Aug 28 Chinese Hat and Dragon Hill

You'll have to excuse the lacking details of this post as i did not get a chance to write it right away. There was a birthday celebration/salsa party that was followed by some unfortunate events at the end of the night. I'll get into that later

Our first excursion was to Chinese hat island. They call it Chinese hat because i guess it looks like a Chinese hat. I don’t even know what a Chinese hat is!

We walked the island over the lava formations and saw millions of sally light foot crabs and craters that were filled with iguanas. There were huge cliffs along the coast lines where we watched the massive waves crash into the rocks.

Across the bay where we were anchored we snorkeled along the back side of Santiago island and we saw many different colourful fish. Then out of the corner of my eye i saw a large dark shadow emerge from the deeper water. It was a shark! My heart was beating so fast and i looked around to see if anyone was close to it. Only 2 other people got to see it. It was about a meter and a half long with white tips on it's fins. It was a white tipped reef shark and I’d learned earlier that they are not aggressive so i followed him for a while. I was so impressed with myself for not having a heart attack right there in the water and he didn’t seem to mind that i was near to him. I followed him for a few minutes before he disappeared again into the darkness.

The water was quite cold today and since i had decided that was not going to wear a wetsuit this trip i had to get out of the water after about 45 minutes.

We had a nice sunny cruise for an hour and a half over to dragon hill which is on Santiago island. We all sat on the back sundeck and listened to music. Since most of the time when we are moving it is night time it was nice to be awake and see where we were going. Two large frigate birds hung around the top of the boat for the entire cruise. They seemed to be riding the wind the boat was leaving behind they were very relaxing to watch.

They call it dragon hill because of the numbers of huge iguanas that live there.

We took a very long walk up to the top of the dry desert like hill and saw around 7 large land iguanas that were as big as dogs. It was incredibly hot once we got away from the cool breeze of the shore lines so we had to keep taking small rests in the trees along the path.

While we waited for the pangas to come pick us up from the beach we watched the sun slowly set on the horizon while we waited in the water to cool off.

It was one of the Slovenian girls birthday today and the crew decorated the dining cabin with balloons and ribbons for her. She was so surprised when she came down for dinner. Once we had finished eating the party began. There was salsa music, maracas and dancing. It was really fun. The captain asked me to dance twice and was a pretty good dancer. It was nice to see the crew get out of their work mindset and blow off some steam. We all danced together like we had been friends for years.

Unfortunately the night did not end too well for abbi. Somehow she managed to slip and fall down the stairs. I found her in our cabin crying her eyes out. She showed me her ankle and i thought oh shit. It was bad. It had become immediately swollen and she was in a lot of pain. I quickly went upstairs and got the captain and our guide.

They took good care of her. They gave here some lineament cream to numb the pain and wrapped the ankle in bandages. After half an our the pain hadn’t stopped so we gave her and injection (yes with a needle) of pain medication. Abbas didn’t like the though of getting a needle but i knew that it had to be done so she could sleep until we could get her to a doctor. Thankfully our next island had a hospital. We planned on taking her there via speed boat first thing in the morning because we were too far away at that point to take her right away.

I waited till she was asleep before i went to bed. I layed awake for quite awhile thinking about how this was going to affect the rest of the trip until the boat slowly rocked me to sleep.