Today we spent the whole day on Española or Hood Island, the oldest island of the Galapagos Archipelago, where we took a long walk in the morning. During this boulder-hopping walk we saw a lot of animals, including marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies, mockingbirds, and the famous Darwin's finches.
During the afternoon, we disembarked at Gardner Bay, the most beautiful of our white organic beaches. This area is home to a large colony of California sea lions (Zalophus californianus), as usual completely indifferent to our presence. It was really incredible to see how these animals started to approach, and in some cases even show curiosity towards both our belongings and us. Several of our visitors got sniffed over by young sea lions, while one of the larger ones saw a nice pillow on the beach, which it approached and then lay down -- right there on our snorkeling gear! It took a lot of persuasion by one of our naturalists, Emma, to get it to surrender the gear to its rightful owner!
