At night we navigate from Espanola to Floreana Island. Floreana, also known as Charles or Santa Maria, is one of the four inhabited islands, and the first one to be officially inhabited by Ecuadorians, when Ecuador took possession of the islands in 1832. Back in those days, the islands were not a National Park, thus, hundreds of animals and plants were introduced to help the first inhabitants survive in such a hard and isolated environment. Nowadays, Floreana holds a small population of about 130 people entirely dedicated to agriculture, fishing and tourism activities.
This small Island has many visitor sites, and today before breakfast, we landed at Punta Cormorant. This site is well known by its green beach, due to the presence of small crystals of olivine that have been eroded from lava rocks. The mineral olivine (or peridot, when of gem-quality) is a common mineral found in the Earth's subsurface.
At Punta Cormorant, we were greeted by a group of four playful young sea lions and once we had enough pictures of them, we continued along the cinder trail, surrounded by typical vegetation from the arid zone, a mixture between endemic and native plants. The trail here, skirts along a large salt pond where we had the chance to observe few flamingos, pintails and other shorebirds.
Flamingos eventually arrived to Galapagos from the Caribbean area and finding good feeding and nesting grounds and very little ground predators; successfully colonized the islands and became an endemic subspecies. Today the islands are home of few hundred Flamingos. By the end of the trail we reached a beautiful white coral sand beach, nesting site of sea turtles that eventually start their nesting season in few more weeks.
Back aboard for breakfast, the ship repositioned to a small offshore volcanic cone named Champion Islet. This is the only island where a small population of the Floreana mockingbird—which was driven to extinction by cats, rats and other introduced predators on the main island—still exists. We explored this tiny islet by zodiac, with a glass bottom boat excursion and by snorkeling.
Following lunch, the National Geographic Endeavour lifted anchor once more to spend the rest of afternoon visiting the famous Post Office Bay, where a barrel is still used for an old mail swap tradition going back to whaling days, probably established in 1793 by a British Captain named James Colnett. Here we went through hundreds of postcards and letters left by previous visitors from over the world, to see if our guests could hand deliver some mail picked up here, and of course they were able to leave their own mail, with the hope that some other visitors will deliver it!
This outing was coupled with an exploration of the bay and neighboring sea lion colony by Zodiac and kayak. Right before sunset, we took off to our next destination, and while we were navigating, we had the chance to spot some tropical whales and a breathtaking sunset.