Damn. The Galapagos Rock!

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We spent a day wandering around the innumerable travel agents in Quito looking for a good deal. This is the way to go if your dates are flexible as you can easily get $500 or so off the price of a $1700 seven night cruise. Which is what we did!

After an initial hiccup with one travel agent who overbooked a boat we eventually got going on the good ship "Intrepido" - a 20 passenger sail/motor boat. It looked the business and turned out to exceed our expectations. The staff were friendly from the captain down and the food was reasonable despite the small portions 😞

There was a large (as in many) and big (as in fat, very fat) English family on our flight from Quito to the Galapagos and we were scared shitless that they{d end up on the same boat as us. Thankfully they didn´t. We had a nice group of 20 spanning all ages from 18 to 80 including 11 nationalities.

The islands and wildlife were fantastic. The best thing for me was how close you could get to the animals - they don´t know no better 😉
It was an amazing experience snorkelling with the seals (even playing with the younger ones), giant sea turtles, sharks (galapagos and white tipped) and penguins at close quarters. Other animals we saw on the trip were; giant land turtles, land iguanas, marine iguanas, lava lizards, sting rays, eagle rays and many birds (blue footed boobies, frigade birds, albatros, oyster catchers, lava herons, pelicans, flamingos...).

The landscape was amazing also. Some of the islands are very yound and the lava formations are amazing. One island had a surface like that of the moon!

We had 2 guides. One was amusing and could do good seal impressions while the other was informative and had much the better english. (we steered towards the latter when possible)
We landed on 2 different islands or bays per day and went snorkelling tice a day. These trips can be expensive but I think we got value for money.

Half way through we stopped at Puerto Ayora (one of the main population centers in the galapagos) for a night. We sated our need for ice cream and cake here and stocked up on snacks. Some people do a 3 or 4 night cruise but you defo need 7 nights. That said by the end of the week it was becoming difficult to impress us: seals and iguanas were 2-a-penny. We saw everything we had hoped for except the hammer head sharks.

Searing heat (thankfully our boat had aircon) and small food portions aside we had the best time and the highlight of the trip so far!

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