San Cristobal

The seas were again rough during the night and I wake up at 5AM thinking I am rolling out of bed. Our choice today is spending the morning in the town in San Cristobal or going to another Tortoise breeding area. Almost all of us choose the tortoises. We take a 45 minute bus ride (it's also interesting to see the 'countryside'!) It's feeding time when we arrive and we see someone taking huge philodendron leaves to various feeding points. It's great fun to see thenm munching away. My new camera allows me to take some great shots too. The facility is about 5 years old. Some of the tortoises are much older than that, some were born there. All will be reintroduced into the wild. We ride back to town and spent the better part of an hour sightseeing before leaving for the airport. We buy more Galapagos coffee. I wonder how we can possibly fit it into a suitcase. It's a bit sad leaving our new friends - but we vow to keep in touch to some extent and to share photos (I've taken a couple of thousand - so it'll be a while before I can weed them down enough to be able to share). We fly back to Quito (via Guayaquil) . The Adventure Life guide meets us at he airport and gets us to a van which drops us back at Casa Aliso. The same hotel manager is there and he points us to an even better restaurant. We have cevichi - a absolutely fantastic seafood appetizer, outstanding main seafood-based dishes, and (even though we were stuffed) we shared a piece of unbelievable blackberry pie. What a meal! When we return from dinner, our hotel manager tells us he can get us a driver for $10 an hour for our last morning in Ecuador. We say yes and he makes the arrangements for the next day.