Many people do the Galapagos in a very short trip either by island hopping every other day and paying for expensive tours to capture the 360* highlights or use a hugely pricey short cruise. We decided that we didn’t need to rush the adventure and we could maintain our budget by just snorkelling from every walkable beach going. It definitely worked! We saw everything we wanted to and when we did buy a tour for Stewart’s birthday, although it was a brilliant day, we only saw what we’d seen on our own just in a greater concentration. We would say that 3 weeks was possibly too long as we didn’t do much in out final days on San Cristobal, except eat free bananas, fry plantain and have an afternoon walk.
Summary:
Quito to San Cristobal with LATAM Airlines via Guayaquil
San Cristobal – 4 nights (Finch Nest)
Ferry – booked in advance with Royal Galapagos Expeditions ($30 a ticket)
Santa Cruz – 4 nights (El Arco de Darwin)
Ferry – booked in advance – see above
Isabela – 7 nights (El Rincon de George and Fruit Farm)
Ferry – booked in advance – see above
Santa Cruz – 4 nights (Worst accom!)
Ferry – booked in advance – see above
San Cristobal – 5 nights (Cucuve Eco Hostel)
Back to Quito with LATAM
San Cristobal
Highlight 1:
A colony of 300 sea lions just living their lives on the town harbour area. The town has built slatted fences to prevent them leaving the beach on mass but quite a few escape and sleep on benches and pavements outside shops.
They were so entertaining to watch. They lollop over each other to get where they want to go: usually right into the middle of two sleeping sea lions to be cosy. The mothers are usually feeding a baby sea lion and an older one at the same time and they cannot be bothered. You can see how ‘mithered’ they are. If you could see her teeth, she’d be grinding them. As the babies (some of them are almost her size) latch on, she steels herself or bats her flipper at them half-heartedly. This is her life now – she will never not be feeding 2 offspring at a time. You can see her immense relief when they leave her alone and she gets to sleep in peace. Some mothers find a rock far away that only fits ‘one’. When the little one finds her, she does her best to cover all the space so they can’t get up! Aww. I felt Mum’s pain though. As beautiful as it is as a human at times … we all know how precious a bit of peace from a clingy toddler is!
The ‘dad’ has a big knobble on his head to show he’s the alpha and he’s father to all the children in the harem … they’re a colony of 300! He swims back and to on the shore, barking to make sure any rival young male knows he’s boss! We watched them for ages each day – laughing at their antics and smiling when they hooked a flipper around a mate for a cuddle. We also took way too many photos of sea lions in odd places.
Highlight 2:
There are 3 free walkable beaches which offer plenty to see: turtles, baby sharks, eels, colourful reef fish. One is very family friendly (Playa Mann); the second (Playa Carolla) is more rugged with lava rocks and marine iguanas. They are Stewart’s absolute fave – his phone is full of the same pictures of them. To me they look like aging ‘rockers’.
I freaked myself out snorkelling at this beach, as an eel shot out of a hole near me – it had the colouring of a land boa (I thought, anyway) and looked thick as it unfurled to strike a fish. The waves pushed me towards the hole as I tried to pull back and the floor was all rock so I couldn’t get away fast, with bare feet! So from then on I assigned my most rubbish trainers as water shoes and I felt much better!
The third beach was really a decking platform and the marine life was fantastic. Here is where you swim with sea lions; Stewart was able to make a fab TikTok which has proved popular. There are many beautiful reef fish and he saw a turtle and a black tipped shark further out.
Lowpoint:
While experiencing these highs, we were also dealing with the loss of Stewart’s rucksack! We shared a free shuttle from our hotel near the airport in Quito with a lovely Canadian couple and because we’d not seen the lady get in and put her bag in the boot, we had no idea she had the identical bag to him. We didn’t realise until after our first leg and Stewart went to get the $220 cash entry fee to the Galapagos out; alas, it was a woman’s holiday washing and not his stuff! We always carry our rucksacks on to the plane so the money can be in any bag as they’re always with us. It was more than stressful because all of our 3 weeks worth of US dollars for Cuba were in there too! We’d spent quite a bit of time changing twenty dollars notes from Ecuadorian ATMs into crisp new 100s in the one bank that would let us, ready to exchange in Cuba. You can imagine.
In our panic, we kept our heads, did quite a lot of sleuthing … her name on a pill bottle; already bought Galapagos souvenirs in the bag; the guy’s name and number from the hotel we had stayed at (I know, no GDPR, thank goodness) and used Facebook to track them down. Suffice to say, they were fantastic, even suggesting a visit to the Rockies, if Cuba didn’t work out. We might still take them up on it! They banked our money and transferred it to us and sent our bag back through the system as we had theirs. It took long days and each hour we worried it wouldn’t happen but it was exciting when finally they were reunited!
It didn’t happen until we’d left for Santa Cruz though, but Andy Morales from San Cristobal airport got our bag diverted to the airport at Santa Cruz – he was the star of the show. Without him, I think LATAM were going to say it was not their problem (which is strictly true), but he got it moving from Calgary to Cancun to Lima to Guayaquil to Santa Cruz. 17,000 kms it travelled!
So, although it means we’ve had to change our Cuba plans considerably- we are relieved! And Stewart has more clothes than he knows what to do with now … I mean, who owns 4 pairs of shorts?!
Santa Cruz
Highlight 1:
Santa Cruz has a couple of piers which are like snorkelling without getting wet. The waters are shallow and well-lit. You can watch black tipped sharks track shoals of fish and see spotted eagle rays swim the length of it. It’s weird as the pier is quite a busy place but they don’t seem to mind. There is a restaurant (The Red Tuna) in the bottom corner of the pier which has a 4x3m space before the boats line up and you see everything ‘by chance’. Turtles, puffer fish families, baby reef sharks, blue-footed boobies surface diving to fish and pelicans. It’s crazy. We also bumped into the young couple we’d met in the Amazon at this restaurant, which was fab. It was great to catch up and swap experiences again.
Highlight 2:
Santa Cruz is great for a range of restaurants and cafes, as well as the traditional menu del día. I picked SC as the place to do my birthday as I just wanted to cafe crawl, write, sit in air con, drink mochas and eat western food. We swim, walk or snorkel everyday and it was easy to do something different here. Lots more places accept cards here but it also has ATMs that allow you draw out more than $200 (for a fee obviously) which helped us after our money debacle!
Lowpoint:
Unfortunately, I made a boo-boo and picked rubbish accommodation for this part. We had tried to book nice accommodation for our birthdays but unless you go ridiculously high-end, which seems stupid when we’ve tried hard to budget, there is not much between them. I went off the friendly reviews as I thought it’d be nice to be with people who engage with you when it’s your birthday, but boy were the reviews misleading! Yes, she offers you juice at every step and tries to share her family’s food but the place was filthy and smelt bad! You know it’s rough when Stewart doesn’t fuss the dog!
Isabela
Highlight 1:
We had not taken up on any of the famous tours on any islands so far so we decided to do the lava tunnels tour – (Los Túneles through Pahoehoe – we booked when we were there – website says $165 but it was $110 in person). Jeff our guide in the Amazon said it was worth it. It really was. It was Stewart’s birthday so it was perfect to have an adventure. We travelled out on a tour boat for 45 mins up the coast to a field of tunnels in the water that had been created by lava flowing into the water, cooling on the outside whilst the lava inside runs into the sea leaving a tunnel. It wasn’t as I had imagined. rows and rows of tunnels which were complete – but it was like pools of shore water with rock formations throughout. We snorkelled through two of these areas, the first being easy, the second had more current. It was insane. Swimming with metre long turtles and reef sharks plus all the pretty fish I love and a seahorse (harsh to say this but his camouflage made him a little boring. Who said that?!) We saw everything in one go. Stewart got his money-shot of a blue footed booby which made his birthday and I stood in the water, half a metre from a pair of penguins you’d find on an orange novel! Perfect they were – preening and sticking their little tummies out.
Stewart found the ‘near-death’ (I’m exaggerating, mum!) churning of water we found ourselves in, trying to get out of the surf in the boat at the end exciting. I was petrified and the guide looked worried too which never helps. Usually, the driver picks his moment to surf the waves (in a motorised boat!) out, but he’d picked his moment and was about to go, when they realised a woman with a thousand of pounds camera hadn’t stowed it away and so we had to phaff, missing our moment, and so we were now in a washing machine of waves. Grim. But El Capitan knew his stuff and with immense patience we got out!
On the way to and from, we saw giant manta rays jump out of the waves too! I realised ‘manta’ means blanket in Spanish (thank you, Duolingo) which explains their 7m span. I enjoyed the boffin moment when the guide asked if we knew 🙂
Highlight 2:
Just off the pier where you arrive at Isabela there is a 10 minute boardwalk to Concha de Perla, an enclosed part of the bay for snorkelling. It’s amazing. The current is super strong in places though so be prepared to full on freestyle it at times. We saw a humongous turtle, penguins swimming, a young fresh eyed green turtle and starfish.
Lowpoint:
This is a mixed one. We booked 3 nights at a fruit farm in the highlands. Despite the host’s very explicit description, we did somewhat romanticise it. We’d be able to wander a fruit farm, eating freely and live with farm animals with breakfast and dinner included for £7 a night; we’d just chill out and read, write, play cards. And to a certain extent we did. We had no choice but to stay put because the rains are torrential which we knew; we did wander the farm and it was a lovely place. The family and their story- a young backpacking French woman meets guy from the Galapagos – buys a farm, and tries to be organic and raise a family – was so interesting.
But the sleeping ‘sitch’ was too much – Stewart sent me his comedic review he’d lain awake writing in one of my snoring snatches that night!
“Growing up as a child in the 70’s we had a tv programme presented by Clive Anderson, each week it would feature clips of an extreme South Korean endurance show that would sadistically torture its contestants, that was a 5* ‘all inclusive’ retreat compared to this hellhole. The room is small and well suited to maintain a temperature just hotter than hell itself. A fan is not provided to ensure the sadistic theme is preserved. The bed is small yet still somehow too big for the mosquito net that lays across your face suffocating what tiny oxygen supply would have been available if this room had not been the log burner for Lucifer’s sauna. The mosquito net is of course necessary, not only to prevent getting eaten alive by the mosquitoes, that are the size of Darwin’s Finches, but also to prevent the accidental inhalation of the spiders which are coincidentally the same size as the giant galapagos tortoises. Not someone to be beaten easily, I accepted the challenge, going to bed at 7pm, because there is f’all else to do, which meant I could be awake again by 10pm, ensuring I could lie awake in this living hell for the next 10 hours contemplating all the mistakes I have made in life. On the plus side it has free bananas!”
And how could you talk about the Galapagos without these beauties!
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