Galapagos Islands

My brother and I had debated for some time whether we were going to visit the Galapagos Islands because of how expensive it is. However felt that we couldn't spend a month in Ecuador and not visit. Originally we were going to book through the school's travel agency but that ended up falling through so we visited every travel agency we could find in "Gringolandia" and ended up finding another package through Zenith Travel, who were great.

When going to the Galapagos you can do a cruise, which is the most common and expensive option. With this option you stay on a yacht or cruise ship and travel to all the islands during the night. The other option is island hoping where you stay in hotels at nigh and take boats to the various islands during the day. We did the island hoping option since its was significantly cheaper. This meant we saw less islands but we did more activities and spent more time on each island. In the end I think we were happy with our choice and liked being able to walk around at night (which you can't do in Quito).

They are super strict about you bringing any sort of fruits or animals into the Galapagos and we actually had to pay for our bags to get checked and special tags put on, to show our bag content was safe. Then on the airplane, while we were in the air, they spray the cabin with a "natural" and "safe" pesticide. To make sure we are not bringing anything in with us.

Lonesome George

Our trip started out with our flight getting delayed because of rain in Quito. This caused us to missing our boat to Isla Isabela where we were suppose to spend out first night. Thankfully our tour agency and guide where really great and rearranged our schedule so we could still visit the things we wanted to. So our first day was spend in Isla Santa Cruz with a visit to the Darwin Centre which is a breeding centre for one of the turtle species. The Galapagos island had 13 species of turtles with  2 of them now extinct. At the breeding centre we got to see "lonesome George" which is the last of his specie, so once he dies there will only be 10 species of turtles left on the islands. We also found out why the breeding centre is so important. Apparently the pirates and natives introduced a number of animals (rats, cats, dogs, goats, etc) to the islands which kill the baby turtles, leading to a zero survival rate is they are left to survive on their own. So they raise the turtles till they are 7 and have a strong enough shell to survive on their own, then re-introduce them into the wild, on the island they came from. We also learned that they can change the sex of the turtle eggs by changing the temperature the eggs are kept at,  regulating the temperature so they end up with more females then males.

Our second day in the Galapagos was spend on Isla Santa  Mariaor or Floreaana. One of the cool things about the two hour ride over to the island was the dolphins. I think they are attracted to the boats because at one point our boat was completely surrounded by  50+ dolphins. They could be seen everywhere, jumping up out of the water beside us. We experienced this again on our boat ride to Isla Bartolome. 

Our morning in Floreana was spent hiking, we got to see more turtles but this time up close and visit pirate caves. The afternoon we then went snorkeling and we actually got to snorkel with sea lions, sea turtles and penguins. It's actually quite cool how close you can get to the animals, they aren't afraid of you at all. It's actually kind of funny because it's more like we're getting in their way and an annoying paparazzi to them.  Trevor actually had one of the penguin's poo in his face while snorkeling. On the boat ride back I made friends with the driver (with my limited Spanish) and he actually let me drive the boat for 45 minutes, which was pretty cool.


After this day we were blown away by all the cool animals we saw because we had seen almost all the typical Galapagos animal on that trip alone. We soon learned the Galapagos island doesn't actually have that many animals, it's a lot of the same type of animals just different species of them on the different Islands. So for the rest of the trip we saw similar animals just in different landscapes. We would see sea lions, birds and prehistoric land iguanas everywhere.

Our third day was spend doing a bay tour where we hiked around Isla Santa Fe and went snorkeling again. This time while snorkeling we saw our first shark. We also visited a very cool cavern where we went swimming in some of the clearest water I've ever seen.   In the afternoon we took a half an hour hike in the scorching heat to visit the nicest beach in the Galapagos - Bahia Tortuga. 

Bahia Tortuga Beach

Swimming Cavern

View from Bartolome Isla

On fourth day we went to Bartolome Island, this was the island I was most looking forward to. It's the most photographed island in the Galapagos and it definitely had the nicest scenery. It took about 3 hours by boat but we sunbathed and watched the dolphins on the way there. Once we arrived we took a hike up to the top. The island itself looks like your on Mars but it's the view from the top that's spectacular. In the afternoon we went snorkeling again and this time we swam with a ton of sharks including Galapagos Sharks and White Tip Sharks. On our ride home we discovered that we had actually eaten shark for lunch.

Our fifth day was spend on Isla Isabela, which was a 2 hour boat ride but the sad thing was that we killed a sea turtle on our journey over. There was a big bag and the motor on the boat stopped working. Of course all the discussion was in Spanish so we didn't understand what had happened until the guy beside me asked if I know what happened and then proceeded to tell me we had killed a sea turtle that was sleeping in the water. Poor turtle.

Baby Turtle

On Isabela Island we went to a bay where we saw Flamingos and them  for a tour of another breeding centre for a different species of turtles and then snorkeling again. Our last day was then spent travelling back to the airport on Isla Balta..

The weather in the Galapagos was great but you definitely needed to load up on the sunscreen, we went through three bottles of sunscreen in six days. Trevor who use to work as a lifeguard  though that if he got a tan he would just keep tanning and didn't need to worry about burning. This is not the case in the Galapagos and after a couple burns he finally started listening and plastering on the sunscreen. The sun is definitely intense there but the humidity actually isn't too bad but it does help that they tend to take you hiking in the morning and then swimming in the afternoon, so you can cool off.