22 June 2008 Sunday: Getting to Galapagos was an adventure on its own. First of all we had to book flights from Guayaquil to Galapagos. There are two companies you can fly with: the military-linked company Tame and the private Aerogal. Aerogal didn’t have any seats for the dates we wanted, so we decided to go with Tame which also had newer planes.

As with many flights in South America, there is one set of fares for locals and another for foreigners. When we tried to book Tame online, they only had fares for locals in their system so we couldn’t book as foreigners. After a week of many long-distance calls (through skype) from Buenos Aires to Tame offices in Guayaquil and Quito, and many promises that their IT people would look into it, we decided we had to make a phone booking which would be slightly more expensive and because of the delay, we couldn’t get seats on the dates we wanted. The good news came when a few days after doing the phone booking we found that their site had finally been fixed and seats become available for the dates we wanted, so we quickly booked online and canceled our phone booking.

After all this hassle, we were a bit apprehensive about flying on Tame, after all if their site was poorly maintained, the same might happen with their planes. Luckily though, we got on one of the newer A320’s and even though it was just a 1 & 1/2 hour flight, they served a small meal - which was just as quickly cleared - and before we knew it, we were landing in Baltra, Galapagos.

But landing in Baltra was just the first step! Once we got our bags, we had to board a bus for a 15-min ride down to the ferry terminal, then it’s another 10-min ferry ride to the neighboring island of Santa Cruz (where most hotels are), and then another 45-min bus ride from northern Santa Cruz to the main city of Puerto Ayora!

Here’s the view from our hotel room. Hovering above the water, you can see one of the many frigate birds that hover high waiting to steal a fish from another bird, or even a sea lion. These birds can soar for hours over the water and are amazing aviators.

Here’s a closer shot of one of the Frigates. This one is a female as it has a white chest.

And here is one of our favorite animals in the Galapagos, a marine iguana. Galapagos is the only place in the world where marine iguanas are found and they are everywhere near the beach, although they seem to prefer the black volcanic rocks where they are best camouflaged.

We have a lot more photos to post, including some underwater ones of us swimming with sea lions and we’ll be posting them in a while!