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Published: November 19th 2007
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Wake up call! This morning we were rudely awaken at 6.30am by our chauffer to the airport telephoning our room. According to the itinerary emailed to us a fortnight ago, we were due to be picked up at 7.45am, but our driver was non-plussed and handed us our information pack and dropped us off at the airport. Turns out we weren´t catching the 9 o´clock Tame flight but an earlier AeroGal flight instead, which promptly detoured to land at Guaquil, where everyone had to troop off the plane. Our connecting flight was delayed over an hour, but we eventually landed in Baltra, which looked very remote from the air!
The Flight At the airport we were met by a non-English speaking guy who stuck us on the transfer bus with our luggage. Two irate New Yorker girls, Marta and Ariel, introduced themselves to us. Turns out they were destined to sail on the Encantada as well, but apparently had been forgotten and were stranded at the airport since 8.30am that morning. Charming! We all got on a small boat which ferried us across to Santa Cruz, where our transfer chap picked us up in a white truck and drove us
to the port. We arrived at the port and the guy obviously panicking about the unexpected New Yorkers, abandoned us all at a small cafe for lunch, and disappeared with our luggage. The only consolation was sitting watching the huge brown pelicans soaring around the bay, like huge prehistoric pteradactyls, swooping down to the sea for a fishy morsal. After much hanging around, Marta phoned her travel agent and eventually our tour group arrived to collect us. Luis our tour guide introduced himself to us and we journeyed into the highlands to see the land tortoise. While we had been sitting bored in the cafe, the rest of our group had been in the Charles Darwin Research Station, which was supposed to the first stop on our itinerary. We discussed the schedule with Luis, who assured us we hadn´t missed anything major at the research centre because the tortoise there were in captivity and the ones we were visiting were wild. But he dropped a massive bombshell when we discovered there was to be no scuba diving on the trip!!!! What???? We had deliberately chosen the Encantada because it offered diving, it was classed as a dive liveaboard in our
guidebook and our tour operator was called Scuba Galapagos. Ironically, it turned out that all the branding on the boat, from the uniforms to the crockery, was stamped with the Scuba Galapagos logo, but now it was only snorkelling for us. We were never offered the real reason for why the diving was no longer available, but it seemed to be due to permits. Annoyingly we had booked this trip with a U.S. based travel agency rather than direct with an Ecudorian company, assuming communication channels would be more open, but we had not been informed of the change. This wasn´t a great start to the most expensive and much anticipated part of our RTW trip!
The Tortoise Our worries were soon forgotten when we met the land tortoise! They were huge and there were lots of them plodding around the damp grass, happily posing for photos next to us smiley tourists. Only the one hissed and sucked his head back into his shell when people approached too close for comfort. Jase couldn´t get the One Foot in the Grave theme tune out of his head while we were there.
The Encantada We travelled back to the port
and caught a glimpse of our vessel, the Encantada for the first time. We had deliberately chosen this boat because it was a smaller schooner and we thought it would be more fun to sail rather than motor on a big cruise ship. However, we didn´t realise just how small the ship would be! It looked tiny from the shore and we wondered whether it could get any worse! We had jokingly laughed at the ship plan with Marta and Ariel and guessed we would get the rooms next to the septic tank, and yep we did - but fortunately we didn´t get any nasty whiffs! Our cabin was cute and Jase nabbed the bigger lower bunk immediately (the git!). We had our first briefing and Luis seemed keen for us to dine on shore, which we thought was odd, since the fellow passengers had praised the chef´s cooking so much. Turns out the stove was broken - what a series of calamities in one day! So we had an Italian in Santa Cruz, but Rach was happy because she got a lasagne.
The rest of the group seemed really friendly. We met Jim and Mary from Wisconsin, Pam
& Don from Louisianna, then Bridget, Susanna, Maktilde and Maria from Germany. We had already palled up with Ariel and Marta, who proved to be lots of fun and great company. The ship was quite small and short on seats on deck, but we hung around the back of the boat after dinner and enjoyed the evening breeze. The motors kicked in after bed and suddenly we were rolling around in our beds! It took quite some time to get off to sleep and Rach woke up several times, a mere inch from falling five feet off the top bunk! No puking today so all was well!
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Debra
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Tortoi?
What's plural for tortoise? Anyway the many tortoise are cool, imagine having tortoi plodding around Cannock instead of cats. We wouldn't need speed bumps anymore, would we?