The departure was early. Very early. Traveling to Las Islas Galapagos is like traveling from one country to another. Entry permits, bag inspections, back to entry permits because you got the wrong one, bag to bag inspection to now finally drop them off. It’s a complicated process. But it’s hard to not be excited throughout all of it. Although it seemed like we were the only ones. We heard several other tourists grumbling about the process, and we judged them heavily. You’re going to the Galápagos Islands. You can’t whine about it.
But we realized that this was a different class of tourist than we had encountered throughout the rest of our trip. As you may have seen, there is a real but isolated flare up of drug violence as cartels from the bordering countries try to find new routes for their products. Emphasis on isolated. For the past three weeks, we’ve seen next to no direct evidence of this. But the people we were walking past in the airport didn’t know that. They’re flying in from Miami, getting their Galapagos permit, and catching a connecting flight to the island. It didn’t matter if the islands were part of Ecuador or part of Mars. Just a necessary stopover. One traveler we overheard had to spend the night in Quito, and made no secret of his unmatched bravery. For context, I was also out on the mean streets of Quito the night before. Here’s what I came across on my grocery run.
Nine recycling options. Nine. This city is adorable.
Also, for anyone who knows my wife, you are 100% correct in assuming that she lost her mind when I texted that photo to her back at Alicia’s apartment. Lost. Her. Mind. We were one compost can away from moving there immediately.
But back to the airport. After we navigated the permit process and dropped our checked bag, we made our way through one of the nicest international airports I had ever been to. Like most airports these days, the security check was followed by what was essentially a mini shopping mall. Even that was pleasant.
But the real attraction to any traveling parent was the kids’ play space.
Our kids could have spent hours there. Which was good, because they did. As our boarding time approached, we saw suspiciously little activity around the gate. The door was still closed, and there wasn’t a plane at the end of the jet bridge. Not looking great, but at least we were comfortable and had enough snack bars to last us a week. And then suddenly, about 10 minutes after we were scheduled to take off, the flight status board switched from “On Time” to “Gate Closed.” Not cancelled, not even delayed, just boarding closed. The airport wasn’t that big, and we certainly would have heard an announcement if the gate changed. So I figured this was just one of those quirks of traveling internationally. Different protocols, different routines. We’d figure something out. At least we weren’t traveling for anything critical. I assumed that was the case for everyone flying to the Galápagos Islands at 9 am on a Thursday in mid-July. But you wouldn’t know it by the scene at the gate. There was a near riot of affluent, confused foreigners barking in at least four different languages. This was a class of people not used to encountering bumps in the road. I was just happy to see how multicultural the crowd was. The US no longer has a monopoly on entitled tourists. I call that progress.
We did eventually get on the plane. During the hubbub at the gate, the status board quietly switched from “gate closed” to “delayed.” Undoubtedly a late arrival or some mechanical issue. Nothing worth getting upset over. Need a few more minutes to make sure the plane is safe? You got it.
The flight itself was largely uneventful. But I had to come to terms that Mimi has now entered her late elementary school phase, as evidenced by the heart that is now part of her signature.
There was also some sort of fumigation spray that was released throughout the plane just before we landed. The flight attendants announced that it was safe and approved by the World Health Organization. But that didn’t prevent more than a few panicked expressions and breath-holding spells throughout the cabin.
And just like that, we were in the Galapagos! We deplaned in the type of open air tropical airport that warms my soul every time.
From the runway, we followed a painted path on the ground into the lone building on airport grounds. It was the biosecurity checkpoint. For obvious reasons, the Ecuador and regional Galapagos governments take their ecological diversity extremely seriously. No food is allowed past the inspection station (we finished our last snack bars while walking up), and animals or seeds can result in massive fines, not to mention serious environmental consequences.
We zigzagged through the line and made our way to the window. After showing our permits and paying the national park fees, our bags were x-rayed and inspected. Quinn’s bag was taking a bit longer to clear, and it turned out the stuffed cuy he had been carrying everywhere with him since we picked it up in Otavalo looked suspiciously like a piece of fruit on X-ray. After a few laughs all around when we realized what they were looking for, we gathered our bags and made our way to the airport shuttle busses. All of the busses were going to the same place: a ferry station on the other side of the island.
There were no signs, no choices, no forks in the road. The island we landed on (Baltra) has no visitor sites and no tourist facilities. It’s an 8 square-mile semi-desolate patch of land know as “The Rock” by the US soldiers stationed there during World War II, when it served as an allied base defending western approaches to the Panama Canal. After the war, the US government turned the airbase over to the Ecuadorean government, which in turn converted the airstrip to a mixed use commercial and military airport. Other buildings were torn down to provide home building materials for the existing Galapagos residents, and it now serves as one of the two main visitor arrival sites to identify and isolate biodiversity threats before they can reach any of the more fertile islands in the archipelago.
The bus took us to a ferry station, which we boarded for the short journey across a narrow channel to the neighboring Santa Cruz Island.
Again, no signs, no choices, just mild wondering about whether we were going to the right place. But we had met the guide we knew would be waiting for us at the shuttle busses, and were happy to just go with the flow. The ferry ride itself was fun, and I was very pleasantly surprised that there were life jackets for everyone.
We pulled up to the dock at Santa Cruz and grabbed our bags from the roof of the ferry boat. From there, our guide ran off to grab his pickup truck parked nearby and we all hopped in for the drive to the other side of Santa Cruz.
We made some small talk with the guide/driver, but he was a man of few words. And to be honest, we didn’t mind the quiet drive. The scenery was beautiful, and we had spent the day traveling on nearly every mode of human transportation with two children. A moment of calm was not the worst thing at that point.
It turned out the break was especially nice, since our arrival at the third dock that day was a whirlwind. Our driver dropped us off at the boat we’d be spending the next four days in. The main guide from that crew let us know that we were going to see a tortoise sanctuary that day, but the entrance timing was very precise and the flight delays from the morning had thrown every tour’s plans into chaos. So we weren’t going to have lunch, or it was going to be a lunch on the way to the preserve, or the group already had lunch. It was all rather confusing, and we wanted to tell the direct-bordering-on-gruff guide we spoke Spanish, since that would at least take a language barrier out of the equation. But all of that melted away when we saw our first sea lion just hanging out on the dock.
But that was just the beginning. It turned out that the boat crew did actually prepare lunch for us (always a big relief for this family). After dropping our bags on the boat and having a nice little meal, we took a dinghy back to the dock and caught yet another bus to the tortoise sanctuary.
The sanctuary was worth every bit of effort it took to get there. In fact, it was nothing short of magical. The creatures themselves are majestic. Weighing nearly 1,000 pounds and living well over 100 years, each tortoise is absolutely awe-inspiring. But taken collectively, they’re even more impressive. Their genetic history predates the formation the Galápagos Islands, and the first ones likely floated there through the ocean from related populations near Argentina about 5 million years ago (they can survive months without food or water). From there, sub-species populated the various other islands in the archipelago after each new island was formed via volcanic explosions. The species then diverged to meet the specific circumstances on each island, and those differences formed part of the reasoning behind Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Here’s his quote about this phenomenon.
I never dreamed that islands, about fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted.
I agree, Mimi. It’s a lot to take in.
After the sanctuary, we headed back to the boat to start our journey. We pulled up to the dock, and our guide said that this would be our last developed environment for the rest of the trip. We were very excited about that part of it. To be honest, seeing any human activity on the Galápagos Islands was pretty jarring. But we still had about an hour in town for people to run any last minute errands. Food was provided on the boat, but they’ve never had our family on the boat before. So out of an abundance of caution, I grabbed a shopping bag full of emergency snacks from a nearby market. Plus a bottle of wine and a couple of cold beers. You never know.
We took our last dinghy ride of the day back to our boat and checked out our new surroundings.
But it wasn’t a long exploration. After a lovely dinner with the three other families traveling with us (one each from Switzerland, China, and the Netherlands), we were absolutely wiped out. I think Quinn’s face here pretty accurately captures the exhaustion we were all feeling, the other three of us are just marginally better at hiding it.
But new experiences are a powerful stimulant, and the kids wanted to stay up until we were underway. However, the crew said that we wouldn’t be heading off to the next island until around midnight, so Mimi read us all some bedtime stories and we called it a night.
This post should have ended there. But at some point in the middle of the night, I woke up to the feeling of us skipping along through the waves. It was exciting, and to this desert dweller, a bit terrifying. So I managed to convince myself that I heard Quinn crying, and figured that he fell off his top bunk and was now wandering a strange ship in the middle of the night. So I popped out of bed and took a moment to steady my sea legs. Then I went across the hall to the kids’ berth, and found them both sleeping soundly. But ironically, me entering actually woke Quinn up. Realizing the same thing I did a few moments ago, Quinn popped out of bed to look out his window. “Dad! We’re really moving! This is exciting!” I couldn’t agree more, Quinn. Also, night night.
