For 2 weeks starting in the middle of September, 2006, my wife and I traveled to Quito, Ecuador, and then on to the Galapagos Islands, for a spectacular visit to this unique part of the world. For 10 nights and 11 days, we lived on the "Tip Top IV" a 120-foot Yacht, with 13 other passengers, our 2 Guides, and about 8 crew-members. Patti Stucki and Richard Parsons were our guides, and they were phenomenal - extremely knowledgeable, enthusiastic and anxious to do anything possible to make our trip the best it could be. We also spent an extra day in Quito, Ecuador, traveling to the Cotopaxi Volcano, which while exhausting (hiking at 16,000 feet is no easy task!) was quite worthwhile. We used Galapagos Travel for our trip - we were extremely pleased with how well things went, and I would definitely recommend them to anybody considering a trip to the Galapagos.
This is 5th of 5 small collections of images I'll be posting here from this trip, featuring the Sea Lions seen in the Galapagos. They were all over the place, and often quite curious, coming up to us, and even smelling our feet and legs! Mothers were nursing their pups (often from more than 1 generation of pups), and we could just walk up to them and observe, without it seeming to bother them in the least, nor intefere with their behavior. We had to be a bit wary of the bulls who swam back and forth, seeming to patrol the beaches, often barking and coming onto land for one purpose or another. We kept our distance from them. The Sea Lions often actively interacted us during snorkeling trips, and their playful nature was also shown as we saw one of them chasing a sea turtle, or many others nipping at the tails of marine iguanas that were swimming at the water's surface.
I again used the GPS System (Delorme's BlueLogger Hardware, with RoboGeo software) to record and later plot where we had been visiting, geolocate the photographs, and export to Google Earth. If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, you can download the open this file to see where the images in this gallery were taken, superimposed on Google Earth's current satellite imagery. I have also written an article for the NatureScapes photography website, on how this can be done, which can be viewed here.
All Content © Donald L. Cohen, MD All Rights Reserved Click on each thumbnail to open up a larger image.
These images, along with all the others present in the various galleries, are available for purchase as prints up to 13"x19". For more details on buying prints, please click here.
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