Day 320: Cousin’s Rock & Santa Cruz
Our boat sailed through the night to return us to the main islands of the Galápagos archipelago by morning. The final full day of our liveaboard trip included two dives at a site off Santa Cruz island, called Cousin’s Rock, followed by a land tour on Santa Cruz Island. Cousin’s Rock ending up being a great dive site! The visibility was one of the clearest we’d had in the Galápagos, giving us the feeling we were scuba diving in an aquarium. We saw a handful of sharks and some disinterested sea lions, but the coolest thing about this site was the sheer number of rays we saw: stingrays, Eagle Rays and Manta Rays. Like most of the wildlife around here, they were completely unafraid of us and allowed us to get quite close for pictures.
Early morning arrival at our last dive site: Cousin’s Rock
Surrounded by huge schools of fish – this location was like diving in an aquarium!
Apparently Russian divers are subject to a stereotype: they like to touch *everything.* Igor shows his roots during our dive trip – while he resists the urge to touch the sea lions and never gets close enough to a shark, just about everything else within reach falls prey to a little poke from his finger. Each time Lindsay catches him on camera, he turns and gives her an innocent look as if to say, “I didn’t do it!”
White-tip Reef Sharks resting below a rock. Look carefully at the gills of this shark – see the bite marks? A few seconds after this shot, the male shark attacked the female in order to have *amorous relations*
Igor swims up to a school of Barracuda
A starfish and a school of Yellow-tailed Surgeonfish (gray-colored Dorys) on the ocean floor
We find a sea lion hiding under a rock – she’s not interested in playing with us, she just wants to quietly roll around on the floor. We must have interrupted her Zen, as she eventually swims off to the surface
Lots of stingrays swimming on the ocean floor
We see one large Manta Ray in the distance, and a pair of Eagle Rays slowly flapping against the current
Lindsay climbs up the rock pinnacle to get a close-up of the Eagle Ray – check out that huge nose and mouth!
So many rays! Igor catches up to several Eagle Rays
We see the Humboldt Explorer in the distance as the panga picks us out of the water for the last time – very pleased to end our dive trip on a high note!
After lunch, we re-boarded the pangas (in dry clothes for once!) and rode over to the ferry landing at the Itabaca Channel on the northern tip of the island. We took a bus up into the Santa Cruz Highlands to see more Giant Tortoises, before continuing across the island to the town of Puerto Ayora – the most populous city in the Galápagos. While in town, we had a few hours free to walk around (giving the other guests time to do souvenir shopping), before meeting up with everyone for a farewell dinner at a restaurant in town (the only meal & beverages NOT included in our tour package).
Group shot of the Humboldt’s guests before our land excursion on Santa Cruz Island
We catch a bus at the Itabaca Channel and drive up into the Santa Cruz Highlands
Chillin’ out at the Rancho El Manzanillo Giant Tortoise Reserve
Igor has to sneak up behind this Giant Tortoise – even though they are GIGANTIC they get rather shy when we approach them, ducking their heads into the shell with a hiss
Giant Tortoises crawling slooooowly though the vegetation, munching on leaves
An artificial freshwater pond provides the tortoises with drinking (and bathing) water
The first thing we did upon reaching town was to head over to the bank ATM – we were low on cash after paying the balance of our bill to the boat (equipment rental, fuel surcharge and tips). We were mystified when the first ATM we tried told us we had already reached our withdrawal limit for the day. Weird – we’ve been on a boat in the middle of nowhere with no reception for 5 days, how could we have taken any money out? We assumed the ATM was on the fritz, and waited for a different one to open up. Again, the same message. We started to get a bad feeling – we logged into our bank account from Igor’s phone…
…for the past 5 days, someone in *Malaga, Spain* had been taking out the maximum USD $600 per day! WTF!!! We didn’t have a travel notice for Spain!!! We were furious, and immediately called up our bank to report the fraud. Turns out, the bank’s fraud department did flag the withdrawals as suspicious and actually denied the final 2 transactions, and they agreed to refund our lost funds. In the meantime, however, we now had to burn yet another card! Since we would be out of the country for another month, there was no way for us to get a replacement card. Luckily, we still had *one* last card left so we could still get cash, but we are going to have to be borderline paranoid about this one – if yet another card gets compromised, we are screwed!
We are still at a loss as to how this card got hacked. We suspected that it must have happened in either the airport in Guayaquil or the only ATM in San Cristóbal (the fact that the fraud charges just happened to occur as soon as we were at sea seemed like too big of a coincidence). The really disturbing thing is that the withdrawals were taken from an *ATM* in Spain, meaning someone had not only copied the magnetic strip of our card, they had also gotten ahold of our PIN! Man, we thought Indonesia was shady – Ecuador is fucking devious.
Once the bank issue was taken care of, we only had an hour left to explore the town. Luckily, we’d be returning to Puerto Ayora in a few days, so we had plenty of opportunity to visit all the sights we missed. We got a quick lay of the land before meeting up with the crew for our final dinner.
Strolling down the main street of Puerto Ayora
Group dinner at a restaurant in town – Lindsay and Igor would have preferred to have our final dinner on the boat, but Lindsay suspects the operator doesn’t want the guests to overindulge at the open bar on their last night with no morning dive to encourage moderation
Igor sits on a park bench behind a sleeping lobo
We spot a baby shark swimming in the lighted water off the pier