When international borders closed down in March 2020 due to Covid-19, our dream trip to the Galapagos was abruptly cancelled. In an optimistic (or perhaps naive) move, we moved our booking with Iguana Crossing to August 2020. This whole pandemic thing was new to everyone and it seemed unfathomable that the world would still be shut down in 5 months. Little did we know…
Obviously August didn’t happen so spring break of 2021 seemed like the next plausible option. Iguana Crossing graciously let us rebook again for April 2021 and we collectively held out breath for the next 8 months.
As March rolled around, the world was in a bit of a murky area. Some borders were open but countries’ different testing requirements complicated things and international travel itself was still a bit of an unknown quantity. There were clearly risks but there were some benefits to traveling during this unusual period as well. After much soul-searching, we decided that we weren’t ready to leave the country yet. With the boys finally back in school (almost) full time, we were concerned about either getting stuck in Ecuador or having to quarantine when we got back. We reached out to Iguana Crossing again to see what our options were.
Understandably, they were not crazy about the idea of us pushing back another entire year to spring break 2022. We had paid them for the package in full in February of 2020 so they didn’t stand to make much more money on us. By 2022, I imagine they were hopeful that things would be back to normal and they’d be full of newly paying customers. They are a small hotel and we didn’t want to take up a spot of a paying customer.
We went back and forth on whether or not we’d be comfortable going in the summer. I knew this would be our last shot to rebook so we had to be certain. It wasn’t fair to the hotel to keep pushing back again and again. The complicating factor was that the Galapagos had some unique testing requirements – we needed a covid test to get into Ecuador (rapid test was accepted) but we also needed a PCR test taken within 96 hours of our arrival in the Galapagos. We did not want to have to take a second test in Ecuador so we had to figure out if we had enough time to get all the way to the Galapagos on a single test taken before we left. At the time, it was tough to get a PCR test turned around in less than 48 hours, which made the schedule really tight.
But as demand for international travel increased in the late spring, so did faster testing options. We found a place that would guarantee a 24 hour turnaround on a PCR test, looked at all the flight options and did the math to determine that we could make it all the way to the Galapagos on a single test if we eliminated the two night stay in Quito.
So with just a few week’s notice, we moved our trip to the end of May 2021, leaving the day after the boys got out of school. Iguana Crossing was willing to let us rebook for that time since tourism on the islands still had not rebounded and they had plenty of availability.
The rest of our tours had been booked (and fully paid) with book-ec. When our initial trip was cancelled, our agent Johanna wisely suggested that we wait before rebooking because she didn’t want to reschedule things multiple times. I was comfortable with this because I figured there was more availability and options with tours from Santa Cruz than there was with a small boutique hotel on Isabela. So I didn’t reschedule with her for August 2020 and then April 2021 as I had with Iguana Crossing. I hadn’t even touched base with her in probably 9 months so I was nervous when I reached out to her in late April and essentially said “great news! We’re coming in May!” She didn’t hesitate to respond with excitement and immediately got to work on rescheduling everything. I am so grateful to both Paulina at Iguana Crossing and Johanna at book-ec for their flexibility and patience in rescheduling and helping to make our dream trip a reality.
From an itinerary perspective, we did have one last chance to change things if we wanted to. While I had no interest in changing our tours or hotels, the logistics of the end of our trip as previously planned had always made me nervous. We were going to have to end our trip by taking a 6am ferry to a 12pm flight to another 12am flight to another 6am flight. It was going to be a horribly exhausting way to end the trip. The alternative was to flip the order of the islands and catch the ferry to Isabela on the same day we flew into Santa Cruz.
So we decided to visit Isabela first, which meant an early morning flight and then an afternoon ferry. While not ideal, it was better than the marathon ferry-flight-flight-flight return we would have had if we kept Isabela as the second island. The return home was still a little rough since we had a long layover in Quito before a red-eye flight but it was way better than the original plan.
So… our final FINAL Galapagos itinerary ended up as the following:
Day 1 – fly to Quito, overnight in Quito
Day 2 – fly to Galapagos (Baltra) in the morning, afternoon ferry from Santa Cruz to Isabela
Day 3 – Las Tintoreras tour in the morning and El Muro De Las Lagrimas (Wall of Tears) bike ride in the afternoon
Day 4 – Sierra Negra tour
Day 5 – Los Tuneles tour
Day 6 – morning ferry to Santa Cruz, afternoon exploring the town and visiting the Charles Darwin Research Station
Day 7 – North Seymour day tour
Day 8 – Santa Cruz Highlands tour (El Chato Tortoise Reserve and Los Gemelos) in the morning, afternoon flight to Quito
Day 9 – flight home
And spoiler alert… this trip actually happened exactly as planned!!!
