Galapagos: Santa Cruz - Days 45-47
Going to the Galapagos Islands was not in the original plan for our South American adventure. It’s too pricey, too out of the way, too islandy, etc. But over the past month and a half, we were slowly talked into it after chatting with a few travelers. The advice we got was that while it still is pricey, staying on the mainland is much more affordable than doing a cruise. And its totally worth it. They all praised the amazing wildlife and flora that inhabits every inch of the islands. But the thing that really convinced us was the diving. They have quite the reputation for amazing dive sites. How could we go to Ecuador with SCUBA certifications and not dive in the Galapagos? Plus, I’m newly certified and eager to show off my new skills. So after an excellent nights sleep in our little bungalow (reminded us of our wedding bungalow at Justin Trails, but with much better weather), we packed up once again and headed to the airport.
First stop: Santa Cruz Island. While not the biggest island, it is the most populous and the main island for tourists, cruise-goers or land-goers alike. Actually, if we want to get technical, the first stop was Baltra Island – a teeny tiny island just off shore from Santa Cruza and for some reason, they decided to build the airport there. So we landed on Baltra Island, got on a bus that took us 4 minutes to the shore to get on a ferry to take us 7 min across the channel to get on another bus to get to the main town on Santa Cruz. And its not like there isn’t room on the main island. We had to take a bus 45 min through nothingness to get to the other side of the island. Ridiculous. Anyway, the thing that struck me the most as we rode the bus into town was the landscape – totally not what I expected. I was expecting your typical humid, hot tropical landscape - palm trees, banana leaves, etc. However, we found ourselves driving through some odd sort of island desert? Low grasses, weird tree/cacti hybrids, crazy looking bushes. The type of landscaping you’d find in a sci-fi movie. It was incredible.
We finally make it into town, Puerto Ayora, and head towards Lava House Hostel where we’re greeted by an older lady. Quick side note: By this point, I’ve gotten pretty good at exchanging pleasantries and basic conversation in Spanish. I’ve also been pretty good at reading body language so I know when to nod or smile or laugh, even if I don’t fully understand what is being said. So this hostel lady and I start a basic Spanish conversation like I have done many times before. She doesn’t speak any English, but that wasn't necessary as I’m following along pretty well. But I must have given away some secret Spanish-speaking tell because she suddenly assumes that we (both) are completely fluent. Her speed increases seemingly 7-fold, she keeps asking us question after question, then she pulls out a map of the island and spends the next 15 minutes describing everything on the map. Everything. Down to the detail of explaining how to use a map, no kidding. I struggle through the questions (she doesn’t seem to notice) but lose her a few minutes into her grand tour. Ben has been zoned out for awhile now. She finally pauses for a breath and we use that opportunity to make our escape. Grab the map and run. Throughout our stay here, I will have a few more of these lengthy conversations consisting of me nodding along and inching towards the door as she speeds through all of the words in the Spanish language.
We’re pretty hungry and eager to get to sightseeing, but first we need to stop by the dive shop and getting fitted for our gear for tomorrows dive! And easy task: they explain a bit about the dive sites and have us try on our wetsuits. Ben gets called out for putting his on backwards, the noob. (Ben's note: whatever, Meg) Then we make our way over to the “kioskos”. On Santa Cruz, there is the main road with all of the touristy restaurants that charge far too much for mediocre food. But then there is this back road of little kioskos where all of the locals eat good Ecuadorian cuisine for cheap. This was one of the pieces of advice that was given to us by other travelers! We pick one with the most people (classic us) and order the “menu del dia”, which consists of a soup (whatever they happen to make that day), a meat (whatever they happen to make that day), and rice and plantains (because its a requirement for every meal). A very tasty and filling lunch for only $5!
Normally, we don’t do too much touristy stuff the day of arrival to a new place. Best to leisurely get a feel for the place then set out on adventures the following day. But we only have a few days on this island and a whole lot to squeeze in so we head off to Tortuga Bay! Its a long walk to get there and by the time we make it to the registration office, we learn that we only have an hour on the beach before they close (the beaches closes early every night to allow the turtles to do their thing at dusk without humans around to ruin it, makes sense). Nonetheless, we push onward! The beach was beautiful. Fine white sand that felt like powdered sugar with big black lava rocks framing the huge bay and big waves crashing in. Full of bright red crabs and black marine iguanas sun bathing and dog-piling. We make our way along until we get to another bay further away that was swimable. Take a quick dip before we’re told to make our way back to entrance. It was a quick journey but spectacular.
At night, we walk around the touristy streets and stop in a few shops. Ben has his eye on a few new T-shirts. Grab dinner at a local joint that we saw on our bus ride in then head to bed early to prepare for SCUBA tomorrow!
End of D45 cribbage score: Ben 75 (12 skunks) – Meg 56 (11 skunks)
SCUBA day! One of the best types of days. We show up to the dive shop early to get debriefed on our two sites for the day – Bartolome and Cousins Rock. Both sound pretty neat and they amp us up about all of the types of animals we might see. The sites are a ways out on the north side of the island, requiring a 45 min car ride then an hour and a half ferry ride to get there. Good thing we met a few other honeymooners to keep us company on the long journey – Barbara and Eric from LA! They had just gotten married in Barbara’s hometown, Quito, and were spending this week diving and relaxing on Santa Cruz. Sounds familiar.
We finally get to the first dive site and struggle to put on our wetsuits (7mm is quite thick!) and gear on the choppy waters. This is my first dive on my own so I’m a bit nervous. I’m in the middle of psyching myself up and reviewing the necessities to keep myself alive when they say “1, 2, 3, go!” and flip us overboard. The shock of sudden entry and the cold water makes me have just a quick internal freak out. Fortunately, I get it together quickly and prepare to descend. This dive was pretty decent. We followed along the sea bottom shelves slowly getting deeper and deeper. Visibility wasn’t great but we still saw a few neat animals – varying fish, sea turtles, a pregnant marble ray (big ole belly), and a few white tipped reef sharks. One shark was swimming around underneath an overhang and we got reallll close. It was doing some figure 8’s under there so would turn and swim head on towards Ben every once in awhile. Scary, but surprisingly not too scary. During our surface interval, the boat slowly made our way over to the second dive sight while stopping in a few bays so we could look for more animals. Saw some blue-footed boobies (by the way, there were an unreal number of “I love boobies” T-shirts all over the shops on the island) and were lucky enough to spot a few Galapagan penguins swimming around - the only equatorial penguin in the world! We even saw a rare Galapagan hawk. It uses the strong winds to float perfectly still above the rocks. It looked like someone had pressed the pause button on a nature documentary. Crazy.
The second dive was incredible. Much better than the first dive. This time, we let the current drift us along a rock wall and then swam around to the back side. Visibility was a bit better and we saw a TON of animals. A sea lion was out hunting and swerved in between us. A few turtles paid no attention to us as they went about their day beneath our feet. We even found one taking a little nap in a cove. More sharks. And oh my gosh the fish. Thousands of them. All sorts of crazy sizes and colors (Ben spotted a neat highlighter yellow lumpy fish). We somehow got in the middle of a huge school of fish and my entire field of vision became a wallpaper of fish. When we reached the edge of rock formation, the guide had us hold onto the rocks while our legs dangled in the strong currents above us and peek over the edge and down into the deep blue nothingness below. It was super cool.
The boat ride back to the main island was quite a bit more turbulent than the morning ride and not very pleasant, though it helped that we were all still riding the high of the neat dive right before. As we were getting tossed around in the back of the boat, a few mentioned that this was at least better than the inter-island ferries. They are much bumpier and nearly everyone on their ferry got sea sick. Uh oh. We had planned to head to Isla Isabela tomorrow, which would require a 2.5 hour ferry there and then back a few days later in addition to the 2 hr ferry we need to take to get to San Cristobal, which is where we fly out of. Hmm maybe we need to rethink our plan. We went back to our hostel and did a bit of research. With the slow internet speed, it took a few hours but we finally came up with a new plan. Sadly, we decided to skip Isla Isabela. This would allow us to not be so rushed on the other two islands and explore a bit more, plus only have one queasy ride instead of three. Bummed for sure sure, but we’ll have to come back next time we quit our jobs.
After our brainstorm sesh, we met back up with Barbara and Eric for dinner at the kioskos. Ben, Barbara and I each had some pretty delicious, freshly caught lobster (fairly inexpensive actually). But the winner of the evening was Eric’s grilled brujo (scorpion fish). So fresh and flaky and buttery. We’ll be coming back tomorrow for that tasty treat.
End of D46 cribbage score: Ben 76 (12 skunks) – Meg 56 (11 skunks)
With the new plan, today ended up being a “bonus” Santa Cruz day so we were able to explore the island a bit more. First stop: The Charles Darwin center. A little museum composed of a few different buildings, it explained the history of the islands and Darwin’s research. Pretty interesting, but quite small so only took about an hour to walk through. Next, we wanted to go to the north side of the island to see a few of the sights – Los Gemelos, a giant tortoise reserve, and the lava tunnels. All of the tourism companies offer this tour for a hefty price (sometimes $50 per person), but we’ve heard that you can just haggle with a cab driver to take you around for the same “tour” and for much cheaper. So this was my next language challenge: negotiation. I flag down the first cab we see and prepare myself as I approach the driver side window. The intense negotiation went like this (in broken Spanish of course):
Me: Can you take us to Los Gemelos, the tortoise reserve, and the lava tunnels?
Hombre: Sure
Me: How much?
Hombre: $50
Me: $40?
Hombre: Sure
Phew, I did it! Off we go. First, we stopped by Los Gemelos (“The Twins”) which were two huge sink holes formed a long time ago when lava tunnels collapsed. We walked
around the edges of them for awhile and they were pretty neat, but in the end they were just big holes. Next, we went to El Chato giant tortoise reserve and this was awesome. They were so huge!! Like coffee table size. But comically slow. And made an odd hissing noise when we got too close. Finally, hombre (we forgot his name) drops us off at the entrance of a 300 m lava tunnel. Really neat to see these massive tunnels and crazy to think that they were formed by liquid hot magma. At one point, the tunnel became so small that we had to get down on our hand and knees and shimmy our way through. Ben struggled a bit more than I did, naturally. Then hombre took us back into town and we handed over our $40. Overall, a neat little tour and worth the $40 but I would have been quite angry to have paid $50 each for it.
What a day we’ve had already and its only lunchtime! But I don’t like letting valuable daylight slip by when there is so much exploring to do, so off we head to the next adventure! Though on the same island, we have to take a water taxi across a small bay to get to the entrance path for Las Grietas. We had heard that Las Grietas was a neat little
freshwater swimming hole, but on first impression it was just a dock with a million small children jumping in the water. Absolute chaos. But we wait for a lull to jump in anyways and swim away from the dock hoping the noise of the minions would disappear. Sure enough, once you climb over one set of rocks, the entire channel reveals itself and its marvelous. The channel walls rise above the water 30-40 ft. The water is crystal clear so with our goggles on we can see the walls continue down and down until its just all dark blue. There were even a few big fish down there. We swim all the way to the end of the channel, taking breaks to climb up the walls and jump in along the way. It was so much fun. At one point, Ben places his goggles on a rock ledge to jump in, but the goggles fall into the water. He blindly reaches for them a few times as they slowly float down but no luck. Since the water is so clear, he is able to look down to find them and fortunately, they were perfectly balanced on a rock ledge 15 ft below the surface. What a lucky float. As we slowly make our way back to the entrance of the channel, the golden hour light peaks into the channel and lights up the channel walls and water. The rays of sunlight penetrate deeply into the water. Absolutely magical.
On our walk back to the hostel, we stop by a few shops so Ben can get those shirts he was eyeing up – he buys 3 and I end up getting a tank! Its been a little boring wearing the same 4 shirts for the past 6 weeks.
As promised, we head back to the kioskos for dinner to get some brujo. As a fun little surprise, Barbara and Eric are there as well! The brujo was as phenomenal as before and the company even better. We say goodbye to our new friends and the lovely kioskos at which we’ve spent so much time and head back to pack. We head to San Cristobal bright and early in the morning!
End of D47 cribbage score: Ben 77 (12 skunks) – Meg 57 (11 skunks)
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