We landed on a slippery lava landing and proceeded to climb the 376 steps to the peak of the island. It's only 120m/400ft high but the path is pretty steep. Along the way we learned about the geology of the islet from our guide.
This is another small volcanic cone that has been eroded away.
And this is a view from the top showing Pinnacle Rock and the beach from which we would go snorkelling in the afternoon.
After breakfast back on Endeavour, we grabbed our snorkel gear and took Zodiacs back to a beautiful beach on Bartolome. The beach is made of broken down volcanic material called tuff and is an interesting goldish brown colour. Usually, we did deep water snorkelling from the Zodiacs, but this time we swam out from the beach into the deeper water. The underwater landscape was as amazing as the terrestrial one. We swam through fairly narrow coral passages that came out from steep, rugged lava cliffs. The passages made it so that the schools of fish were closer to us, letting us get better views and pictures. The most exciting sight was a 5 foot reef shark that didn't seem interested in eating us!
The highlight of this day happened on a Zodiac ride in the late afternoon. We were taken to an area where Galapagos penguins had been seen earlier in the day. As we approached, we could see them standing on the rocks getting some sun. In all, we saw around 25 penguins, some on the rocks and some swimming. There are only around 2000 of them so we felt very lucky to have seen them.
On the way back in the Zodiac, we saw a very interesting cloud formation developing as the sun set.
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