After getting off our boat in Puerto Ayora and finishing our last excursion (a trip to the El Chato Tortoise Reserve in the Santa Cruz highlands), we set about on what would be one of our last accommodation searches of our trip! If you believe what most of the guidebooks tell you, staying in any of the Galapagos’ three large towns will be hard on your pocket, but this doesn’t have to be the case and with a bit of searching and bargaining, we got a lovely double room for $20 in the Hotel Espana (on the intersection of Tomas de Berlanga and Islas Plazas). Food wasn’t overpriced either – if you wanted to eat gringo-style food on Puerto Ayora’s main drag you’d pay well for it, but a trip to Charles Binford St will have you eating a set lunch of soup, main course and desert (with a drink) for $3. The restaurants on this street aren’t flashy, but you’ll be in good company (all of the locals eat here) and the food can be really good. Familiar Williams was the pick of the lot – we had the most succulent lobster in coconut sauce here for $12 on one of our last nights and it was superb (neither of us had tried lobster before and thought it was all it’s hyped up to be!). The more ordinary dishes come in huge portions and average around $3-4.

There’s plenty to keep you occupied around the town, but its highlight for me was the small fishermans port where the boats land their catch every day. The port has an army of pelicans constantly waiting for leftovers and easy thieving opportunities, but they’re not as ill behaved as you’d expect and most of them wait patiently for handouts from the fish traders. There’s even a resident sea lion who’s been hanging around for years (you can just about see his head in the picture below, underneath the womans arm).

On past the fishermans port is the Charles Darwin Research Center where Lonesome George lives. Back in the day, when the Galapagos were frequented by whalers, merchantmen and naval vessels, thousands of giant tortoises were taken away on ships as an insurance against scurvy – the huge animals could be kept alive as a future food-scource for up to eighteen months without food or water by simply turning them on their backs. This and the introduction of feral animals to the islands, all but wiped out the giant tortoise population, and while some species were wiped out altogether, many are still dangerously close to extinction. George is the last of his own species (Pinta) and was taken from Pinta island in 1971 to the Research Center where he lives to this day. They’re still trying to get him to reproduce with a close matching species and in July of this year he mated with a suitable female. However, the eggs are showing signs of being infertile but as of November, there’s still some hope that some of the thirteen eggs may hatch.

Just as with the unpopulated islands, there’s plenty of wildlife to be seen on Santa Cruz including lots of marine iguanas, boobies, finches and sally lightfoot crabs. There are some great places to visit within walking distance of Puerto Ayora like Tortuga Bay with its pristine white beach and Las Grietas gorge, a natural swimming pool filled with brackish water that’s reached by a $0.60 water taxi from the main port and a twenty minute walk.

We didn’t spend all of our time on Santa Cruz. Our cruise itinerary didn’t take in any of the northern islands, and one of them in particular that we were sorry to have missed was Bartolome island, so we went there on a day trip. It cost around $100 dollars each and was quite a long day (more than six hours were spent on the boat getting there and back) but worth it. There was a group of Japanese tourists on board who were so excited by every small animal they saw that they made us a bit more appreciative of just how much wildlife we had seen on our cruise! At one stage we spotted a huge Manta Ray swimming alongside the boat, and this, added to the Japanese group’s enthusiasm, helped pass the hours on the boat. Bartolome has some great snorkelling, an interesting lava landscape and probably the most famous vista of the Galapagos, the so-called ‘double-sided beach’.

We were really sorry to be leaving the Islands after spending ten days there, and if we were to do it again, would have stayed for another week or two at least, but our flights were booked and we had to move on.

If you’re thinking of going to the Galapagos but are put off by the cost of the cruises, my advice would be to go on out there and enjoy them from the land. You can always do a bit of island hopping when you’re there! The islands truly are a wonder of nature and they’re clearly not going to stay that way forever – we probably  have less time to enjoy them than we realise.

For our remaining six days in South America we flew back to Ecuador to see a bit of the coast. During this time we visited Montanita which we disliked (too many fake hippies) and Canoa which was lovely and chilled out. We enjoyed Canoa, but really we should have just stayed in Santa Cruz as it would have been nicer and we would have avoided a lot of travelling.

After Canoa, we returned to Quito for the last time, where we ate an excellent meal in El Arabe and stayed close by in the homely and cosy Blue House.  It certainly was a step up from our previous accommodation in Quito which was in the very welcoming but slighty scummy Hostel Sucre (the cheapest bed in the city I reckon at $4 for our own room). After spending our last day in the excellent Artisan’s market in Quito getting a few gifts for the folks at home, we finally left this part of America behind and flew north to New York, our last stop before returning home to Ireland.

We spent five days on the Archipel II and visited five of the main islands in the group: San Cristobal, Espanola, Floreana, Isabela and Santa Cruz. We had read online that the islands, which are all volcanic, are not that pretty and so were pleasantly surprised by the beauty of the place as well as the excellent wildlife watching.

The Archipel II is a luxury class “eco” catamaran with a seven member crew and room for sixteen guests, but as it was only the beginning of the high season, there were only eight of us on board. After flying over on a plane full of people in their sixties, we were quite pleased to see that we would be joined on our boat by six other ‘youngsters’ like ourselves, all from different countries and all good craic. The boat itself was great; although perhaps a bit lacking in atmosphere, it was quite luxurious and you couldn’t complain about the food or general service. Our average day involved waking at about 6.30am, breakfast at 7am, hopping into our small speedboat at 8am and beginning our first excursion minutes later. After a few hours we would return to the boat for lunch at 12pm and then leave again around 2pm for the afternoon activity. Activities were always either a guided walk along one of the island trails or snorkelling in the clearest water I’ve ever seen. After this second activity we’d have some afternoon refreshments and as we soaked up the rays on the sun deck, the boat would sail on to the next island. We rarely sailed at night. The sea was not very rough so neither of us were sick thankfully, and as with our boat trip in Indonesia, we both really enjoyed the hours reading and chatting with the other passengers as we motored along through the deep blue sea. Most days the weather was great and although at times it was dull or overcast, it was always warm and sunny.

Because we were with a nice group and the wildlife and scenery was so good, we really enjoyed all our activities but were quite disappointed with our guide who was verging on rude at times and generally unenthusiastic. This is no reflection on the boat as he had never worked with them before and was just assigned to it at late notice (most of the boats don’t have their own permanent guides: they are assigned by the national park authorities). In a way, it would have been great to have a better guide who could have told us more about the endemic species and how they differ, but in another way it didn’t matter too much as unlike a safari trip, for example, the animals don’t exactly need spotting! The snorkelling everywhere was really enjoyable, but to be honest it wasn’t as good as Borneo. And of course it was a lot colder. Generally wetsuits weren’t 100% necessary but they did make it much more comfortable and enabled us to spend longer in the water (the water temperature was about the same as Ireland at its warmest).

Over the five day boat trip, we saw many sealions, iguanas, pelicans, albatross, boobies, mockingbirds, Darwin finches, tortoises, lava lizards and crabs, while underwater we saw many colourful fish, turtles (sometimes mating), rays and white tip reef sharks. There were many really cool moments, including some of these main highlights:

On Espanola, we witnessed an Albatross mating ritual, which was really very funny to watch. Originally there was three birds involved but number three soon bowed out and left the other two to it. What followed consisted of quite a bit of rapid opening, closing and touching of beaks, accompanied by lots of squawking at various volumes and pitches. They were still going strong when we eventually walked on after about twenty minutes of giggling and photo-taking.

At Shark Alley on a small island off Isabela, we saw about thirty or forty white tip reef sharks in a narrow, shallow, natural canal. We also came within about two or three meters of these reef sharks when snorkelling in Gardner Bay. After a few minutes observing these, we moved along the path to where we witnessed two angry-looking marine iguanas locked in a head-to-head battle of endurance and strength. This duel involved a lot of spitting as well as quite a bit of gum and teeth baring which we hadn’t seen before. Vicious stuff!

The best stop on our itinerary was probably Gardner Bay on Espanola. We were lucky to have a beautiful blue sky day here and the beautiful beach had about one hundred sealions on it, plus marine iguanas, sallylightfoot crabs and red lava lizards. We also spotted a rarely-seen Galapagos snake and spent a fascinating few minutes watching three mockingbirds eating the placenta of a sealion who had just given birth. The newborn pup still had the cord attached and apparently the birth had been witnessed by other tourists an hour previously while we were strolling up the beach.

The baby tortoises we saw at the Isabela Tortoise Breeding Centre were just plain cute, especially when you compare their size to their grandparents, who are huge creatures that often live well past one hundred. The work of the breeding centre is very important as the tortoise population has been decimated over the last fifty years of human habitation, primarily by the introduction of mainland species such as goats and pigs. The centre helps boost the population of various endangered species before releasing them back into the wild.

One of the most common but amusing sea-birds on the archipello is the blue-footed boobie. These oversized, dopey-looking creatures with their big blue feet, never failed to bring a smile to our faces and it’s no surprise that they’re the unofficial emblem of the islands.

After five great days on the islands, our boat landed in the most populated town in the chain, Puerto Ayora on Isla Santa Cruz. We had another five days left before we returned to the mainland and although we didn’t have very high expectations, we enjoyed the second half of our stay just as much as the first.

After our week of lazing about on Gili Trawangan, we took the boat back to Lombok and set off by bus to the other side of the island we’re we would board the good ship ratcockroachtinycabinbutlovelyfood – this was going to be interesting! It actually turned out to be a fantastic few days – we’d sail (mostly motor) through the night and spend the days island hopping. The route went around Sumbawa, over to Flores and back again (the full itinerary is here).

Most of the islands we landed on didn’t have much to them, but some had villages and the locals would usually come down to the beach to have a good gander at us. They’re very smiley people the Indonesians, especially the kids who love practicing their two or three sentences of english (usually “hello”, and “where are you going!?”). We did a lot of snorkelling, but most of the coral was dead, killed by a combination of El Nino and dynamite fishing (which is the method of choice for many over here!) – it wasn’t all bad though, the reefs around Komodo were untouched because of its national park status so they had lot of life about them (all sorts of reef fish, turtles and in some places the biggest clams I’ve ever seen!). While some of us spent our time looking at fish, Neil from Australia preferred to hook them; he caught us one nice big Mackerel for dinner on the last night, which went down a treat!

On the third morning, we arrived at Komodo island and went on our first dragon hunt, but as we were in the middle of the mating season they we all off getting jiggy with it so we didn’t even get a glimpse of one. It was a little disappointing, but the following day we went to Rinca island (which is the other main island in Komodo national park) and spotted one within a few minutes. We then saw some more on a hike into the island; they’re impressive creatures and have picked off a few of the locals living on the island over the years. You wouldn’t think it by looking at them, but apparently they can run at up to 30 mph and count buffalo as one of their favourite snacks!

After a couple more days of sailing, snorkelling, sun-bathing, chatting, singing, reading and island stops we said goodbye to the wonderful Perama crew and all the lovely people we’d met and went back to Bali to get a bit more surfing in. If we’re ever back in Indonesia we’ll probably do this boat trip all over again as it was a great way of seeing parts of Indonesia that are otherwise difficult to get to and it was probably the most enjoyable thing we’ve done on this trip so far.