After a night of abbreviated sleep, we got up a little after 5am and hopped on the shuttle to Bogota airport. Although we were already issued seats together near the front, the flight was delayed about 45 minutes. This wasn’t ideal because we had a relatively tight connection in Guayaquil, Ecuador. While not a huge airport, we would have to go through customs, collect our tourist card for the Galapagos, and go through security again. The odds seemed against us.
Our Avianca A320 departed without incident, albeit late. It was about 8am and we were given . . .breakfast . . .maybe? Is this breakfast?
The snack box was rather deceptively large for its contents. To be fair, the flight attendants did eventually come around with ham and cheese sandwiches, but it wouldn’t have been my first choice for breakfast. Chilly Bogota gave way to muggy Guayaquil. We pulled up to the gate around 9:40am. Our LATAM flight was scheduled to leave at 1030am with a note on our ticket that boarding would end at 1011.
Off to the races! We handed in our immigration forms to a desk before standing in line for border control. It only took about 5-10 minutes, and we now headed through customs and into the arrivals hall. Next we took an escalator to domestic departures and tried to go through security, but were stopped because we didn’t have a Galapagos tourist card. I knew we needed one for the Galapagos, but I always figured the desk for this would be inside the terminal or at least prominently displayed. It was neither of these things, but the lady checking for such documents was nice enough to show us the line. There’s no way we would have found it otherwise.
After waiting in line for about 5 minutes, we were called up to the counter and asked why we didn’t have some kind of special one inch ticket. We were handed off to a different line to acquire said flimsy ticket. All we had to do was show vaccine cards, so couldn’t the previous guy have done that job? We queued up again and finally got our tourist cards. It was now about 1015am. Though we figured there was virtually no chance of catching the LATAM flight, we did our best to move through security, only to see the aircraft pushing away from the gate. This was not entirely surprising. We had a backup option of an Avianca flight 90 minutes later, the last flight of the day to the Galapagos.
We were the last passengers to board, given seats together at the last possible moment. While relieved to get seats, our fellow passengers were annoying the hell out of us. It seems to be very cool to listen to your device totes loud without headphones on this flight. Bad music, children’s arcade games, a true symphony for the ears of two weary and slightly stressed-out travelers. All the wealthier American and European tourists were seated toward the front of the plane whereas locals and peons like us in the back. I did originally want to get confirmed tickets just to make things a bit easier for us, but if I’d bought tickets for the LATAM flight, I’d be out about $520 since we didn’t get there in time, and if I wanted to buy tickets for Avianca, they would have been $710 for the one-way flight for both of us. They require that non-Ecuadorians pay a much steeper fare, so I guess the Q-tips and other folks who bought their entire adventuring wardrobe from an REI catalog sitting up front should get something for the minimum $150 extra per person they are required to pay.
While we were glad to at least touch down at Seymour airport on Baltra island, we still had quite a few steps to go through. First we handed in our customs forms and paid $100 for some sort of conservation thing. After getting a fun passport stamp that had a hammerhead shark on it, we finished up with customs and went outside to buy bus tickets. The bus then took us to the marina on Baltra where we had to board a ferry to go across the channel to Santa Cruz Island, where we had to then hire a taxi to take us on the 20 minute drive to our hotel. It takes a lot to get to the Galapagos.
We settled in to room #5 in the Semilla Verde boutique hotel. We were a bit tired, but as it was only 3pm, we thought we would check out a place called El Chato, a nearby giant tortoise reserve with lava tunnels. It took maybe 20 mins in a taxi to get there, partially on very bumpy unpaved roads. The taxis here are all white Toyota pickup trucks, which is a bit different from your standard yellow Prius, but I guess they need the ground clearance for the roads here.
They strongly encouraged us to get rubber boots for the short nature hike around the reserve. Not long into the trail, we saw a few giant tortoises chomping on grass or frolicking around the water. When I say frolicking, take whatever you’re envisioning and slow it down about 20x. We then walked through three different lava tubes, the first one lit, the second one short, the third one not lit at all. They were . . .meh. Once you’ve seen one lava tube, you’ve seen them all.
The property around our hotel has a little walking path as well, where we encountered some more tortoises. Most weren’t as large as the ones at the reserve, but once we made the loop, we saw a very large one lumbering along just 20m or so from our back porch. We ran ahead of the tortoise (or walked at a normal pace) back to our room and set up on our porch as we watched the giant tortoise slowly lumber directly at us. It paused directly in front of our porch, presumably to catch its breath, before lumbering onward toward a tree that it started chomping on.
We had dinner at the hotel that consisted of chicken and rice before fighting a battle with the internet which was about as fast as your average tortoise in order to get this blog posted. So here it is a few days late, but I have delivered.
passports & pepto bismol 