Traveling to the Galapagos

In February of 2012, Kevin & I had a night to kill in a Vietnamese port town.  The following morning we would finish our travel in Vietnam by passing a few days on the beaches of Phu Quoc Island.  Our home for the night was largely a place where people lived & worked.  We spent a significant period of time establishing that fact, and that most restaurants were little family hole-in-the-wall eateries.  While we circled the same blocks, Lonely Planet in hand, we saw another couple, obviously Western, doing the same.

Ultimately, we decided to share a table & had a wonderful night swapping travel adventures & getting to know one another.  They were traveling the world & had been on the road for a year.  I asked them their three favorite places.  Their response:  The Galapagos, New Zealand, & Namibia.

This is generally how Kevin & I set our next destination.

This past fall I booked two tickets for Quito, Ecuador.  As my research developed I learned that travel within Ecuador would be fairly inexpensive.  The Galapagos, on the other hand, is notoriously expensive.  The biggest obstacle is that you have to purchase an additional flight.  & this isn't like a $40 domestic internal Vietnamese flight.  This is like a real flight, often around $500 from Quito or Guayaquil.

Kevin & I talked about whether or not we could afford this adventure.  There's plenty to see and do on Ecuador's mainland.  We didn't want to be irresponsible or greedy!  We also weren't big on a cruise.  The top-rated cruise for the Galapagos is run by National Geographic.  It costs several grand, but features delicious food and world-class nature guides.  Alternately, you can island hop and stay in their hotels if you would prefer less time on a boat.  Again, I looked into some of these hotel rooms.  Discount rooms were close to $300 a night.

You can book budget cruises online or less expensively at hostals and travel agents in Quito.  We looked into some of that.  It's a really mixed bag.  You may pay $800 a person for 4 nights and 5 days to stay on an oily clunker, eating terrible food with drunk backpackers.  Or, you may luck out and meet wonderful people while seeing more of the archipelago.  While Kevin & I perused brochures in Quito a sunburnt Australian told us he'd just returned from three weeks in the Galapagos.  We asked him if it was possible to go on a budget.  He said, "First.  Not if.  You HAVE to go.  And yes, you can budget."

He & his wife stayed at hostals on several islands.  They rented boats for transport, which turned out to be easily arranged at the main docks.  Kevin & I nodded each other.  We'd book a flight and figure it out when we landed.  That's generally the game plan.

We tried a few travel agents but couldn't find an enticing fare.  We went to an internet cafe (always an exercise in frustration with Ecuador's reliably horrible internet connections) to research fares.  It took diligence and patience but I was ultimately able to book us two tickets.  With the dates set, we continued our overland journey, knowing we had to be at the Guayaquil airport by February 14.

We flew into Isla Baltra, the main airport on the Galapagos.  Passengers pay $100 to enter the national park (& you have to have that in cash) & are efficiently ferried onto buses.  The bus took us a short distance to a ferry, where we were greeted by these guys.

That's how it is in the Galapagos.  Ridiculous.  Seals (or sea wolves, translated from Spanish) behave like a cross between Golden Retrievers and drunks.  It's bright and improbable and real.

On the other side of the ferry we paid a fare for the public bus to take us to Santa Cruz town.  Taxis run about $18 vs around $2 for bus fare.  Once in town, we caught a quick taxi to Red Mangrove, the one hotel I knew to request.  Obviously, the hotel was far outside of our budget, but we decided to get lunch while we got our bearings.  While waiting for sushi and tempura we met this fellow.

Properly fortified & enchanted, we walked along the water's edge towards town.  There are plenty of hostals and hotels.  Some are gross concrete institutions that charge a reasonable $10 a night, while some seemed (from the outside) downright hip.  We found La Peregrina for $50 that first night.  It was all that was available.  It cost twice what we hoped to pay, and twice what we usually paid on the mainland, but that's often the case in the Galapagos.  We decided to put our bags down and continue exploring in the morning.

I was also concerned about eating vegetarian in the Galapagos.  In my experience, island food is often pretty limited.  A lot of archipelagos have to get food shipped in from the mainland, or diets revolve around fish and fruit.  The Galapagos had a surprising range of food given the micro-climates on many islands.  Food wasn't great (it's really not great, by my tastes, anywhere in Ecuador) but I certainly had plenty of vegetarian options.

The following morning we found a hostal for $25 a night that would accept credit cards!  Our prayers were answered.  That meant we could extend our time in the Galapagos.  Ultimately, we changed our return destination from Guayaquil to Quito to connect directly to our home-bound flight.  The change only cost $20 and enabled us to stay for 10 days in the enchanted Galapagos.