The Juliens: Galapagos: Day 1

Getting to the Galapagos was no easy battle. The trip is non-trivial even if things go well. We had a flight from Austin to Atlanta. A two-and-a-half hour layover in Atlanta. Then a flight from Atlanta to Quito with an overnight (12 hour) layover in Quito. This was followed by a flight to San Cristobal Island (with a stopover in Guayaquil). Of course, everything did not go well. Our flight out of Austin was delayed by a half an hour. Then by an hour. Then they boarded the plane. Then we sat on the plane for another half an hour. Then they announced there was no cockpit crew, so we had to deplane. Needless to say, this caused us to miss our connection in Atlanta. Delta rebooked us for the same itinerary the following day, with one change. There are no flights from Quito to San Cristobal on Mondays. So we had to fly to Baltra Island, get to the adjacent Santa Cruz Island and get a boat to San Cristobal.

So we left Sunday around noon. We got to Quito without much snag, though our flight was a little late arriving in Quito. By the time we had cleared immigration and customs, it was about midnight. We had booked a hotel near the airport (if you ever need a recommendation, the Hosteria Airport Garden was FANTASTIC), and the proprietress met us at the airport. She and her lovely son got us quickly checked into a neat little cabin just big enough for a bunk bed. We slept. In the morning, we headed back to the Quito airport around 6am (for an 8am flight). It was good that we had allowed more than the one hour and fifteen minutes recommended for a domestic flight because our tickets were all messed up. As best we can tell, when Delta rebooked us, they rebooked our entire itinerary (including the last leg to Baltra), but they failed to cancel our original flight from Quito to San Cristobal (the one that Delta’s inability to find a pilot caused us to miss). So we were marked as “no shows” for that flight, which apparently sullied our entire booking. We’re not even sure how the lovely service people at LAN airline managed to force us on the flight because our reservation was completely deactivated. But they got it done and they got it done almost exactly just in time (well, I suppose it would have been nice to have a few extra minutes to get something to eat for breakfast). In any case, we got on the flight and landed in Baltra without any further airline hitches. Then things got interesting.

You can see in one of the photos below that the airport is on Baltra island (in the north). To get from the airport to the seaport, one has to get from Baltra Island to Santa Cruz Island and then get from the north end of Santa Cruz to its southern end. We knew what this entailed, but we were pretty hazy on the details. We walked out of the airport and were immediately accosted (in a very polite way) by a man offering to help us get wherever we needed to go. I find these kind of things shady, but we went with it. We told him we needed to get to San Cristobal. He said we should pay him $45 in cash (each), and he’d make it happen. We asked if he was including the boat (which costs $30), and he said it did. This sounded like a good deal, and, honestly, it wasn’t at all clear what other options we had from that point right there. So we closed our eyes and handed him $45 each. He took our suitcases and had us wait on a bench for a few minutes. Then he handed some money to another man who spoke basically no English. This man then chatted with a bus driver who was driving a tour group down to the Baltra-Santa Cruz ferry. Our suitcases were loaded on this bus, and we were told to get on. We did (so did our escort--we made sure). We got off the bus at the southern end of Baltra and our escort efficiently grabbed our bags and helped us onto a small ferry to cross the short (500m) channel to Santa Cruz. We then hopped in our escort’s car for a 45 minute drive across Santa Cruz Island.

The scenery on this drive was amazing. We started on the very arid coast (no palm trees… volcanic rocks and cactus and leafless trees). After about 15 minutes, we started to enter a very tropical area with flowers and palm trees. And the temperature dropped about 10 degrees. A bit further along, it looked like a classic midwestern highway scene: rolling hills with groves of clustered deciduous trees. When we reached the southern end of the island, the scenery turned back into the arid coastal clime we’d seen previously.

At the seaport, our escort pulled up to the side of the road where another man (“el capitan”) was waiting. This man had our first names on a list (what turned out to be the passenger manifest for the boat); we added our last names. Meanwhile, our escort handed over $50 to el capitan. It was 1pm. El capitan said to be back a the dock at 2pm. We grabbed some food, then came back to the dock. We had our bags checked (they are constantly checking bags here to make sure organic items do not move from island to island or, worse, come across from the mainland). Then el capitan was waiting for us. After a brief wait, we boarded a water taxi to take us to a larger boat (don’t get the wrong idea here… the larger boat was a 35 person speedboat). We kept saying things that sound something like “vamos a San Cristobal?” and people kept looking at us strangely and saying “si.” So we went with it. El capitan was the last one on the boat. He ducked his head down into the cabin and said “Vamos a Isabela?” Everyone else laughed, so we assumed this was a joke. The conclusion of the very bouncy two hour boat ride confirmed that it was in fact a joke when we arrived at San Cristobal Island. We disembarked (still with our luggage!), being careful not to step on the flippers of the sea lions who could definitely not be bothered to move from the dock. We wandered up to the conference (we’d missed the first few hours) in time to catch some teasers for upcoming demonstrations and then a welcome from the Mayor that included some traditional singing and dancing from local kids.

The trip was an adventure, but in hindsight it was kind of fun to do. Just about everyone else who stepped off of our plane was associated with an enormous tour/cruise group. We definitely interacted more with the locals and the regular pace of things, which was fun.

Our bunk bed room at the Quito airport hotel.

The channel between Baltra and Santa Cruz.

Tomasz "talking" to our escort. He's probably just trying to reconfirm the next thing that is going to happen. We did this a lot. The next thing here happened to be "get on the ferry."