Whilst waiting for Le Roux to arrive in Quito I decided to head out to a cafe for a cup of tea. I had my trusty Latin American Spanish phrase book in my bag and having looked up the necessary phrases I decided to give Spanish a go. I managed to get across that I wanted a cup of tea, and having been presented with about 10 different boxes of tea, I picked out my bag of choice. Then came the question “con limon o con leche?”. I replied “con leche por favour”. Going well I thought. However, when the tea arrived I was presented with a cup of hot milk with my tea bag on the side. Something obviously got lost in translation! Back to the phrase book, me thinks!It was lovely being reunited with Le Roux after nearly 7 weeks apart. The beginning of our adventure together. I was so excited about the first part of our trip as I’ve heard such wonderful things about the Galapagos Islands, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Our Galapagos trip began with a walking tour around Quito’s old town with Doris, our guide. We soaked up the atmosphere wandering around the old streets and visited a few of the 30 something churches in the city. We also sampled some Ecuadorian delights with the first being “canelazos” which is a thick hot fruit juice spiced with cinnamon and laced with a shot of local liquor – nice and warming on a cool drizzly day in Quito! For dinner Le Roux and I decided to try roasted guinea pig but there was not much meat and it was a bit fatty and fiddly to eat, so I don’t think we’d choose to have it again.
Next morning all 11 of our tour group were up and ready to go at 8am as instructed by Doris, however, she was nowhere to be seen. On chatting with the group, it emerged that Tim had been out on the town with Doris drinking bottles of tequila with her and her friends until gone 5am. On all the group trips I’ve gone on over the years, there’s normally someone who can’t get out of bed on time, but it’s never been the tour guide before! So although our bus had turned up to take us to the airport, Doris had our plane tickets, so without her we were a bit stuck. We headed over to the airport anyway and Doris finally made an appearance claiming the road had been closed. Not sure how many of us believed that! Anyway, it worked out fine in the end and we just about made the plane although Le Roux and I had to neck boiling hot coffee as our flight was called pretty much as soon as we’d made it through security.
The Galapagos Islands - what an incredible place! They are called the enchanted islands with good reason. I have been amazed by the quantum, variety and fearlessness of all of the wildlife we have seen. This truly is a mecca for wildlife enthusiasts. My new digital SLR camera and zoom lens have been invaluable and have barely left my side since we arrived. The animals don’t seem to mind the paparazzi at all, thank goodness and in fact some of the animals seemed to enjoy posing for photos.
Our trip took us from Quito, via Guayaquil, to San Cristobel Island for 2 nights. We then sailed to Isabela Island via Floreana Island and spent 3 nights there. Next stop was Santa Cruz Island for 1 night before heading back to San Cristobel via Santa Fe Island for our last night.At this time of year the water is rougher and colder, but this does mean that there is more sea life around as the plankton grows abundantly in colder water thereby supporting a larger population of animals. Although I was very happy that there would be more sealife to see, the thought of snorkelling in the colder water was not filling me with joy. So one of the first tasks we had to do therefore was have a wetsuit fitting. This was an exhausting exercise as having fought my way into a 7mm long wet suit, I discovered that it was way to big at the top, so I had to extract myself from it and try and get in a smaller one. Oh how I wish I wasn’t so pear shaped! It took 3 people to get me into the wetsuit and another 2 to get me out again, by which time I was so hot and knackered. I almost suggested that I just stay in the suit!
Sea Lions
I have a few sea lion stories for you: Our first wildlife encounter on arriving in San Cristobel Island was with sea lions. On the walk from our hotel to lunch we practically tripped over some lazy sea lions resting on the pavement under a tree. We then went on to play spot the sea lion as we encountered many more in random places - sprawled on the beach, sleeping in shop doorways, basking in the sunshine on moored boats and rocks, hiding under the slide in the children’s playground, and pretty much everywhere!On our first snorkelling trip we swam with some very playful sea lions – Le Roux was diving down and him and the sea lion were chasing each other causing much amusement for the rest of us. The sea lions would come straight at you and then veer off at the last second which gave me quite a fright the first time – I have to admit that I screamed through my snorkel just a little bit!
The sea lions are quite strong willed and very much own the piers: We were just waiting to get on a taxi boat one day and a sea lion couldn’t be bothered to go round me so it decided to walk across my foot instead giving me quite a fright! Another time we all had to quickly make way as a sea lion was intent on coming past and was not prepared to wait for us to get out of the way and it left us a smelly gift as it passed by! Leaving Floreana Island required us to move the boat as the steps down from the pier which we needed to use were occupied by a stubborn sea lion who was definitely not going to interrupt its rest for us!
Le Roux and Juan Carlos had a close encounter with a very large male sea lion during one of our snorkelling sessions. He was none too happy to have them come too close to his domain, so they hot footed it out of there. You can tell a male sea lion as they are larger than the females, have a bump on their forehead and tend to bark a lot.
Everytime Catherine, one of our group, tried to have her picture taken with a sea lion on the beach, it would bark at her making her jump and us all fall about laughing! They mustn’t have liked her perfume!
Food
We tried quite few different Ecuadorian dishes on our travels round the islands, with plantain featuring regularly on the menu at all meal times and in many guises – plantain crisps, plantain chips, deep fried plantain, mashed plantain, mashed & fried plantain cakes, plantain pancakes, plantain fritters, plantain crostinis with ham and cheese....
There has been lots of fresh seafood, with a melt in the mouth piece of swordfish being the highlight for me. The low light was the worst lobster (really a crayfish) Le Roux and I have ever eaten – considering we saw them arriving at the pier straight off the fishing boat, we had high expectations, but unfortunately both of ours were grilled to death and were somewhat chewy and dry – such a disappointment when I know we could have cooked them so much better. Coriander (or Cilantro as the Americans call it) seems to feature in most dishes which for those of you who know me well, know I hate with a passion! I’ve had to pick it out of many a dish, unsuccessfully, so perhaps by the end of our travelling I will have learned to like it!
I’ve not yet understood why both rice and fries are served with most dishes – one carb is enough for me. Although having said that poor Le Roux has been hungry for most of our time in the Galapagos - the portions were not massive and the fact that we were pretty active everyday meant he needed somewhat more to fill him up. One night he ended up ordering a second main course as the taco didn’t even touch the sides! Breakfasts have been quite interesting with no sign of my usual cereal anywhere – we’ve had everything from eggs and toast to beef stew with peppers, obviously served with plantain! We’ve also sampled quite a few “llapingachos” which are potato cakes with cheese in the middle – very tasty, especially when served with a fried egg on top for breakfast.
The fresh fruit here is delicious and we’ve had gorgeous freshly squeezed juices for breakfast along with fresh fruit - a mix of banana, melon, watermelon, pineapple, papaya, and kiwi. I even picked a ripe banana straight from the tree to eat one day, and Le Roux found some wild guavas for us to snack on, on a walk one day. However, given all this fresh fruit, including orange trees along the roadsides, I have been unpleasantly surprised on some occasions when I sipped my juice and discovered that there was no way a real orange had been anywhere near it and that it was horrible fake orange squash instead!
Recently it has been made illegal to drink on Sundays in Ecuador in order to try and reduce the amount of drunkenness. The Ecuadorians, much like the Icelandics, don’t seem to be able to go out for one, but are instead on a mission to get drunk every time. We did, however, find a little bar on San Cristobel that would serve us tourists with a much needed “Cerveza Grande” (large beer) after an afternoon of cycling in the highlands.
Our trip was plagued with boat trouble – these things definitely come in threes! On our first day on the boat we stopped at the beach for a walk after a couple of snorkelling sessions and on returning to the boat to head back to town, it wouldn’t start! We had to enlist the help of another boat to jump start our engines. The next day was a long, rough crossing from San Cristobel via Floreana to Isabela. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite go to plan and it took nearly 6 hours instead of 2 to get to Floreana as 1 of our 2 engines packed up and the crew couldn’t fix it. We soldiered on on 1 engine, but the current was so strong that for every 10 mins we sailed, we only really moved forward by 6 mins. In the end they radioed for help and a rival tour group came to collect us all from the boat in the middle of the ocean. Despite the sea sickness pills I felt pretty horrible the whole way.
Keeping an eye on the horizon became tricky when the waves kept causing it to disappear! In the end I curled up on a cushion at the back of the boat and tried to sleep as much as possible so I wouldn’t be focussed on how rubbish I felt! Our third boat incident involved a taxi boat, a rock and a bamboo pole. We were headed out to our boat in order to move on from Isabella to Santa Cruz but as it was low tide we had to get a smaller taxi boat from the pier out to our larger boat. We were commenting amongst ourselves on how skillfully our taxi driver was negotiating the harbour, with various rocks and sandbanks so close to the surface. However, we spoke too soon as we ground to a halt on a sandbank. Out jumped the taxi driver in order to push the boat back into deeper water and after a lot of huffing and puffing, he managed to get us going again. However, his next choice of channel proved even worse – we ended up well and truly stuck on a rock! But with deeper water either side he couldn’t get out this time, so he resorted to his bamboo pole to try and push us off. We all moved to the back of the boat and much prodding and poking with the stick followed, but then a crack was heard and the stick became 2! Our only option now was to be rescued by another boat. We piled into another taxi boat that had chosen a better route and was on the right side of the rock to get to our big boat, and then used this boat to pull our original taxi boat off the rock. Finally the boat was freed and we piled back into it again. 45 mins after leaving the pier we finally arrived at our boat!
Our itinerary mysteriously included a number of “power hiking” activities. On questioning Ossie, our guide, as to what exactly this was, he wasn’t sure either and claimed that the local tour organiser, Carla, had invented this new term! However, our group soon adopted this term as the 5 hour trek up to and around the Sierra Negra volcanic crater was most definitely hard work. When we set off in the bus that morning it was cold and cloudy, but as we neared the start of the trail we came through the clouds into the bright sunshine and a clear blue sky. It got hotter and hotter as we hiked up and by the end of the trek we were all dreaming of the cold water we’d been snorkelling in the day before! The hike was well worth it though as the volcanic crater is the 2nd largest in the world (the largest being the [ ] crater in Tanzania) - an impressive sight and we were also treated to wonderful views over the island and the other volcanoes in the distance. A couple of other “short” walks also turned into power hikes too as we bounded over boulders to get to various remote places, including a gorgeous swimming hole on Santa Cruz island where we were able to snorkel and jump off the rocks without having to don our wetsuits for once. We saw a number of large parrot fish and Le Roux won the prize for climbing the highest up the rocks to jump off (about 7m). The rest of us managed a 3m jump, of which I was quite proud having bottled a couple of the cliff jumps in Iceland.
Now Le Roux would say that I have developed an obsession with marine iguanas given the number of pictures I took, but they are such interesting creatures, piled up on top of each other amongst the lava rocks, with their spiky hairdos with salty gel (they keep spitting to get rid of salt and manage to cover themselves and each other – nice!). I was even spat at whilst trying to take a close up picture which made me jump a little. There are various different species of marine iguana with different ones living on each island having evolved slightly differently over many years. The ones on Floreana Island are red whereas the ones we saw everywhere else were just black and salt encrusted.
We’ve seen all sorts of sea life including Giant Turtles, Sharks, Sting Rays, Crabs, Galapagos Penguins, Bottle-nosed Dolphin and lots of varieties of tropical fish. I’m hoping to steal some of my fellow travellers underwater photos to prove what we saw as our waterproof camera packet developed a hole, which luckily Le Roux realised before we used it! The giant turtles are so chilled out – they glide along in the water effortlessly and are amazing to swim with. When the sea lions try to wind them up they just flick a flipper and zip off in a different direction. We even saw one eating – it was greedily chomping on the algae growing on the rocks and coral.
We saw 2 types of sharks – Galapagos Sharks and White Tipped Sharks. My encounter with a Galapagos Shark was a little closer than I’d expected as Ossie said the sharks would be resting on the bottom of the channel through the middle of Kicker Rock. However, whilst snorkelling through the channel, one was swimming practically alongside me which scared the life out of me! The channel where the white tipped sharks were on Isabela Island was closed to snorkelling as it was breeding season, so we only got to see them from above – I’m not sure whether I am disappointed or relieved about this! While snorkelling near Isabela we came across a couple of sting rays swimming around, one of which didn’t have a tail. They are quite hard to spot unless they are swimming as they tend to hide under the sand on the bottom. We also saw a few manta rays swimming together from the beach as they were showing off by waving their fins at us. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get a good picture of this. Right from the beginning Le Roux developed a fascination with the crabs which could be found crawling all over most patches of rock along the shorelines of the islands. The adult Sally Lightfoot crabs are the red ones, while the junior ones are smaller and black. I have to admit that they are fascinating to watch as they crawl and jump around, and apparently they can even walk on water for a few seconds if necessary to escape from a predator.
BirdlifeWe saw a huge variety of birdlife, some of which I can name and some I can’t! I’ve got quite a few close up pictures of lovely unknown birds. Therefore any snitchers out there, if you could label my unknown bird pictures on facebook that would be very helpful!
The most talked about bird seems to be the Blue Footed Boobie (“BFB”) – crazy name and crazy bright blue coloured feet. We saw these a few times on the various islands and we even managed to get some close up pictures of them sitting on the rocks, but what we didn’t manage to capture is their very fast nosedive into the sea from quite a height in search of a fish – amazing to watch. We came across a lot of amusing BFB T-Shirts in Santa Cruz, and although we couldn’t bring ourselves to buy one, we did take pictures of our favourite two for entertainment value.
From our first day in the islands we saw the very graceful Frigatebirds flying over head. They are huge birds (2nd only in size to the Albatross) which glide around looking for fish to steal from other birds as they can’t dive into the sea themselves. The male one puffs up his red chest to attract the ladies and Le Roux managed to get picture of one doing this in a tree, opposite a female with a chick. We also managed to capture the fight between a pelican and a frigate bird over fish scraps at the fishmarket on Santa Cruz – I’m not sure who won, but it wasn’t the fishmonger!
The story of the Giant Tortoise is a sad one as the early explorers and settlers on the islands decimated the population as they either ate them or they killed them for their oil, which could fetch a good price on the mainland. In recent years huge efforts have been made to increase the population again through breeding programmes and subsequent release into the wild. However, due to evolution, the giant tortoise is very slightly different on every island and even within an island as they have evolved to deal with different habitats and this means that exact male and female matches must be found in order to successfully breed. In the case of Lonesome George, he is the only one left of his particular species and is living out his days in the Charles Darwin Research Centre on Santa Cruz. He has 2 lady friends for company but they are only a 99% match so they cannot actually breed with him. We saw a 3 month old baby giant tortoise which was so cute and small, compared with the enormous adult ones we’ve seen – they keep growing and can live up to 150 years. 
At the giant tortoise farm, Le Roux couldn’t resist impersonating a giant tortoise to the amusement of the rest of us – I’ll leave you to chuckle at the photo!
Lava Caves
We visited a couple of lava caves and a huge lava tunnel on Santa Cruz, which was cavernous. I was scared I’d feel claustrophobic and uneasy like I had in Iceland, but it was so big and the low bit we had to crawl under was very short, even I managed to stay calm. It was so interesting that the lava can create such a huge tunnel.
I have run out of adjectives to describe the Galapagos Islands and the wildlife. Incredible, amazing, remarkable, wonderful...... Yes, it is an expensive place to go, but it is most definitely worth it. Save up for a trip and take a decent zoom lens with you! It was the best start to our adventure and I think we’re going to have to go some to beat the experience.
To view all of my Galapagos photos, follow the link below. You don't need to be registered on facebook to see them!
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