I promised more detail on the Galapagos, so here goes.
I’ll warn you though that if you just tuned in for the steamy turtle pictures you’ll have to wait.
I still haven’t worked out how to post photos.
In this post I’ll give you some general background on how you (yes you!) can get to those remarkable islands.
The Galapagos are an hour and half’s flight off the Ecuador coast. There are no direct international flights, so getting there requires a stop-over in Quito, or possibly Guayaquil. That adds considerable time and inconvenience if all you want to do is visit the islands. But – as you will see if I ever get around to blogging Quito – a stopover there is well worth it.
There are lots of islands, about 300 I’m told. The total land area is pretty considerable – about one or two Connecticuts, let’s say a CT and an RI (which, incidentally, are the official units of land measure of this blog.) So these aren’t little specks of land with a single palm tree like in the cartoons but actual real estate that you can get lost on, if they let you, which they don’t. Access, not surprisingly, is strictly controlled. People are allowed to live on only about 3% of the land, and only on a couple of the islands. Since visitors to other areas are required to be with a government-supplied naturalist guide at all times (with a ratio of no more than 16 visitors to 1 guide) the only way to see the Galapagos is through some sort of organized tour. Though a few are land-based (there is at least one luxury quality resort hotel, and some lesser ones), most visitors take cruise boats. The boats range in size up to 100 passengers, but many seem to be in range of 12 to 16 passengers (to allow a single guide). Boats both provide mobility, allowing you to move from island to island each evening, and limit the impact to the islands.
In principle it is a good system, though policing seems to be poor and the islands suffer from illegal fishing and poaching. Also, the guides are of uneven quality in their naturalist knowledge and English facility. They work both for the government, policing the rules about where you can go and what you can do, and for the tour companies providing information about what you are seeing. The top quality tours seem to keep them around only to meet regulations and supply their own professionally trained naturalists, but more on that later.
The tour we took was marketed as a 6 day tour, but that is misleading. They count the first day and night spent in Quito and the last night and day spent there on the return. That leaves only 4 days and 3 nights on the islands. In reality, it was a half week tour, and the short half at that. The purists would spurn that as entirely inadequate and say a true week is the minimum and two weeks better. There is something to that. We certainly would have been happy to have at least a few more days, but our schedule didn’t permit more time. If you are a hard core penguin hugger (there aren’t a lot of what I would call trees on the islands worth hugging), or are long on both time and cash, I’d agree that you should give it a week or more. But there is something to be said for the mini-trip. It allows you to include visits to the Amazon and Machu Pichu on the same vacation if you have limited time and diverse interests. And four days is enough to give you a reasonable flavor of the islands and check off most of your major animal spottings. A longer trip would provide significant added value only if you had a first quality naturalist with you to make the more minor distinctions meaningful. Moreover, the boat we were on – while comfortable for 3 nights – would have gotten claustrophobic over a full week. For a longer cruise we would want to upgrade the creature comforts. Bottom line is that after extending time, intellectual depth and comfort you are increasing costs by orders of magnitude. So I’d argue that the mini-cruise is a good compromise for a lot of us.
One thing to be aware of is that if you do take a full week cruise is that some of the operators, such as GAP described below, sell some of the cabins on a half week basis. This means that there is a transition day midcruise when you don’t get much quality island touring done. This isn’t necessarily terrible since you may want some down time at that point, but you are not getting the same value as a true week cruise. Also, you likely will end up with a lot of new tour companions. Since the group bonding is a big part of the experience this could be a problem, though in our case it was a blessing for the full weekers there when we arrived, since the departing group were apparently total losers. But it generally isn’t optimal, especially since the newbies won’t know a blue footed boobie from a frigate bird and your tour guide will have to start over with Galapagos 101.
The particular tour company we went with is GAP Adventures. I can only give them a mixed review. Some of the people in our group were thoroughly soured on them because of last minute schedule changes, poor communication and the like. We didn’t experience anything of that sort (we booked late and got what we expected) but did run into more missed airports transfers (we had to take cabs and get reimbursed), delays getting our luggage (we ended up wading through piles of luggage in the hotel storage rooms to find our own), and similar annoyances than you would want. And on the cruise we had only the park–supplied naturalist guide who, though knowledgeable, was rather grumpy and unpleasant. On the plus side though, both the hotel and the boat were reasonably plush, the food was good and plentiful, and the price better than anything else I saw offered at a comparable (say 3 star) comfort level.
One way to look at it is that there are a lot of price-is-no-object tour companies out there, particularly for the more exotic destination like the Galapagos. Some seem to cater to Americans who won’t set foot in a foreign land without someone holding their hand at all times. On the other extreme, there are companies that cater to backpackers trying to get by on a shoe string, happy to spend nights in a sleeping bag and dig their own toilets.
GAP seems to be aiming for a middle ground that includes yours truly. We don’t need or want to be insulated from the experience of travel in a foreign country (including its inevitable frustrations), we are cost-conscious, but past the youth hostel stage and ready to pay a little for comfort. GAP seems to be aiming for this sweet spot. But keeping costs down while delivering quality means that they can’t afford legions of staffers making sure everything goes perfectly and they may play games with scheduling to avoid wasted capacity. This will inevitably cause some irritation and result in dropped balls. Provisionally, I’d say they are more or less on target, though the members of our group who were hit with late scheduling changes might have a different view. Kathy and I are taking their tours of both the Amazon and Machu Pichu, so I’ll have more to report on them in a later post.
For the moment, let’s say that if you are planning a varied South American excursion, like ours, and want to get a taste of the Galapagos, they are well worth considering. But if you want the full bore experience and can spend a week or more and whatever it costs, there are probably better alternatives. In particular, Kathy and I receive occasional mailings for alumni trips to the Galapagos led by professors in biology, or comparable tours offered by NPR, PBS and comparable egg-head affinity groups. I would expect that the depth of knowledge you could gain from such a trip would eclipse anything offered by GAP and other run of the mill tour companies out there. I can easily see going back to the Galapagos some day on that sort of tour, so consider this limited this first exposure a nice teaser.
Sorry for all this dry detail – I usually try to sarcastically abuse my scum of a readership at least once each blog but I don’t seem to have gotten around to it. I really do think the Galapagos should be on most folk’s short lists for a fabulous vacation, so I wanted to give you the benefit of my experience for planning your own encounter. I’ll give you more particulars of my own trip in the next post.
Your faithful correspondent,
Walkabout Dave
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