March 18 – Word of the Day: Salvaje (Wild)
For our third day on the Galapagos, we took the dingy back to the town and drove the same 40 minutes to the channel to hop aboard the Sea Finch yacht again. With all this interim travel to get to places you need to occupy your time and you can only take so many pictures so at this point I had already finished reading Allegiant and was about half way through Orange is the New Black. If you haven´t read the Divergent series it´s really pretty good brain candy. I wanted to read all three in the series before the Divergent movie came out and I´m thankful I accomplished that. Orange is the New Black is good too… funny and it really made me want to do something related to rehabilitating women in prison like helping them write resumes or something. Kudos to the author!
Anyway, today´s agenda including exploring Plaza island in the afternoon after a morning of snorkeling. J decided not to snorkel this morning since he got a bit burnt yesterday so he hung out on the boat. Meanwhile I was on a mission to find something cool. There weren´t sea lions, seals, penguins or tortoises nearby since we were snorkeling along a steeper cliff so I knew I´d have to look deeper in order to find anything cool beyond fish.
I ended up seeing a TON of different fish this time around and zero sharks. 😦 However, after about 45 minutes I finally saw a sting ray! Here is my attempt at a photo of the stingray. I got a pretty cool video of him swimming around too. 
After snorkeling we hopped back on the boat for another delicious lunch. Then we spent the afternoon exploring Plaza island where we ran into more sea lions and fur seals and saw a ton of birds and iguanas.
When the cat´s away, the mice will play! The baby sea lions were super friendly and curious and our naturalist guide explained to us that we should slowly try to back away from them. By touching them, we can get our scent on them and that can cause the mom to not recognize their baby and reject them. So as much as we desperately wanted to cuddle these cuties, we had to resist!
After a long day in the wild exploring and learning about all the lovely creatures we were exhausted. On the bus ride back I decided it was time for a nap. I was just minding my own business, dreaming about snorkeling with sea lions when I awoke startled by something that felt like a small shock. Natually I flung my hand in confusion and through a wasp toward J. THAT S.O.B. STUNG ME!!!!!! (The wasp, not J. :-)) Being the chivalrous husband that he is J, stomped that little sucker to death. I could not believe it. I had successfully avoided yellow fever and malaria in the Amazon, and then a killer wasp has to find me sleeping inside of a bus and sting my hand. Grrrr.
By the time we reached to the town to take the dingy back to the other side of the bay to our hotel, my joints were numbing and my hand was swelling up. The nurses on the trip with us (who coincidentally were also from the same state) let me know they had benadryl if I needed it. When we got back to the hotel, I decided I needed to nurse my wound with red wine and dark chocolate naturally. That meant no benadryl because that makes me drowsy but luckily I had a non-drowsy antihistamine in my toiletries from our last trip to Australia so I took that and iced my hand. Later that night my hand was back to its normal size and we had finished our box of Chilean red wine and a whole bar of 70% dark chocolate.
Tomorrow morning we head to the tortoise breeding station and then back to Ecuadorian mainland. I wish we could stay on the Galapagos forever!
andyoumaysayimadreamer 