the bay was very interesting, so I won’t tell you too much about it, except to say that the lack of Dramamine turned out to be not much of an issue. I will post some pictures if you promise not to pay us.

Diving deep in a local swimming hole

Walking along the beautiful, dangerous beach

It’s a cactus AND a tree.

This bird has blue feet.

Green sea turtle as seen from underwater

Sea lion, also as seen from underwater — photo by Zoe

This rock looks like it’s made out of marine iguanas.

This sea lion is named Marianna.

Lastly, if you’ve managed to make it this far into this rather bland blog post, we’ll share with you a happy little accident.  Someone touched a switch on our fancy new camera and we found a new mode.  It’s cool, but rather memory-intensive, so we probably won’t use it a lot.  This took a good six hours to upload to youtube and it eats a lot of precious hard drive space.  Still, it’s kind of like a behind-the-scenes reel of how our Day 2 pictures were made.