Easy question: Why do blue footed boobies do have blue feet? - Easy answer: Why not?
Questions like this where no problem for our guide Alfonso. He always knew the answer.
Never before did we have the chance to observe wild animals in such close proximity: only a few centimeters. It was just incredible!
And furthermore if there are unique species like iguanas and giant turtles and finally a marvellous landscape - then you are visiting the Galápagos Islands!!

Each of the 10 visited islands has its own character and its own kind of fauna. Within our 8 days trip, we have experienced such a lot of different impressions, that we and our 8 fellows could not handle more - It was just too much!
The islands all have volcanic origins. They emerged within several millions of years. That explains the difference between them.

The name Galápagos derives from the spanish word for the giant land turtles, which populated the islands in their tenthousands in the past. But also in the past crews of large ships used the turtles as living provisions for their long journeys and almost exterminated them. The Galápagos Islands are situated almost 1000km from the mainland of Ecuador in the pacific ocean and were discovered by the bishop of Panama in 1535, who was on his way to Peru but was displaced by strong currents. But they got popular many years later with the studies of Charles Darwin, who visited the islands for only 5 weeks in 1835 and afterwards developed his theory of evolution.

We were especially impressed by the iguanas and the turtles, which we haven't seen before. There are land and marine iguanas, which get their food from the ocean and are able to swim. By the way: All iguanas are vegetarians and therefor unperilous. The land iguanas feed cactuses, the marine iguanas feed algae, which grow in the ocean.
The giant land turtles can weigh more than 300 kilograms. Seaturtles are more difficult to observe, but we were lucky in observing them from the boat and while snorkeling.

There are hunderts of other species living above and below the oceans surface on the Galápagos Islands. Under water we saw sharks, rays, peguines, delphins and not to forget a lot of sealions, which where almost everywhere. Without having a underwater-camera we got only some photos of fishes from the boat, but a lot of more pictures above the ocean. Finally we almost took 1500 photos on the Galápagos Islands.