Isla Isabela
13 October 2008 | Galapagos Islands, Ecuador
Heather
We stayed on Hiatus for a grand total of 2 days, basically enough time to air out the boat and exchange dirty clothes from Peru for clean clothes for the Galapagos in our backpacks.
After our typical 6 hour bus ride to Guayaquil, we stayed the night in the city before catching an early morning flight to Santa Cruz Island, which we decided to use as our home base for exploring the Galapagos. Puerto Aroya on Santa Cruz Island is where most people catch their cruise and it is the largest port in the Galapagos. We opted not to do a costly cruise unless we could find an irresistible last minute deal in town. Galapagos is expensive, just to fly and pay the park entrance to the Galapagos is $460pp ($350 for a flight and $110 for the park entrance fee). We think that we can see most of the places a short cruise visits by using Puerto Aroya as our home base and doing day trips. If money grew on trees a cruise and then some self exploring would be the best way to see the Galapagos.
We spent one day and night in Puerto Aroya, quickly visiting the Charles Darwin Research Station where you can see giant tortoises and then we were off to Isla Isabela for a few days. Travel between islands is available through daily or weekly ferries which are simple 20 passenger fiberglass boats with huge outboards on them. Our two hour trip was wet but uneventful. Arriving in Isabela we immediately loved it. Isabela is the largest of the Galapagos Islands but only two thousand people live there, the vibe is very casual. Our hotel is simple but perfect - hammocks hang everywhere, cold beer and pop is available for sale and they arrange day tours with a bilingual guide. We thank my friend Val for advising us to stay a few days on Isabela.
Ok, so the first tour we did was of the Sierra Negra Volcano (it's 1 of 5 active volcanoes on the island). The day involved a horseback ride to the crater and then a hike around the crater and lava field. Let me paint a picture - the only time I have been on a horse was when I was about 7 and I only sat on it for a picture and Kent's last time was when he was in the boy scouts. You do the math; this was a very, very long time ago. So our guide explains to the group how to stop, turn and basically control our horses. In reality he was wasting his breath; all the horses had no intention of obeying us. I pulled left on the reins my horse went in reverse, Kent tried to steer his right and his veered off the trail and into the bushes to eat. We did get them galloping a few times which was a lot of fun - Kent was like a cowboy speeding down the trail at one point, with a cloud of dust behind him.
Once we reached the crater we began our hike. The latest eruption was in 2005 near the rim of the crater and you could see the recent black lava that had spread though half of the crater. The crater itself is large, something like 5 miles by 6 miles. Next we hiked down into the lava fields. The landscape was quite beautiful actually, very lunar like. From here we got a great view of Isabela, the bays and other smaller islands around Isabela. It was pretty spectacular.