Day 15, April 26: Leaving Galápagos
First thing this morning we gathered our bags and headed straight for the airport at Baltra. LOL, just kidding. Sunrise is at 6:00 and our flight to Quito didn’t leave until 10:22, giving us just enough time for one more wet landing. In a small lagoon near Bachas Beach, on Santa Cruz Island, we photographed two flamingoes, a Black-necked Stilt with four chicks, and one last marine iguana.
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| Juvenile American Flamingo |
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| Black-necked Stilt with chick |
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| How many birds do you see? |
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| Black-necked Stilt chick |
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| American Flamingo |
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| Marine Iguana |
On the beach we found the tracks of a sea turtle that had laid her eggs just a couple hours earlier. It felt like the right way to say goodbye to Galápagos before joining the crowds at the airport.
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| Sea Turtle tracks |
Tonight in Quito we will have one last dinner together, though it won’t be the same without Tui and Monica. Early tomorrow morning we will board our flight for Miami and then home.
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| Baltra Airport |
Epilogue
I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing my photos and reading my stories. What started as a simple email to a small group of friends and family while I was traveling somehow evolved into a major project that has taken much longer than I had planned.
And it’s not really done yet. I’m writing this in September, five months after my Galápagos trip, and I’m still editing the photos.
I shot more than 80,000 exposures, most of them in bursts of between five and fifty (at twenty per second). I'm on track to delete about 95 percent, and maybe half of what I keep will be good enough to add to my web site. So when someone asks, “how many pictures did you take?”, the fun answer is 80,000 but the honest answer is 2,000.
In our fifteen days on the Tip Top IV we visited 18 islands, going ashore on 15 of them. We photographed the other three from the boats.
I came home with photos of at least 38 species of birds (in addition to the 23 species I photographed at Mount Antisana before the trip officially started), 12 species of reptiles, two mammals (three if you count the whale skeletons), five invertebrates, and a bunch of fish. Most of them are animals I had never seen before and many I had never heard of.
My traveling companions were interesting and we got along well. The food on the yacht was very good; the cabins were small but adequate. The days were full, the photography was often difficult and at other times absurdly easy, and I went to bed each night completely exhausted.
Would I do it again? Of course I would. In fact, I’ve already booked my next trip for 2026.
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Day 1: Photographers meet Galápagos
Day 2: We meet some new species
Day 3: Don't forget to preheat your camera!
Day 4: More snorkeling, more boobies, and our first snakes
Day 7: A trip to the Post Office
