Thursday, September 12, 2013

Day 6 Wall of tears and Centro de Crianza de Tortugas

Today we had a nice breakfast at our hotel with made to order eggs, toast, fruits, yuca with cheese fried "dumplings", and bread. There was also some nice looking bacon. 

We took a taxi ($5/pp) to the wall of tears (Muro de las lagrimas). This was a Penal colony in the 1950's and as a way to keep the prisoners busy they were forced to build a large wall that is now 100 meters long and 7 meters tall. The horrible conditions endured by the prisoners resulted in the wall being named the wall of tears. 


We then began our LONG walk back to our hotel and stopped at a bunch of lookout points and other sites along the way. We saw lots of giant tortoises just roaming in their natural habitat, lots of black marine iguanas, and our first look at blue footed boobies.




Once we finally made it back to town, most of the restaurants were already closed for siesta time. So we had to grab some snacks from the mini markets to eat. The pickings were very slim and we ended up with just some chocolate and some cookie type crackers.

We the explored the dock area to see hundreds of small black marine iguanas basking in the sun.


The last excision we took for the day was to walk the lagoon path behind our hotel to the tortoise breading center. Along the way we saw lots of birds, but the most magnificent ones were the two flamingos. The breeding center had tons of baby giant tortoises. Talk about cute!