Chinese hat – or Sombrero Chino – is a very small island off the Southeast coast of Santiago Island. We had visited the west coast of Santiago on Day xx.
Chinese hat was not meant to be a wildlife stop. It’s a short loop, around ~1/4 of the island, then back again. The island is essentially a spatter cone, then more recently (several 100s of years?) some lava flows covered large parts of the island. The lava’s sharp – wear good shoes!
The photos below give you a sense of what the initial portion of the path is like. That’s Santiago island directly across the water.
We lucked upon this Galapagos hawk lounging on the ground. It sat there for quite a while, enabling all of us to get a good shot of it. It then flew about 50 feet further up the island, so I maneuvered around so the sun was hitting it straight on, and the moved myself around this location to get several backdrops. I’m not sure what the others were doing, but I somehow was the only person who thought to walk over there. The first 3 shots are from basically the same spot, with some minor movement on my part.
The background is so important for closeups – do whatever you can to move yourself into position. That’s the ‘Chinese hat’ behind me.
Exciting! And some great photo opportunities.
You’ll see some of the red ground cover in the photos above. As we turned the corner we found a pair of sea lions just lounging about. I shot them from a couple of angles really trying to get it to work, but never managed to get that ‘perfect shot’. Partly it’s that the sun was in exactly the wrong place – coming in from the upper left – and we couldn’t maneuver off the path to get a better angle.
We hung out at the end of the trail for a bit, watching the waves crash over the lava fields.
There were a few marine iguanas nearby, and I managed to take what might be my favorite iguana photo of the entire trip. Great angle, nice, blurred background, spray from the ocean zipping by, and really works in B+W.
The spray was a minor problem, and you had to be quick to get the shot before being doused again, but a few quick wipes of the lens on my shirt and I was back in business.
There was a friendly sea lion as we made our way out, who walked right up to me, wanted to give me a good sniff and maybe lick my camera. The rest of the group in the background is icing on top. I love photos like this, with the wide angle, and never miss a chance to take one, but they can be difficult as I’m usually just holding the camera out firing off blindly. Focusing on the eye is always very difficult here, too – I have 100s of photos like this where the nose of the animal is in focus, but with a blurry eye it looks pretty crappy. I got lucky here! This technique also works well with little kids.
Snorkeling was in the channel between Chinese hat and Santiago. It was a pretty ho-hum reef along the side of Santiago, with standard reef fish. But it also had reef sharks! This was by far the closest we got to sharks all trip. In the very first clip you can see the shark turned to come towards me, and even though it wasn’t huge and normally doesn’t attack people, I started to get a little nervous. But then it quickly veered to its left to move away from me. Close call! 🙂 Bonus close-up of a penguin at the end of the video
During lunch we moved southwest to Rabida island, off the south coast of Santiago.
Prior to landing we had the chance to either kayak or go snorkeling – we all chose snorkeling, of course! This was the most unexpected snorkel we had. The area itself was not interesting. Very rocky, not much wildlife. But it did have an octopus, which my wife somehow managed to spot, followed by a giant manta ray. Totally unexpected on both counts! My wife actually spotted the octopus – she said when snorkeling she’s trained to just look down. So she did, and spotted the ocean floor moving. If it wasn’t moving, there’s zero chance you’d see the octopus – watch how it is ‘normal’ color when moving, then instantly takes on the color and texture of its surroundings.
The highlight of Rabida was to be a red sand beach and a nice sunset, which was quite lovely, but the true highlight was an unexpected flamingo encounter, followed by some baby oystercatchers.
First up, the flamingos. I had two good photographic moments with them, at the start of the landing, then again at the end, as the sun was setting. The flock was very close to the left corner of the lagoon, near the ‘n’ in ‘lagoon’ on the map. With so many flamingos, including a baby, I had difficulty focusing on a subject. Post-processing I enjoyed these portrait styles the best, capturing the odd contortions they put themselves in. The baby was particularly cute, trying to mimic the adults. I added a wide shot just to show how they were set up – I wouldn’t put that on my wall, though.
We eventually got a bit bored and wandered off to the beach, where we happened upon a couple of juvenile oystercatchers and their parents digging up sand crabs for them. The sun was coming in off the water, so, wearing shorts, I walked out into the surf zone to try and get a nicely lit shot of the parents dropping crabs off to their offspring. I was soon joined by the other photographers. The parents would wander up the beach, and after a wave washed in they would hurry down to the wet sand and dig for crabs. Once they found one they ran full speed back to the waiting offspring. Very cute. Here’s a sequence of the young one eating.
I was there quite a while, and wished in retrospect I had taken a video of the interaction. I was struggling a bit to keep the pictures in focus, and even though I thought I had the shutter speed dialed up, some of the shots had motion blur (I was at 1/640s, and ISO 280, so I had plenty of headroom if only I had remembered to dial down up shutter speed). The oystercatchers would also turn their butts to us whenever they were picking up a crab. I suspect it was a natural instinct to protect their food, although maybe they’re just camera shy. I eventually got tired of getting wet in the surf, and moved up for some nice sunset lit shots of the juveniles.
With the sun setting, I went back to the lagoon to get some better lit flamingos. By now they had wandered into the lagoon, which made for some nice pictures.
The nesting flamingo is particularly nice. Very good lighting, blurred reflection off the water. Very nice.
Here are the photographers trying to get the shots. Photographing the oystercatchers was pretty ridiculous, we knew it was ridiculous, but it was a lot of fun.
Full gallery over at Smugmug. Backward to Masquera or forward to Bartoleme
