Finally! We Make It to the Galapagos Islands

April 1: Day 9. We are up at 0130 hrs. to get our bags out at 0200 for a 0215 departure. It’s hard to imagine that we are moving again after about 3½ hours of sleep.

Our plane on the San Cristobal runway

Breakfast is served in a brown paper bag that we eat on the bus as we ride to the airport. Once again we have a long way to drag our luggage from the parking lot to the airport lobby, but at least it’s not at altitude. The Lima airport is always busy and there are long lines at both the ticket counter and the security checkpoint.

Ready for the Galapagos Islands!

Our group gets to our gate about an hour before our 0705 departure to Quito.

Arriving in Quito, we pass through immigration and are waved through customs which surprises us, given that this is a different country. In any event, we board our next plane that will fly us to Guayaquil where we will catch a flight that will take us to the Galapagos island of San Cristobal 600 miles off the Ecuadorian coast.

Beautiful island landscape

 It will be another busy day dealing with airports and airlines.

Our flights go smoothly and we arrive at the San Cristobal airport early afternoon. San Cristobal is the easternmost and second most populated (~6000) island of the archipelago.

Boarding a panga

Geologically it is the oldest of all the islands and is comprised of three or four fused extinct volcanoes. Aside from being home to the archipelago’s only major airport, the island is home to the port town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, the second largest town in the islands (pop. ~5400) and the government capital of the Galapagos Province which includes the entire archipelago.

We made it aboard!

The airport has a single runway with a cul-de-sac turnaround at one end for taxiing to and from the terminal. Inside the terminal we wait in line while Marcos passes out our entrance passes to the park. The entire archipelago makes up the Galapagos National Park and Marine Reserve. After processing our passes, we board a bus that takes us to the island’s port.

Donning life preservers, we board inflatable zodiac boats (also called pangas by the locals) that take us to our ship— the Silver Sea Silver Origin.

Kicker Rock

We will spend the next 7 nights aboard this expeditionary-style yacht cruising the islands. We are greeted aboard with a champagne welcome and orientation briefing followed by a lifeboat drill and lunch. We spend the afternoon unpacking our luggage and getting ready for the Captain’s welcome reception and dinner. We join David and Linda in the Observation Lounge for a Kicker Rock sunset sail away and pre-dinner drinks.

Kicker Rock at sunset

Kicker Rock (also known as Leon Dormido) is the remains of a volcanic tuff cone which forms when hot magma meets cold seawater and the resulting explosion forms a rocky monolith. Over time erosion has split the rock in two. The rock is an extremely popular snorkeling and scuba diving site and is one of the most photographed landmarks in the Galapagos. We enjoy our sunset views of the rock as we circumnavigate it before going to dinner. After dinner, we attend a destination briefing on the activities we will experience tomorrow on Genovesa Island then retire for the night.

 

We Spend a Long Day at the Lima Airport

March 31: Day 8. We have an early start to our day not knowing that the day would turn out to be truly hellish and perhaps the worst day we had ever experienced on a tour. We are up at 0300 hrs. with bags out at 0400. Our early departure is to catch a flight back to Lima with a connecting flight to Guayaquil, Ecuador, where we will spend the night before flying to the Galapagos Islands and embark on our ship for a 7–day cruise of the islands. We have breakfast, board our bus, ride to the Cusco airport, and lug our bags into the airport lobby while gasping our last few breaths of the thin air. The flight from Cusco to Lima was unremarkable. We get to the gate for our connecting flight to Guayaquil and wait. It’s getting close to when we should be boarding, but there is no plane at the gate. An announcement is made that we have a last-minute gate change with our new gate at a lower level (meaning we will be boarding using air stairs). We wait some more. And some more. It’s becoming obvious that our flight is seriously delayed. Our tour director, Marcos, is working the ticket counter when the announcement is made that our flight has been canceled. The plane has some major issue that can’t be worked out. We will have to get to Guayaquil on a later flight, but with a group of 20 there are no guarantees that seats will be available.

Around 1100, Marcos asked for volunteers to fly to Guayaquil via Panama, while the remaining group would get there via Quito. Around noon he reappears with the news that the plan fell through. He gathers our group and explains the situation to us. Since he will have to spend time working things out with the airline, he gives us food vouchers that are good in the airport’s food court so we can have lunch. The food court offers a number of dining options, but our vouchers are only good at Burger King, KFC, and a pizza place that is offering up some of the tiniest individual pizzas we have ever seen. KFC is also ruled out because of the long line waiting to get chicken (in fact, almost every Peruvian eating in the food court is feasting on fried chicken and we had noticed that KFC must be the preferred fast food fare due to the ubiquitous outlets we had seen throughout the city). That left us ordering Burger King.

We finished our meal and gathered with other members of our group to wait for news of our flight. Bored to tears, we wait until around 1700 when Marcos appears and announces that we won’t be able to fly tonight and will have to spend the night in Lima. We have been booked on an early flight to Quito tomorrow with a connecting flight to Guayaquil. The main problem centers around getting to Guayaquil in time to board the ship before it sails. If we miss the sailing, we will miss 3 days of the cruise until the ship arrives at an island that will accommodate embarkation. It’s been a long day and everyone is starting to show irritation at the wait time and situation.

Marcos has arranged for a bus to take us to our hotel for the night, and we are forewarned that the hotel is not in the same class as those in which we have been staying. Once again we have a 100-yard trek to the parking lot to board the bus and our luggage is not getting any easier to handle. But at least it’s not at altitude! We leave the airport, which is on the northern outskirts of Lima, and ride completely through the city to its southern outskirts and our hotel. The nearly 1-hour bus ride and the mediocre accommodations of our hotel start to get a few tempers boiling. We are served a nondescript meal and told that we have a red-eye flight to Quito, so there will be another early start tomorrow. A lot of campers are not happy, but it is what it is.