Photo credit: C. Dorobek/Flickr
Ever since the widespread popularity of cruising, the Galapagos Islands have been regarded as primarily a cruise destination to be visited on small and very expensive ships. The Ecuadorean government has been strongly opposed to the use of large cruise ships to visit these environmentally sensitive islands, where wildlife has remained untouched and undisturbed for many millennia. So travel companies taking visitors to the Galapagos have used tiny boats, not ships, to deliver groups as small as 25 people to these fabled homes of sea life, exotic land animals, turtles, and birds.
Problem is that passengers aboard these small boats have had to pay a pretty penny for the experience, and also had to hazard being seasick in vessels that plunge up and down, and sidewise, as they navigate a sometimes-turbulent sea. Many Americans have been discouraged by these factors from visiting this location made famous by the wildlife discoveries of Charles Darwin. Almost as many Americans have assumed (falsely, as it turns out) that there was no alternative to the small boat as a means of visiting the area.
Although a few lightly-distributed guidebooks have explored the alternative, non-cruise method of visiting the Galapagos, and an occasional—in fact, very rare—article has dealt with alternatives to Galapagos cruising, a great many travel experts have remained ignorant of those other methods—until now. In a lengthy article appearing in the travel section of the Washington Post, one of its writers has composed a lengthy description of what she terms the "land method" of visiting the Galapagos. Her name is Andrea Sachs, and budget-minded tourists, as well as tourists sensitive to seasickness, owe her a debt of gratitude.
Ms. Sachs points out that four of the 19 Galapagos Islands—Santa Cruz, San Cristobal, Isabela, and Floreana—are inhabited by over 25,000 people who maintain multiple hotels and restaurants on their islands, much to the surprise of many visitors. Those facilities make it unnecessary to take a live-aboard cruise on a small ship, resulting in a much cheaper, much-less regimented method of visiting the Galapagos.
You begin the adventure by flying to either Quito or Guayaquil in Ecuador (Guayaquil is better for reaching the Galapagos), and in Guayaquil you change to a smaller plane for flying to Baltra, the main airport of the Galapagos. From Baltra, you board a ferry for the trip to one of the inhabited islands, and there you obtain a room in hotels ranging from dirt-cheap hostels to low-cost budget properties charging between $50 and $100 a night for a double room.
Surprisingly, even in the inhabited islands, you see a great many species of wildlife: sea lions and fur seals, iguanas, gulls, marine turtles and whales offshore. To see even more, you book aboard a scheduled ferry to one of the lesser islands crawling with undisturbed marine life of every species. If you're easily sea-sick, you simply make sure that the ferry you choose does not require more than two hours to reach the island you've chosen.
And on each small stretch of earth, you simply wander at will, exploring these phenomena "by land", and not in the regimented confines of an expensive small cruise boat. And at night, you return to your budget hotel for a good night's sleep.
In a fascinating description of her own trip there, Andrea Sachs has opened up an alternative, cheaper, and less regimented method of visiting the Galapagos. You might access the online article, and then enter into the accessible world she has outlined for you.