Galapagos on a budget – two weeks of independent travel to Santa Cruz, Isabela and San Cristobal…

For many independent travellers backpacking through South America, a visit to Galapagos seems like an expensive option best to be avoided unless one wants to blow one’s budget. That is 100% true :). It is not possible to travel to Galapagos for a two week stay like we did unless you can stretch your budget to around $ 100/day for accommodation, meals and a few excursions. That excludes the return flight of $ 400 – $ 500, and the $ 100 + $ 20 National Park fee and Transit form which are compulsory. All in all a two week trip to Galapagos, with ferry transfers to Isabela and San Cristobal will set you back at least $ 2500 for a couple, if you stay in double rooms with hot showers and air-con, and eat at relatives inexpensive local restuarants.

We flew into Santa Cruz island via Baltra airport on Tame Air, a fairly tatty airline which offered no meal options at all for their $238/person one way flight. The return flight on Latam Air was a bit cheaper and had hot food options for sale and complimentary colddrinks. Flights departing from Quito stop over in Guaquil for 45mins, with onward-bound passengers remaining on board. Additional costs include $20/person for a ‘transit card’ and $100/person for National Park fees.

After arrival at Baltra airport you take a $5 bus to the transfer point to Santa Cruz with a small ferry, and then either $35 for a taxi to Puerto Ayora or $5 for a bus transfer. We booked all of our accommodation in Galapagos via Booking.com, and paid $ 35 – $60/night for a double room with aircon and hot water, and sometimes cable TV with only Spanish channels. Sometimes I was able to get into the settings of the decoder and change the language of some channels to English :). If you shop around you can find places for $ 15 – $25 quite easily it seems, of varying quality. We stayed at two different ‘hostals’ on each island to spread our risk…

Puerto Ayora is the busiest and most touristy town in Galapagos, and is a good place to spend a few days while exploring Santa Cruz, which offers a great introduction to Galapagos, with a visit to the Charles Darwin Research Centre a good first stop. You can see several species of giant tortoises at this breeding centre which have been brought over from all the other islands, so it’s cool to see them all in one place. As the visit to all of the research centers on each island is free, it’s definitely worth the visit, if only to see the last resting place of Lone George, who was the last of his species of tortoise. We made the visit on our first day on the island and found it very informative.

We stayed in Puerto Ayora for 4 nights in total, and during our time on the island we visited the El Chato Tortoise Ranch located in the highlands, which is on the way to or from the airport jetty. If you hire a taxi expect to pay an exorbitant $35 – $45 for a vehicle there and back. We chose the cheap option of catching a local bus to Santa Rosa for $1 each way. Then we were told it was an easy 2.5km walk to El Chato. Let’s just say that islanders don’t always judge distance very well 🙂 It felt closer to 4km in total, but it was through beautiful, restful countryside, and we were offered a free taxi ride for the last kilometer or so. We paid $4 to enter El Chato, which included unlimited free tea and an introductory talk. Then we walked around, following the pathways through the surrounding countryside. We spotted several giant tortoises during our walk, and without exception the all hissed and grumbled at us when we had to pass close to them. I guess the memory of humans almost killing the entire population of Galapagos tortoises still lingers in their collective memory…

What was enjoyable about the visit to El Chato is that the tortoises roam freely, so one can really observe them at close quarters. Their ancient faces are of course fairly expressionless, but one can see the years they have lived in the size of their shells. The males are very focussed on mating with any female tortoise who crosses their path, but it was interesting to see how females dodged some males to avoid the act 🙂 It seems that there are some things that are common across all species…

We decided to try and get a ride back to Santa Rosa on the back of a taxi – they are all pick-ups, as we did not relish the thought of walking over 3km again. So we approached a group of taxi drivers who were waiting for their $45 customers to walk around the ranch for an hour or two. We were happy to pay $5 for the two of us, but the taxi drivers tried their luck by asking $5 each. We refused and walked away, but one guy followed us and agreed to the $5 total. He dropped us off back at the bus stop in Santa Rosa, where we caught the local bus back to Puerto Ayora.

That night we hit the famous Binnford Street for supper at one of the many small restaurants that line the street. We had eaten a 2 course lunch with a drink there for $5/person, so we thought it would be a good spot for supper. At night there were few bargains to be had, as the restaurants cater for the typical European or American tourist wanting pricey seafood, but we did find a little Italian restaurant at the end of the street offering a $5 menu. We had a burger and chips, and fried chicken and chips plus a drink each which was pretty satisfying.

The next day we took the long, hot walk out to the much publicized Tortuga Bay, said to have one of the best beaches in Galapagos…It is a pretty good beach. Unfortunately snorkeling here was a complete waste of time, as the visibility was about 20cm 🙂 We had lugged all our snorkeling gear the 3km walk for nothing. We tried to relax on the beach, but after I was stung by one of the hundreds of wasps hovering over the beach we decided to head back to our guesthouse…That damned wasp sting was painful for around a week …

The walk to Tortuga Bay was made worthwhile when we came across the first marine iguanas we have ever seen, basking in the sun at the end of the beach and swimming in a small pool, much to the delight of our fellow beach goers.

Las Grietas is another spot which is famous in Santa Cruz, so we took a 2min water taxi to the peninsula that juts out adjacent to the harbour, followed by a 30min walk through a somewhat salty, alien landscape, and past a few small beaches until we finally reached this inland lagoon, which was thronging with mostly local families and a few foreign tourists. A slippery rocky staircase led down to the water, but we ended up just taking a few shots before heading back to town…The sharp volcanic rock had already cut several swimmers so we decided to play it safe…Injuries while traveling are not fun, and I was already nursing a large, itchy sting from that wasp…

As we planned to catch the ferry to Isabela the next day, we went and bought our ferry tickets from a tour company located near to the supermarket opposite the harbour…We paid $25/ticket rather than the normal price of $30, and bought tickets from Santa Cruz to Isabela, Isabela to Santa Cruz, and Santa Cruz to San Cristobal. Ferries do not run from Isabella to San Cristobal, so one must travel via Santa Cruz. Then we took a last walk around the port and came across the small fish market…

We got up bright and early the next morning to catch the ferry to Isabella, a bumpy trip of over 2 hours in a large speedboat crammed with about 25 people. Annoyingly we were made to pay and additional $1 on each side of the trip for a totally unnecessary water taxi ride from the ferry to the pier. Grrr. On our arrival, our host from Cielo Azur was there to meet us and put us in a taxi to his place, which was quite a distance from the pier. Our room was nice and spacious and had aircon and a hot shower, something we appreciated in the heat.

We set about exploring the island later that day, and found that most of the food options were located in a strip of similar restaurants with similar menus charging similar prices, about a block from the beach. We chose one such restaurant, and had a mediocre lunch there for $8/person. That was the last time we ate there 🙂 After that experience we looked further back from the beach and find a local eatery offering tasty fried chicken and chips for $6.50, which we ate at twice. We moved to accommodation with a small kitchenette and cooked chicken curry one night, and made breakfast and lunch there as well on one day, so we sorted ourselves out food-wise. On our last night on Isabela we thought we’d splash out and go to the TripAdvisor recommended Schwarma Hot. It was crappy to say the least…did those rave reviewers eat at the same place? Sadly, this was not a unique experience…It seems that most people are easy to please when it comes to food 🙂

Isabela was the best island in terms of day trips and things to do in our opinion. We took the $100/person Los Tunneles tour on our second day, and to proved to be a worthwhile experience, if only for the strange mixture of volcanic and desert landscape with crystal clear rock pools in between…We saw several beautiful turtles swimming in the rock pools, as well as a friendly blue-footed booby. During the snorkeling part of the trip we must have seen at least ten giant turtles up close, although unfortunately the visibility wasn’t great, due in part to a brattish little boy who swam around kicking wildly and disturbing the sediment wherever he went…Nevertheless it was a good day 🙂

Our most enjoyable time was spent on one of the free snorkeling activities available to visitors to the island. Concha La Perla is adjacent to the local pier, and offered crystal clear water at mid to low tide, with sightings of Galapagos penguins, marine iguanas swimming, bat rays, reef sharks, golden rays and various small fish. We went early one morning and avoided the crowds which inundate the small wooden jetty later in the day. It was great, and reminded us of the time we spent in the islands of Philippines and Fiji 🙂

While walking around the island I spotted a few cool locations to shoot some pics of Akhona, so on one day she got dressed up and we set off to take some cook photo’s of her ‘on location’ in Galapagos…

On our third day we took the long walk to the tortoise breeding centre, more to see the promised pink flamingos en route than anything else. The research centre was pretty bland, but on the way back through the marshlands and mangroves we finally came across two little lagoons with a few resident pink flamingoes. With my 50 – 230 telephoto lens I managed to photograph them.

Our final leg of our Galapagos adventure was on the island of San Cristobal. To get there we had to get the ‘ferry’ back to Santa Cruz, hang around for 5 hours having lunch and watching the rays in the port, and then board a second speedboat ‘ferry’ to San Cristobal. The morning trip was a bit bumpy, but the afternoon trip was far worse. Thank heavens we took our ant-nausea tablets in the morning 🙂

Cristobal proved to be a great place to spend five nights, with a more laid-backed atmosphere than Santa Cruz, but a better, more appealing main town. There were lots of good restaurants to choose from, and it is a picturesque place to just hang out in. For our first two nights we stayed in a nice hostel with a big kitchen for $30/night for a double room, so we cooked twice, which we always enjoy. We then moved to a hotel for twice the twice, and immediately regretted the move. The hotel was fine, and offered a so-so breakfast included in the price, but it lacked the kitchen facilities, and the rooms were pretty much on par. So definitely not value at $60/night. This was a common issue in Ecuador…You don’t always get what you pay for.

We tried to do a day trip to a small island off the coast of Cristobal, but in the end we couldn’t find a boat doing the trip at a reasonable cost, so we gave it a miss. Instead we went in search of the Blue Booby and other birds for our good friend Jonathan Lloyd. And we found them by spending the day taking a walk to two small beaches on the peninsula, followed by a bit of a hike to the Orientation Centre, which describes the history of Galapagos. On the way back to the main port we came across two beautiful blue booby’s, and spent almost two hours photographing them between bouts of rain. A lunchtime ‘almeurzo’ meal at a local restaurant for $5 was delicious and rounded off another good day.

So Isabela was the place we rested and recharged our batteries in anticipation of the 10 days we had planned staying with a Warrant family in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The day before we flew back to Quito I managed to sell our two full face Easybreath snorkeling masks for $40 to a local dive shop. We used them for a year and a half and managed to sell them for what we paid for them, as in Galapagos they would cost $65 each and have to be shipped from the USA. More space in our bulging bags is always a good thing 🙂

Galapagos was a bit of a disappointment for us, as detailed in my previous post, mainly because it was just so expensive, with absolutely no value for money. There is just too much inconsistency with pricing…Accommodation for $20/night can be far better than accommodation for $60/night. An ‘almeurzo’ lunch of a soup, main course and drink costs $5 in Santa Cruz, $8 in Isabela and $5-6 in Cristobal. Day trips are hellishly overpriced, starting from $35 for 2 hours right up to $190 for a full day. So my advice to travellers on a limited budget is….Don’t go. Rather use your money to visit South East Asia or Phillipines which offer great value for money. We don’t regret visiting Galapagos at all, but the constant price gouging and overcharging left switch a sour taste in our mouths…