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| Dave saddling up! |
The morning
program began with visiting a ranch, saddling up and riding our horses up to
the lip of the massive volcano, Volcan Sierra Negra, which is in fact the
second largest active volcano in the world (it recently erupted in 2005). It was David’s first time on a horse, and he
was a little bit apprehensive after riding a camel in Morocco, but once he was
mounted it was all good and he thoroughly enjoyed the ride despite holding on
for his life. It took about half an hour
to ride to the top and we looked around for a while and listened to Chimarro’s
explanation before remounting and riding back down. The descent was a little dangerous as the
recent rain had made the path quite muddy and at least everyone’s horse slipped
once or twice, but thankfully we all managed to stay in our saddles.
We had a
sandwich lunch at the ranch before going back to the boat to collect our
snorkelling gear for the afternoon. The
location was a small bay, and the visibility was fairly poor, but Dave and I
managed to find the largest sea turtle we saw on the entire trip. It easily had a shell as large as us, but he
also had one fin missing, however this didn’t seem to bother him at all. He was
actually positioned so his was ‘sitting’ against a rock with his shell resting
perfectly in an upright position while he munched on all the sea grass close to
his head.
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| A brightly coloured Sally Light-foot crab |
To our
surprise we found another sea lion, this time a medium sized pup, which played
with us for a brief minute while before swimming off presumingly to do something
more interesting.
From the
bay we walked back to the main beach town where Chimarro promptly told us we
had three free hours and left us alone.
There’s actually not too much to do in town so we walked around to the
rocky beach and found literally hundreds of iguanas sunning themselves. We occupied ourselves with watching and
photographing them, we were even lucky enough to witness two males having a bit
of a tussle, which involves them repeatedly head-butting each other till one
gives in and turns tail.
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| An iguana enjoying the sun on a lava rock |
Back on the
boat we had farewell cocktails and a great dinner followed by banana and
chocolate flan. Since we’d all spent the
afternoon in the port where there wasn’t much to do we opted for UNO and
packing since we had to be up at 5.30am to take our transfer boat to the
airport with the Steffo’s. Our transfer
was meant to be included with our tour, but we didn’t have a receipt to prove
it, our tour organiser had said that Chimarro would give the necessary receipt,
but when we asked him for it he said that there was no need, that he had talked
to the guy doing the transfer and they were expecting us so not to worry. Then he promptly left the boat to spend the
night in the port since it is his home town.
Needless to say we weren’t convinced that things were going to go
smoothly in the morning.
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