North Seymour Island, The Galapagos

Seymour Island is located about two hours from Baltra Island, the one and only airport everyone must land on when visiting the Galapagos Islands. The Santa Cruz II boat makes two trip routes when exploring the Galapagos. I sailed the shorter route which is a six-day exhibition. The first island the captain sailed us to was North Seymour Island, and it's a dry landing, so we all wore our sneakers. The fun part about sailing on a mid size boat, is disembarking. The captain anchors about a mile or so from each island, so smaller plastic zodiac boats are required to get to the actual islands. The Galapagos Islands are still very untouched territories, so real docks don't exist. During each day, the exhibition leader would announce the kind of landing it would be and some days it was a wet landing where the zodiac boats would take us all the up to shore and we'd hope off onto the beach shoreline..

Beyond the red crabs and blue-footed boobies are the beautiful cactus. It's dry season in June so the Palo Santos trees were dry and bare. The whole Island, or at least where I disembarked, is dry and bare so the only thing that's really living on this island are the blue-footed boobie birds and the huge land marine iguanas.