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 the 1st of 5 small collections of images I'll be posting here from this trip. I estimated that I must have shot between 3,000 and 4,000 frames over the span of the 2 weeks, to give you an idea of how great the photo opportunities were. I downloaded to my laptop once or twice a day to keep up, deleting heavily, culling them further once we got home, but still ended up with 369 images. If you've ever seen television specials on the Galapagos, you get a feel for how unique and approachable the wildlife there is, and our experience was just as it was portrayed on TV. Sea Lions littered the beach, interacting with each other, nursing their babies, and were basically oblivious to the people around them. We would find them along the various trails where we hiked, and we had to be careful to avoid stepping on them! It was much the same with the Marine Iguanas - many areas were thick with them, and especially considering how well they are camouflaged against the lava, we really had to watch our step!
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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