Highlights of our Galapagos adventure

When you arrive at the tiny Galapagos airport on Baltra island and follow the path from the plane to the open air “terminal”, you pass all the people waiting to board the plane on which you have just arrived, most of whom are probably sharing the same thought - “I wish we were in their shoes, starting over”. True enough, earlier this week, that was exactly our experience as we moved on to the next leg of our trip.

We’ve enjoyed some really interesting shared experiences together living on the three main islands: Santa Cruz, San Cristobal and Isabela, each with their own appeal and character. 

At Santa Cruz, we settled into a pleasant little apartment in a residential area a ten minute walk from the main town of Puerto Ayora.  You got a sense of “life as normal” here, walking around the back streets, trying to avoid the noisy roadworks and regular dynamite explosions as they try and improve the main street that follows the coast.  As you get nearer the town, there are lots of little convenience shops dotted around, a bustling Saturday market, a little paneria which was our favourite place to buy fresh bread and croissants first thing in the morning, all places for us and the boys to practice our broken Spanish. Taxis anywhere in town are just a dollar (as the boys sometimes reminded me whenever we were walking with all our gear) but you get more of a feel for the place walking around, and besides, what’s the rush? 

The boys surprised us with their washing up skills!

Many of the experiences that the Galapagos are famous for are part of tours, but there are quite a few that can be done independently, if you have the time to get to the main islands, which has been our strategy.  We were also very fortunate that Paul and Gaby, who owned the apartment we stayed in on Santa Cruz, not only are very personable and competent guides themselves, but also have two delightful children, Emily and Danny, that the boys really loved spending time with, so we had some great experiences sharing time with these guys too.  They also very kindly allowed us to use the apartment as a base from which to visit the other two islands, which was a big help.  

Poor old Lonesome George

Santa Cruz gave us our first wildlife experiences - you see the pelicans and sealions almost immediately fighting over the fish from the fisherman at Pelican Bay which Louis has reported on (The Galapagos Brown Pelican.) We saw some giant tortoises at the Charles Darwin Research Station, although alas no more Solitario George - Lonesome George - as he sadly died in June this year, making his species, the Pinta island Giant Tortoise, extinct. 

And we made a few visits to Tortuga Bay and Playa de Alemanas giving the boys their first close-up views of marine iguanas as well as enabling them to get accustomed to snorkelling, in order to enjoy the amazing experiences to come on the other two islands.

Daddy, can you help me with my flippers?

We snorkelled one on one with the boys at first, to get them used to it, and then, depending on whether one of us needed to stay on the beach to look after our stuff, we’d go in three or four of us.  It’s lovely to snorkel hand in hand with them while they make sense of the underwater world.  Even though the visibility wasn’t that great there in Santa Cruz, you could hear their little excited noises like squeaks in the water, and feel their hand squeezing yours when they saw a fish. In fact, Frankie’s initial preferred mode of communication was to repeatedly slap me over the head when he saw something interesting, even if it was only little.  Luckily I managed to persuade him to adopt a different approach before we saw anything too large.  It was really good to give them some basic confidence in the water, and we were pleased we’d invested in some new “dry snorkels” so that they could start diving down without breathing in any water.

We decided to head for San Cristobal after a week, and took a very bumpy two hour speedboat crossing (described interestingly as “tranqueeel” by the captain, just before we embarked.  Not a description probably shared by many of the 16 passengers judging by most of their expressions during the crossing ). It was on San Cristobal where we really started getting the most memorable wildlife experiences. 

Ssssshhhhhhh!

Even in our first hour there, as we wandered along the coast of the very small town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno (actually the capital of the Galapagos, although a third of the size of Santa Cruz) looking for the hostal we’d booked, we immediately warmed to the much calmer, smaller and friendlier atmosphere here. It’s as if the sea lions must sense it too, because for the most part in Puerto Ayora, they don’t come ashore, whereas here, you see them everywhere along the coastline of the main town: on park benches, lying across walkways, on the docks where you embark and disembark the boat, and of course lying, in their dozens, along the beach and rocks that border the town. 

We had our first wild sealion snorkelling encounters, literally face to face, right on the very first day there at Playa Man.  We then spent three consecutive days at La Loberia, a beautiful, deserted beach populated only by sealions. The boys are reporting separately on our time there and in fact Louis is thinking of making a movie with all the video footage we have of a lovely little baby sealion we spent a lot of time watching.  

Sunset at La Loberia.....time to leave

Hi, we're called Louis and Frankie too!

We had a great weekend in the San Cristobal with Paul and his family in the highlands.  On the way, we visited the Interpretation Centre, which gave us a lucid and well illustrated history of the Galapagos on which the boys are putting together a presentation.

We climbed a steep volcano whilst learning about how the Galapagos is combatting the challenges of "introduced" flora, such as quinine trees and blackberry bushes........






....and were rewarded with a lovely view of the island.

We made it!

Early next morning, we visited a coffee and sugar cane plantation, and learned about the clever ways in which the family there have been making alcohol, brown sugar and coffee there for generations.  Naturally we had to try both the coffee and the alcohol.  The boys are working on keynote presentations for this!

We went down some lava tunnels together, the smaller ones provided great places for the boys to hide, and the larger ones were just scary when you reflected on what it must have been like to witness lava flows of this magnitude.

Who turned the lights out?

Later, we ambled around the rolling hills of a farm owned by Steven Divine where dozens of wild giant tortoises have made their home.   It's a strange experience to hear them hiss if you get too near - you think it is a warning but it's actually them exhaling in order to be able to fit back into their shell!  Steven generously introduced us to the delights of rum in our coffee, not often that we'd had TWO alcoholic drinks before eleven am!

We headed back to Santa Cruz for a few days, during which the boys enjoyed a morning with children at a local school, where they had particular fun with the music lesson!

Then on to the very peaceful Porto Villamil on Isabella, an island with one tenth the population of Santa Cruz, but several times larger. We hooked up with another mobile family that we met the unsteady ferry ride over, and shared some almuerzos, drinks at sunset, homeschooling tips (we probably received more than we have, sorry Daniel!) and exploring together over a couple of days. Louis and Frankie enjoyed sharing hammocks, Lego, some wave-jumping and generally going wild with Daniel and Cecile's great kids, Kasem and Zaki. The highlight was probably a trip to Las Tintoreras, where you could see dozens of white-tipped reef sharks gently swimming through a narrow channel of crystal clear warm water just a few feet below you.

Good boy - go fetch!

At Concha de Perla, just when we thought we'd seen it all, in terms of sealion snorkelling experiences, we were swimming with a sealion when a large marine iguana swam hurriedly past.  We watched closely as the sealion keep swimming up to him from below, nudging the iguana's tummy.  The iguana clearly didn't want to play. Then as if to emphasise the canine qualities of the sealion (well the seal pups do resemble dog puppies a little, don't they?) this seemingly very happy sealion that had been darting around us, picked up a stick and dropped it in the water in front of us.   Frankie dived down to the bottom to pick it up and gave it back to him, (well you can't really "throw" under water) and the sealion took it in his mouth then let it go so that he could trap it between his two flippers and swam around holding it there, close to his tummy.  We could scarcely believe he was doing this.

That's not grooming, it was very windy lying down on the front of the boat!

We made the most of our last couple of days on the Galapagos - a marathon one mile snorkel culminating in Frankie swimming with his first shark; and a fabulous all-day boat trip around Santa Cruz to Islas Plazas, where Kike, our first class guide, introduced us to some fascinating flora and fauna on a more remote part of the Galapagos.  The boys are working on separate blog entries for both of these, as well as more of the many animals we have seen.

Such an incredible four weeks, and we leave with many happy memories and two new but now very competent snorkellers!