GALAPAGOS ISLANDS, DAY 4

On our third day in the Galapagos (4th day in Ecuador), we headed off Santa Cruz and over to Isabela. It the largest of the Galapagos islands, but only the 3rd most inhabitated island, so it's a pretty quite place. After a 2 hour boat right over to Isabela, we started by visiting the turtle reserve and breeding center on the island. After looking at a bunch of different turtles (and tons of little ones - they're so cute!), I got a little hungry and decided to buy an ice cream bar at the gift shop.
Ok, the photo is kinda dark (and Tom claims he takes better pictures than me), but in the photo, I'm eating a Magnum. Now many of you who have traveled outside of the U.S. have probably enountered a Mangum, but those of you who haven't, it's basically like an ice cream bar that comes in lots of different flavors - like a cheaper version of the Haagen Dazs ice cream bars. It's sold a lot in Europe and South America, but for some reason, not in the U.S. (I have no idea why), so I decided to take advantage of the fact that they're sold in Ecuador. It was very yummy, and nice to have on a hot day on Isabela.

After some hiking and a visit to the Wall of Tears, we headed over to our next hotel, the Red Mangrove Isabela. The place isn't like a traditional hotel. The "lobby" is a two storied house on one side of the road and has a desk, lounge area and the dining room. Across the street are where the rooms are. We had a great room right on the beach, with a deck to lounge in. It was definitely a great place.

But my favorite thing about Isabela turned out to be the chef. I think we had our best meals on this island. For every meal, we'd head over to the dining room to eat. And though we weren't given a choice in for every course like we'd had in Santa Cruz, we still had really great food prepared just for us. For lunch, we started off with this nice salad:It was very refreshing and you can see the pieces of hearts of palm. For our entree, we had fried fish. You can see this is pretty similar to the meal we'd had for lunch when we went to North Seymore - a deep fried piece of tuna, along with mixed veggies and rice. I found it to be super tasty, especially since they were again using locally caught tuna.

For the afternoon, it was more hiking - in search of a colony of marine iguanas. We also saw penguins and sea lions, and there was also snorkeling. After our very active day, we were given some time off to settle in and unpack. For dinner, we headed back to the dining room.

Apparently soup is very big in Ecuador, so while on Isabela, we had lots of different types of soup. The first one we had was this celery soup:

It was very very good. I actually wish I could figure out how to make a celery soup like this (though Tom would never eat it since he doesn't like celery - he still had some of the soup, though). For the entree, we had grilled chicken with veggies.

Again, it was very well cooked and tasty. I enjoyed it a lot. Lastly, there was dessert. The desserts weren't my favorite during this trip, so I didn't always order it. In this case, we had vanilla ice cream with cherry sauce.

Ok, I admit it. I ordered this mainly for the cherry on top - I'm not a huge fan of vanilla ice cream unless it somehow involves chocolate (like hot fudge or chocolate sprinkles). All in all, we had a wonderful first day on Isabela, and I certainly was enjoying the food.