These are
photos that I took on my trip to the Galapagos Islands in August of 1999.
My grandparents, Paul and Dorothy Bunn of Hamlet, NC, took me there because
they take all of their grandchildren on cruises and I love the natural world,
so that was a perfect choice for me. The trip took 10 days for everything and
7 days were spent in the Galapagos.
We flew from Raleigh-Durham Airport in NC to Miami, FL. We changed planes and flew to Guyaquil, Ecuador, and spent the night in a Hilton hotel. It was the fanciest hotel in Guyaquil. The next morning, we got on another smaller plane and flew to the only airport in the Galapagos Islands. We went on a bus to the port where we got on a small rubber Zodiac boat, which took us to the our ship, the M. S. Polaris. There are about 80 passengers on the ship. We spent the next 7 days touring the islands on Zodiacs and on foot and snorkeled in the ocean.
At the end of the cruise, we flew back to Guyaquil and spent the night in the same hotel. The next day, we flew back to Miami and then back to Raleigh-Durham and then drove home to Hamlet. After spending a couple more weeks with my grandparents, my parents came down to pick me up and take me home to Lewisburg, PA.
Here are
some of my favorite pictures of the Galapagos wildlife. If you like my pictures,
you can send an email to my dad.
| This
is a male great frigatebird. You can tell by the green feathers on his back. |
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These are marine
iguanas on Isla Fernandina. |
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This is a Galapagos fur seal. They live no where else in the world. |
 This is a California sea lion. That's not snow, that is just white sand. |
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| Red-footed booby. |  |
 A
Galapagos penguin. Who would believe a penguin lives at the equator? |
A
Galapagos hawk. |
A close-up of a blue-footed booby |
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Skeleton of a California sea lion. |
| A prickly-pear cactus. It is taller than most prickly-pear cactus plants because it tries to avoid being eaten by land iguanas. |  |
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A masked booby (on the right) is trying to mate with a frigatebird chick. The frigatebird's mother was trying to save her chick. We weren't there to see if she succeeded. |
 A waved albatross chick. The chicks weigh more than the parents to keep from being carried off by frigatebirds. This chick is about a week or two old |
A close-up of a Galapagos tortoise. This tortoise was brought to the Charles Darwin Research Center from a zoo or circus in the United States because it couldn't survive in the wild.
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 Three swallowtail gulls, nearly surrounded by marine iguanas on Tower Island. |
A short-eared owl, roosting in a hole in the lava. Since all of the islands were formed by volcanoes, the ground is all igneous rock.
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| A family of sea lions with the M. S. Polaris in the background. We went from the islands and the ship using Zodiacs. About 8-10 people fit into a Zodiac at one time. Zodiacs were very bouncy and you got sprayed by the water a whole lot! The water was about 60 degrees F, even though we were on the equator, because of the cold Humboldt Current from Antarctica. (that's also why the penguins were able to survive in the Galapagos) |  |
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This is a picture of Lucho and Rafael, two guides on the Polaris. They're dressed like this because we were crossing the equator and we had to get King Neptune's permission. He called us Pollywogs (Lucho is King Neptune's wife!). |
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Here I am petting a giant sculpture of a tortoise in Porta Yora, the largest town in the Galapagos. I hope you enjoyed my site. I'd like to give special thanks to Mrs. Wendy Hummel, the enrichment teacher at Linntown Elementary School, my father, who helped me with the site, and Mr. Heberlig, our very helpful principal. |
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Last updated 5/24/00
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