The Galápagos Islands — An Honest Account
A sea lion brushed my face with his whiskers, dared me to chase him, and disappeared into the blue before I could process what had just happened. That was Day 3. By Day 7 I had swum with sharks, sea turtles, marine iguanas, Galápagos penguins, and a manta ray that nearly took out my sister Debbie. Each day of our trip we marveled at what we'd just seen and asked ourselves how the next day could possibly be better. Each day was.
Janet and I went to the Galápagos in the fall of 2023 with my sister Debbie and her husband Craig. It had been a dream trip for both me and Debbie for a long time. I can tell you without any reservation that it exceeded every expectation we brought with us. I can also tell you — because it's my job to know these things — that getting the most out of the Galápagos requires making the right choices before you go. The wrong choices will cost you both money and experience. So here's what we learned.
The wildlife here doesn't know you're watching. That's not a metaphor. It is a literal description of what happens when you get in the water.
Why This Place Is Different
The Galápagos is an archipelago of 13 major islands and dozens of smaller ones, located about 1,000 km off the coast of Ecuador. They are part of Ecuador and they have been since 1832. What makes them different from every other island destination on earth is the wildlife — and the reason the wildlife is different is that for most of its history, nothing here had any reason to fear anything. There were no large land predators. The animals that arrived on these islands, carried by wind and current across hundreds of miles of open ocean, found a place where survival depended on adaptation, not fear. Charles Darwin noticed this in 1835. It remains true today.
About 97% of the archipelago is protected as national park. The Galápagos National Park Directorate — the GNPD — controls access to every protected area with a level of rigor that would feel bureaucratic anywhere else but here is exactly right. Tour groups are limited to 16 people maximum. Each group must be accompanied by a GNPD-certified naturalist at all times. Groups are assigned specific time slots for each site, and only one group is allowed in a protected area at once. You will never be standing at a viewpoint with 200 other tourists. The animals will never be crowded. And the naturalist — if you book the right tour — will make the difference between seeing wildlife and understanding it.
Getting There
There is no direct international flight to the Galápagos. It will take a minimum of three flights from anywhere in the United States — at least two to reach mainland Ecuador, and a third from either Quito or Guayaquil to the islands. There are two airports in the Galápagos: Seymour Airport on Baltra Island, which handles most tourist arrivals, and a smaller airport on San Cristóbal. Flight schedules typically require an overnight on mainland Ecuador before the island connection, so build that into your planning. Quito is worth an extra day on its own. Guayaquil less so, but either works as a base.
The population on the four inhabited islands — Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, Isabela, and Floreana — runs to about 30,000 people. Baltra has an airport but no permanent settlement. Everything else is national park.
Choosing Your Tour
This is the decision that will make or break the trip, and it deserves more thought than most people give it. There are three broad options: land-based touring, adventure cruises, and what I call comfort cruises. We did an adventure cruise. I'll give you my honest take on all three.
You stay in land-based lodging on one or more of the inhabited islands — Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, and Isabela are the main options — and take day excursions into the protected areas with a naturalist. Some tours include snorkeling. Island-hopping between the populated islands is done by ferry.
I can't speak to the land experience firsthand since our trip was a cruise, but I can tell you there are no luxury hotels in the Galápagos. At best you're looking at what Americans would rate a 2-star property. The more important limitation is access: land tours are necessarily centered on the inhabited islands and the protected areas immediately surrounding them. You'll see a meaningful portion of what the archipelago has to offer, but not all of it. A cruise covers more ground.
Seven to fourteen days aboard ships carrying 16 to 32 guests. Basic accommodations — private rooms with bathrooms, but marine toilets where you discard paper rather than flush it, showers that range from functional to barely adequate, no in-room televisions, no onboard entertainment beyond nightly planning sessions for the next day's excursions. Our ship held 16 passengers with a crew of seven.
On the most active itineraries you'll get four excursions per day, each running one to four hours. This is an immersive, destination-focused experience. It is not a vacation in the traditional sense — it is an expedition. The ships are small and they move, and if you're prone to motion sickness, come prepared. I use the scopolamine patch and had no issues despite seas rough enough to nearly throw me out of bed more than once. Don't skip this step.
Food is basic — buffet or family style, fresh and locally sourced, heavy on chicken and seafood. If you don't like cilantro, prepare to pick it out of everything.
This is not appropriate for anyone with significant mobility limitations. At the same time, you don't need to be an athlete. Janet and I both managed fine, and we have the evidence of a sea lion encounter to prove it.
Celebrity, Silversea, and Lindblad operate larger ships — 48 to 100 guests — with gourmet dining, nightly entertainment, hot water, and stocked bars. Celebrity and Silversea built ships specifically for these waters. These are for travelers who want the Galápagos experience without giving up the comforts of a traditional ocean cruise.
The trade-off is time on the islands. The group size rules are the same — 16 people maximum per landing — so to serve a ship of that size, the cruise lines cut your excursion opportunities roughly in half compared to an adventure cruise. You'll spend more time on the ship and less time seeing what you came to see. If the luxury matters more than the access, this is a legitimate option. But go in knowing what you're trading.
The Islands
Our itinerary covered the central and western islands — Baltra, Santa Cruz, Bartolomé, Santiago, Isabela, and Fernandina. No single itinerary covers everything, and that's not a failure of planning, it's the nature of the place. Here is what we found.
Our first excursion was Bachas Beach on Santa Cruz — a semi-wet landing into calm surf, a short hike to salt ponds, and our first Galápagos finches, the same birds Darwin studied. The lava formations along the beach were covered in Sally Lightfoot crabs, which are exactly as improbable as they sound: small, fast, and fluorescent orange against black rock. Fresh sea turtle nests in the sand — not expected in November — turned out to be a climate story: warming water has extended the nesting season from a few January days to a four-month event.
Bartolomé Island contains Pinnacle Rock, a volcanic formation that served as a target for U.S. Navy gunnery practice during WWII — which puts a different spin on the scenic photographs. Our time slot had us climbing to the observation point at sunrise, which required a 5am wake-up. Nobody was happy about it. Nobody complained once we saw the light. In the waters below Pinnacle Rock we snorkeled with Galápagos penguins — an actual anomaly, penguins on the equator, kept viable by the cool Humboldt Current — and had our first encounter with the sea lions. No amount of preparation makes the first encounter anything less than extraordinary. They came directly at us, in a group and individually, played, blew bubbles, and made it very clear that the no-touching rule was going to be challenged more from their side than ours.
Sullivan Bay on Santiago is a lava walk — fields of hardened flow from eruptions spanning centuries, the most recent solidifying in the early 20th century. Our naturalist explained the geology with the kind of detail that turns a landscape from scenery into story. That afternoon's snorkeling in the same bay added a tiger sea snake slithering across the bottom and a whiptail ray with vivid green markings along its body. The Galápagos consistently delivers something you didn't know to expect.
Our final excursion of the trip was Buccaneers Cove, off Santiago's coast — a snorkeling dive into a sea cave in near darkness, a Galápagos shark on the bottom, sea lions escorting us out into open water, a manta ray that chose Debbie as its target, a blacktip reef shark in the cove, and a pair of whitetip reef sharks close enough that I made a conscious decision not to reach out and touch one. Whitetips are not aggressive. I did not test this hypothesis. The cove was the single best excursion of the trip, and the trip was full of extraordinary excursions.
Isabela is the largest island in the archipelago, home to five of the Galápagos' six major volcanoes. We spent a morning on Sierra Negra — a 3,867-foot shield volcano that last erupted in 2018. I sat this one out with a cold. Janet, Debbie, and Craig made the 3.5 km trek to the summit through wet, muddy trail conditions. On a clear day you can see the entire island below and all five of the Galápagos' largest volcanoes from the top. On their day, the summit was socked in with fog. Janet came back with a great picture of it.
The afternoon went better. We visited the Giant Tortoise Breeding Center on Isabela — and I'll be honest here, this was the one stop on the trip that didn't completely wow me. The tortoises are in captivity, and seeing them in an enclosure, however educational, feels more like a zoo than the rest of the Galápagos does. The breeding program matters; these animals were nearly gone. But the experience is different in kind from everything else the islands offer.
The following morning redeemed it entirely. A panga tour of the mangrove swamp in Elizabeth Bay, primarily meant to be a birding excursion, became something else when a sea lion surfaced next to the boats and demanded our full attention. Our naturalist gave up on pointing out birds and just watched and laughed with the rest of us. Deeper into the mangroves, in water clear enough to see the bottom, a hawksbill sea turtle circled our pangas — slow, then fast, indifferent to us, occasionally breaking the surface for air. Then a school of spotted eagle rays came through. Graceful and completely unexpected in water that shallow.
Tagus Bay, on Isabela's opposite coast, has a graffiti wall — literally, a rock face where 19th-century whaling crews carved their names, later visited by 20th-century tourists who added paint. The GNPD stopped new additions when they took over but left the existing record in place. It's a strange juxtaposition with everything else on the islands, but oddly compelling as a layer of human history on a place that is mostly defined by the absence of it.
The youngest and most pristine of the major islands — no introduced species, no permanent human settlement, no hotel, no ferry. Snorkeling off Punta Espinoza put us in the water with green sea turtles so focused on feeding they didn't notice us at all. One bumped into me and gave me what I can only describe as an irritated look before continuing its lunch. We also swam alongside Galápagos marine iguanas, which are the only seagoing iguanas on earth — and I watched one hitch a ride on the back of a sea turtle, which feels like something that should be in a nature documentary but happened six feet away from me.
What We Missed
A week is not enough to see everything, and the GNPD's scheduling means you don't get to choose all of your stops. Our original itinerary included Genovesa — known as Bird Island for the density and variety of its bird population — but the island was under quarantine for avian flu at the time of our visit. The GNPD closed it without notice and without compensation. In exchange, they opened access to Punta Bowditch, which had been closed for ten months after hurricane damage in 2022. Our naturalist coordinated the change with the park and our ship's captain overnight. This kind of thing happens. Build in flexibility and don't go expecting a guarantee.
The southern islands — Floreana and Española — and the eastern island of San Cristóbal were not on our itinerary. Floreana has Post Office Bay, where the tradition of hand-delivering travelers' postcards dates to the whaling era. San Cristóbal has Kicker Rock, a sheer volcanic formation rising from the ocean that is one of the more photographed spots in the archipelago. We missed both. Which means we have a reason to go back.
When to Go
There is no bad month to visit the Galápagos. Each island is its own ecosystem with its own rhythm, and the wildlife cycle runs year-round. That said, the two seasons offer different things. The warm and wet season runs January through April — air temperatures near 90 degrees, four to five inches of rain per month, and land wildlife at peak activity: mating, calving, nesting. The cool and dry season covers the rest of the year, with temperatures in the 70s to low 80s and almost no rain. The landscape looks like a desert in the dry season, which is accurate — much of it is. The underwater experience is excellent year-round.
We went to the Galápagos with high expectations and left with something harder to describe — a feeling that we had seen a place that works the way the world is supposed to work, before everything complicated it. The wildlife isn't performing for you. The regulations aren't getting in your way. The naturalist isn't reciting a script. The sea lion that brushed my face did it because it wanted to. That's what makes this place unlike anywhere else we've been. If it's on your list, go. Call us first — we know the operators, we know the itineraries, and we know what you're getting into. That last part is the point.