As I had a 9am appointment with the Port Captain to obtain my fuel permit I decided to go ashore early and visit the internet café. While we’ve had internet from the boat it has been patchy and a number of services blocked. I needed to make some calls as well as upload the albums that have been accumulating. In the hour I had I made the calls necessary but only some of our albums uploaded. As ever, the recently updated blog entries can be found by clicking on the ‘Recently Updated’ category.
At 9am I packed up, paid up and headed over to the Port Captain half suspecting that I would not be in luck. Things got a little confusing when the official took me over to another cruiser, a lady called Irene from Scott Free, to try and explain something. It took a while to figure out what was going on but what it turned out to be was that she had had to return to the Galapagos as a result of mechanical difficulties. She was after some more fuel but cruisers are allowed fuel permits only once. The official was circumventing this constraint by adding her need of 40 gallons onto our request. This turned out to be correct as our permit ended up having her 40 gallons added on so all seemed well. In fact, this was a bonus for us. Irene agree to let us borrow her 40 gallons of jerry cans which reduced the number of trip we had to make to the fuel station to 2. We could fill them all up, transfer most to Dignity’s tanks then refill the empties, drop hers off then ours.
Back on Dignity we refined the plan by deciding to take a taxi out to the Highlands of Santa Cruz. We’d heard that the local taxi drivers do this for far less than the official tours. We tied our cans into a ring, headed off to Scott Free, picked up Irene’s cans then headed ashore. We soon found a taxi driver, Marcos, who could speak a little English, flung the 15 cans in the back and headed off on our island tour.
The first stop was a couple of extraordinary craters, one about 80m deep and the other about 60m deep. These craters were formed when the solidified lava/land above giant bubbles of gas collapsed some time ago. One hopes there aren’t any other bubbles waiting to burst.
The trail ended up a little further down the road and the taxi driver picked us up there. Our next stop was a farm where we could see giant tortoises in the wild. We had to exchange our flip 
flops for wellington boots before heading out into the farmlands, with Marcos as our guide, to find tortoises. It took a while but we eventually found three separate female giant tortoises, the last one right by our way back to the buildings.
Here we removed our boots and put our flip flops back on. There was a small building showing 
two empty giant tortoise shells. We were shown the insides of them and to our surprise, we were encouraged to get inside and have our photos taken. Doing press ups inside a tortoise shell was not that easy but we managed it.
Our final stop of the tour was to visit a lava tube. We didn’t know what to expect so we were 
pleasantly surprised to find a 600m long traversable lava tube. It started with steps leading down into the ground and soon we were walking along the tube along an even floor with a ceiling way above our heads.
It wasn’t going to stay that simple. In places parts of the tunnel roof had collapsed requiring us to climb over muddy rock falls. 
We eventually came to a part of the tunnel where the roof came down to 1 meter above the muddy ground. Limbo was out of the question so we had to crawl underneath as best we could unsuccessfully attempting to avoid getting muddy. On the far side of our crawl we were close to the exit where again Marcos was waiting for us.
We then headed back to Ayora and the fuel station only to find it closed for lunch so we stopped in town for a bite to eat leaving all our jerry cans on the pavement. After lunch Helen took the bags and went shopping leaving John and I to revisit the fuel station and get our first batch of diesel.
After presenting my form to the office I was given my ticket to present to the pump attendant. They duly provided us 80 gallons of diesel and presented me with a bill for nearly $240. I was expecting to pay the local rate of $1.02 per gallon so this was a bit of a shock. I went back to the office only to be firmly told I was getting the tourist rate and not the local rate and that there was no alternative. This was still cheaper than having fuel delivered to the boat but it was not the savings I was hoping for. I also had the problem that I did not have $240 on me so we had to remove all the cans from the back of the taxi truck. Leaving John at the station I went back into town to obtain enough cash then return to pick up John and reload the cans. We dropped off as close to the water taxi dock as possible and schlepped the cans over to the taxi dock then onto the water taxi. We ended up putting all 80 gallons into Dignity as a result of all the motoring we’d done as well as accidentally not quite filling the starboard tank in Costa Rica.
Another run to the fuel station was required and on the way back we dropped off Ilene’s seven cans then headed back with ours and put them away. We had a 5pm date with Phil and Christine aboard Songline and it was now 5pm so we quickly showered and readied and dingied over to their boat. After a strenuous day we had a pleasant evening chatting with them over beers and gin and tonics.