Day Two: Afternoon on Isabella Island
We head to Punta Moreno for a walk on some very rough lava (called a'a by the hawaiians though there is some Pahoehoe (smooth, pillow shapes) lava as well... there was an option for a Panga ride as an alternative, but we got a panga ride on the way in anyway and the lava terrain was unlike anything else I've seen, green pools surrounded by lava, and Flamingo, and oh yeah, by the way, the second smallest penguin in the world... (if you want to see the smallest penguin, I've got one or two bad pictures of one in a box in New Zealand)
Did I say Penguins? Notice how small they are compared with the iguana... the last one is swimming, as they do...
And here are some black crabs on black lava, and one colorful one, for Beth
And to finish up the pictures from the panga, a flightless cormorant and some iguana
On the lava flow some very hardy plants are the first to colonize the lava... in a few million years they will have helped break the lava down into soil and they will be displaced by other species
The Lava itself is very rough and difficult to walk on, with jagged brittle edges, mixed in with some frozen ripples and large smooth plates
Suddenly we come across these amazing pits filled with pools of water and green vegetation
In the first two pits we saw some small birds like this Yellow Warbler
In the third, we struck gold, or um, pink...
Here are a few pictures of the surrounding landscape, and Beth, and Beth and I together
And here's a Panoramic of the Lava flow... you can see the two volcanoes responsible for the lave off in the distance and another panoramic with one of the pits
