Floreana has a long, strange history I won’t go into here. Basically there were some pirates, then the Wittmers came from Germany, and now it’s an island with 150 people and one of the few natural sources of water in the archipelago. There are no longer any native tortoises here, because sailors were careless in mixing species and leaving them here. So the national park decided to set up an enclosure and let the tortoises live out their lives in peace. Here we learned about the “sweet dream” trees whose flowers produce a compound akin to Rohypnol, so from here on out we joked that we’d be sweet dreaming people if they didn’t stay in line.  Continue reading →