Touring the Galapagos Islands

So after a great few days seeing what was below the Galapagos Islands, it was time to spend a few days seeing what was above it. Through our ¨do it all¨ travel agent, Paddy, we got ourselves a great last minute deal on a boat called the Friendship. We´d read some mixed reviews about the boat, but the price was right and we´d heard that it was guaranteed to be mostly filled with young travellers. This was definately a necessity for us, given the amount of tour groups we had seen walking through Puerto Ayora that comprised entirely of elderly, mostly loud, American tourists. Not the sort of people you want to be stuck on a boat with for 5 days.

We were happy to meet our group and find that the 16 of us were all between the ages of 19-37. What was interesting about our gang was that everyone spoke English, however Lyds and I were actually the only native English speakers. The rest of the group came from Sweden, Denmark, Belguim, Germany, Chile and Switzerland. We lucked out with a great bunch of people, and particularly became buddies with Bert from Belguim and a young Scandanavian couple - Kasper and Viktoria. Our boat was as expected...on the lower end of luxury, but the food was unbelievably good, we had a really knowledgable tour guide, a great roof deck for tanning after post island visits, and most importantly we covered a lot of different islands. We also had a great time joking about how bad our boat was in comparison to the many 1st class boats that docked near us at each of the various sites, but always had a little smile and chuckle when we saw the people getting off them.

The 5 days were an incredible journey through these beautiful islands taking in the vast number of endemic (i.e. - not naturally found elsewhere) species that willingingly allow you to get up close and personal to them. Everyday our tour usually consisted of two Island land visits, and a couple of snorkelling trips.

The Islands are strictly controlled as far as where you can and can´t tred, so no matter where we went, you felt that the Islands were being well preserved. Indeed many of the animal species are fighting back through conservation programs after being almost wiped out by a lot of man introduced species in the early 1900s. Hearing that made us feel a bit better about the $100US they levy each foreign tourist at the airport on arrival for ¨conservation¨ (Ecuadorians don´t pay).

It´s hard to document such an incredible trip in words without writing thousands and thousands of them. The photos below give a good indication of all that we saw during our trip. Suffice to say we´ve certainly seen enough Iguanas to last us a lifetime(thousands of them), and been lucky enough to get so up close and personal to dozens of seals in and out of the water that seeing them now down at say Sorrento Rocks near Melbourne wouldn´t really be that special to us.

Here are some pics (actually a lot of Pics) from the 7 days we spent cruising through the Galapagos Islands.

If you can´t see them properly than click on the link here - Galapagos Touring

Having had such a great time, it was hard to leave the boat, but there was still more to see !! When we got back to Puerto Ayora, we literally hoped straight onto another boat to spend a couple of days checking out nearby Isabela Island, which we´d heard great things about. Again we took a little all inclusive tour that our mate Paddi had organized. We were met straight away by our guide Dairo who took as on a whirlwind non-stop 2 day tour. Our rapid fire visit was spent - visiting a turtle breeding farm; checking out a Flamingo reserve (this proved quite sad given that now is not the migratory season for them, so in the whole reserve we saw....ONE Flamingo. Don´t worry, we still got a great photo !!); Horseback riding and hiking up Sierra Negra Volcano (Lyds got a young horse that loved to Gallop at just the slightest encouragement, while I got the old veteran who told ME when he would gallop (very little) and when he would just plod along at his own pace); snorkelling (white tip sharks, turtles and of course playing with seals); and a bunch of great meals and drinks at Dario´s beachside bar. All this and we got to do it all with two great brothers from Switerland (Flo and Sebastian) that we met straight off the boat.

Regretfully on getting back to Puerto Ayora it was time to say goodbye to the Galapagos and Ecuador in general. A 36 hour busride from Guayaquil to Ica, Peru was waiting for us and the legendary Maccu Picchu is just over the horizon...