Thursday, November 12, 2009

Las Tintoreras

Since we are on the theme of Galapagos do-it-yourself activities we may as well tell you about las Tintoreras. It is most common to hire a boat tour out to this series of small islets, then go snorkeling in the reefs around them. We decided to make a bit of an adventure out of it and save some money at the same time, so we rented some flippers, geared up with our speedo goggles and homemade snorkels and swam the 1.5 hours. On the way we encountered a penguin, a sea turtle, rays, sharks, schools of tropical fish and a group of about 15 very playful sea lions.
























White-tip sharks




Oops...We came to this sign after swimming with the sharks.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yikes!! I thought that white tip sharks were dangerous to humans! You guys swam for one and a half hours through their territory?! P

Josh said...

We should have been more specific. This is the whitetip reef shark, but people in the Galapagos often just referred to them as white tips. It is significantly smaller and less aggressive than the oceanic whitetip shark which is found further offshore and is responsible for more attacks on humans than all other shark species combined. Similar names but very different sharks.