We’ve been fortunate to visit some pretty incredible places over the past two years.
Angkor Wat. Paris. Ha Long Bay. “The Beach”. Sagrada Familia.
The list goes on.
We’ve also been lucky to have family come and visit in more than a few locations, but we hadn’t yet had any friends come join us on the road. Until now.
20 years ago I worked my way through undergraduate school as a bartender in Boston, and the summer of ’96 found me slinging drinks at Whiskey’s, a bar on Boylston Street.
[Aside: Some would say that I hung on to that life a little too long. I’m not gonna argue.]
I took the month of July off to backpack around Europe, and when I returned to Whiskey’s I found they had replaced most of the bar staff with a whole new crew: a Vermonter fresh out of college named Ryan; a short guy with a shock of blond hair who talked a blue streak named Seth; David, a Massachusetts native just returning from a stint in Arizona, and Tony, a local boy from Norwood with a quick smile.
We all became great friends, and even ended up roommates in some pretty shitty but memorable apartments. We’re still friends all these years later, and we get together whenever possible.
When Juliann and I were in Boston for the holidays last year we visited David, who is now married to an amazing woman, Tanya, and they have three wonderful kids: Violet (3), Caiden (8), and Addision (10). We spent the evening eating pizza, drinking wine, and laughing at old stories. More importantly, we started planning for them to come visit us when we were back out on the road.
David and his wife, Tanya, both wanted to check out someplace in the world they’d never been. They were looking for something fun, exciting, and a bit adventurous, and when we told them we were going to be in Costa Rica and Ecuador for a few months they were intrigued by Ecuador and the famous Galapagos Islands.
They took a leap and agreed to meet us in Ecuador for a couple of weeks, we immediately started planning. We quickly eliminated the option of cruising through the Galapagos for reasons of cost and convenience, and we decided instead to base ourselves on a couple of the islands for a week and take some day tours.
Over the next couple of months we exchanged dozens of emails and phone calls. We managed to find two villas that checked all the boxes for us on the islands of Santa Cruz and Isabela, so we booked flights and arranged tours to the uninhabited islands of Santa Fe and Bartolome.
After the flurry of planning and booking we sat back, enjoyed Costa Rica, and waited to see our friends in South America.
The Most Secure Little Neighborhood in the World
To get to the Galapagos most travelers fly into Guayaquil, Ecuador, and then take a 2-hour flight out to the archipelago, which lies 600 miles off the coast.
We arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s second largest city, five days before our friends were scheduled to join us, so we had a bit of time to kill. Our apartment was in the Las Peñas neighborhood, which we had learned from our research was a pretty safe and attractive spot.
Our research held up. Las Peñas was indeed pretty, with cobblestone streets and quaint shops, restaurants, and lively bars fronting the Guayas River. It was tiny, however, perhaps 5 square blocks, and the reason it was so safe was that there were armed guards everywhere in Las Peñas 24/7.
Las Peñas was armed to the teeth.
Our host, Jose, was the brother of the longtime mayor of Guayaquil, and judging by Jose’s home (our building was 5 stories, two of which were his, and included an extensive pool deck with a jacuzzi, steam room, and gym) he was rather wealthy. He was very friendly to us, though a bit patronizing to his handyman, Felipe. As Jose gave us a tour, he paused every few seconds to yell, “Felipe!” and directed the sheepish grinning fellow to pick up a stray tool or some trash. Jose would then wave us on and continue the tour.
When he was showing us the pool deck, he stopped in front of a beautiful mosaic sign that read: Clothing is optional on this floor.
“This sign is very serious,” he commented in broken English. Jose was apparently letting us know that he regularly used the pool deck nude. We took a mental note and avoided the pool for the next five days.
Las Peñas was secure and we felt very safe walking around the neighborhood. The problem was that it was very small, and after dark once we stepped outside of Las Peñas our feeling of safety vanished.
These feelings were probably colored by our research, during which we had read several stories and warnings from tourists who had had, um, negative experiences in Guayaquil. Robberies, muggings, and general creepiness and unpleasantry seemed to be a common occurrence in Ecuador’s second largest city.
If we were relatively new to travel we might have chalked all these stories up to gringos with shitty attitudes. After two years on the road, however, we had done plenty of research, and we had never seen such an overwhelming amount of bad press about a location on our itinerary.
Even the information binder provided at the Hilton warned guests not to wander far from the hotel, not to try to flag down a taxi on the street, not to talk to…basically anyone, etc.
Given this info we planned on staying in Guayaquil for only a night or two, but organizing a complex trip with another family via email can get messy, and we ended up arriving in the city much earlier than our friends.
Our apartment was a bit strange and sat on the top floor of Jose’s building. It almost felt like a NYC-style railroad apartment – very narrow and long – but with large windows and modern design.
From the living room we had 180-degree views of the river and the scores of brightly colored shanty homes clinging to the hills on either side of us. Music filled the air in the neighborhood, and one Sunday the pounding Latin beats started at 6am (thankfully we were already up) and were still going when we hit the sack at 11pm.
Our first evening we went for a walk down the cobblestone street right outside our door and stopped at Casa Pilsener, a promising-looking two-story Ecuadorean pub. We should have known to walk away when the hostess greeted us gruffly, but we were tired and hungry so we selected an odd table in the corner of the patio. Our waitress had even less interest in us than the hostess, and the food tasted like it came out of a 10th-grade Home Economics class. We ate and got the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
The next few days we spent time resting, getting caught up on work, and writing, as we knew that once our friends arrived we weren’t going to want to spend a single minute working.
I took a couple of days to throw some weights around at Maori CrossFit, a great outdoor gym about 20 minutes away, and we did our shopping at Mega Maxi in the Mall del Sol, a huge shopping plaza a short Uber drive from Las Peñas.
The discovery that Uber was operating in Guayaquil was a “Hell yeah!” moment. Don’t wanna be stuck inside and can’t hail a cab, but also don’t feel much like getting mugged on the way to the mall? Call an Uber!
Taxis and Planes and Ferries – Oh My!
Our friends were scheduled to arrive on a late afternoon flight from Boston and we decided to surprise them at the airport. Braeden wanted to be like all the limo and taxi drivers we had seen at other airports, so he made a huge brightly-colored sign that read “The Swansons” and tucked it under his arm.
We waited for about an hour before our friends finally emerged from the terminal looking exhausted but cheerful. We greeted them with shouts and hugs, piled into two taxis, and took them to the Hilton where they were staying for the night. They ditched their bags and we all spent the next couple of hours at the lobby lounge sharing stories, having a little dinner, and enjoying some mojitos and cold bottles of Pilsener while Violet and Braeden chased each other around the restaurant.
The next morning we were scheduled on two separate flights to Santa Cruz, with our flight landing a couple of hours after the Swansons. Once we landed, to get from the Baltra airport to our villa on the other side of Santa Cruz we had to take a 5-minute shuttle from the airport to the channel in separating Baltra (the tiny island on which the airport sat) from Santa Cruz, then transfer to a ferry across the channel, take a taxi on a 45-minute drive south from one end of Santa Cruz to the other, then take a water taxi from Puerto Ayora, the port town of Santa Cruz, to our villa. All in 90-plus degree heat while carrying all kinds of bags and trying to understand what the hell was being said to us in rapid Spanish.
Piece of cake, right?
Despite all the moving parts everything went smoothly for the Swansons, and we received a text message shortly after we deplaned letting us know they had picked up some groceries and checked in.
When we first began our travels back in 2016 transfers were tiring: we had two bags each, and we didn’t yet have the hang of moving all of our stuff around on planes, trains, cars, buses, and ferries.
By this time, however, we had it down to a science. So despite all the transfers, the trip across Santa Cruz to our villa was relatively relaxing. Our taxi driver (all the taxis on Santa Cruz are shiny new pickup trucks) was a very friendly and helpful guy, and he arranged all our packs in the bed of the pickup as we climbed in. The road across Santa Cruz was miles of arrow-straight blacktop, and we marveled at the scenery as we sped down the highway. The surrounding land was covered with scrub brush and cactus, and beyond the turquoise Pacific sparkled in the sun. Other islands appeared to float on the horizon, rising up out of the sea like giant, mossy turtles.
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Our driver pulled into Puerto Ayora, the center of activity on Santa Cruz, and dropped us off at the town pier. Out on the pier we flagged down a yellow water taxi and after talking a bit with the driver in Spanish we hopped in.
To drop us off on the peninsula other side of the little harbor was 50 cents per person, and to take us all the way to Furio’s villa on the other side of the peninsula was $5 per person. We didn’t yet know how long the walk was from the first stop to Furio’s, so we elected to pay the $15 and have the taxi drop us off at Furio’s dock. The shorter the distance we had to lug our packs, the better.
The taxi wound its way through the harbor past dozens of ferries and tour boats (actually repurposed sportfishing vessels) and small Galapagos cruise ships. Other taxis shuttled back and forth across the harbor, dropping locals on the ferries and cruise ships as they went. Our driver pulled up to the pier across the harbor, right in front of the chic-looking Angermeyer Waterfront Inn, and several people handed him a few coins, hopped out, and scaled the rough-hewn stone steps to the sandy path through the brush.
Then the driver pointed the boat toward open water. The swells were large for the little boat, around 5-6′, and the breeze felt refreshing after so much time in the equatorial sun. Soon we spotted Furio’s villa in the distance, a boxy three-story concrete building with circular windows at the top and an expansive pool out front. The Swansons waved to us wildly and we waved back, and as we drew closer the kids ran down the dock to greet us.
We paid the driver, hopped out with our bags, and took a tour of the house. The large pool out front overlooked a little bay, and between the pool and the house was a wooden walkway that crossed a large patch of sand. The house itself was old and in need of some love, and there was clutter everywhere, particularly in the kitchen, where it took a good five minutes of going through dozens of drawers just to find a spoon.
There was also a “Surprise Dog” that lived on the property, Toronado, a large but friendly mixed-breed. We called him a “Surprise Dog” because the description of the villa on AirBnB said nothing about a dog on the property. Surprise!
He was sweet, though, and good with the kids. It quickly became clear, though, that he had staked out the sand next to the pool as his toilet, and at times the terrace smelled strongly of dog piss. Surprise!
It was late afternoon by the time we got situated, so we had some lunch, a few cocktails, and started talking strategy for the next day. We were only in Santa Cruz for four nights, during which time we were doing two day tours and had one full day to do anything/something/absolutely nothing. We elected to play the next morning by ear: if we felt good we could check out some sights. If we were tired we could have a lazy day and let the kids play in the pool while we relaxed.
We spent the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening catching up. Braeden was delighted to play with three other kids around his age, and the four of them splashed around in the pool for hours.
Los Gemelos, El Chato, and a Side Trip to the Hospital
The next day started off with a relaxing breakfast followed by some playtime in the pool for the kids. They also spent a bit of time admiring the large marine iguanas that were hanging out near our gate, and gawking at the hundreds of brilliantly-colored Sally Lightfoot crabs crawling around on the dock.
We still had a balance with Yate Espanola, a local tour company, that we had to settle prior to our upcoming day trip to Bartolome. The Yate Espanola folks were very friendly but they didn’t seem particularly anxious to take our money because they didn’t accept credit cards or PayPal, only a bank transfer or cash. Initiating a bank transfer from a U.S. bank to an overseas institution turned out to be a big hairy hassle, so we resorted to paying in cash. This meant that we had to withdraw the cash that day in order to settle up for our tour the following day.
[Side note: We rarely carry much cash, as most places we’ve been either accept credit cards or have ATMs readily available. The Galapagos is not one of those places, so we planned ahead and brought about $1400 in cash with us to the islands, which is about $1350 more than I feel comfortable carrying around in my backpack.]
After breakfast we decided to fill our day packs with water and sunblock and head into town. I planned to strike out on my own to find a few ATMs from which I would wrangle as much cash as I could, then we would grab a couple of taxis to take us first to the offices of Yacht Espanola to pay our tab, then to see Los Gemelos and El Chato, two sights on Santa Cruz.
The water taxi dropped our eager crew of 8 at the dock in Puerto Ayora, and I jogged off in search of ATMs while everyone else grabbed a snack and had a look around town.
The biggest village on Santa Cruz, Puerto Ayora was busier and more developed than I expected. Avenue Charles Darwin, the main thoroughfare, was jammed with the well-kept facades of tour companies, souvenir shops, bars, restaurants, jewelry stores, ice-cream shops, and more. The avenue wound through the waterfront past the town pier, the center of activity in Puerto Ayora.
Tourists passing through Santa Cruz on the way to other islands disembarked and shuffled off down Avenue Charles Darwin in search of a postcard or a souvenir. Locals with crates full of goods deftly maneuvered through the crowds to load their wares onto water taxis. Tour guides shepherded large groups of bewildered-looking gringos in wide-brimmed hats caked with layers of sunblock onto boats for day tours. Sea lions dozed languidly on benches. Portly, ruffled pelicans perched on the pier railings, their eyes focused on the water below while tourists took gleeful selfies from just a few feet away.
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It was only late morning but the day was already extremely hot, and I was damp with sweat as I walked up Avenue Baltra away from the waterfront, towards the ATM Google Maps had assured me was there. I found it and made a $300 withdrawal. Then another. The machine politely rejected me on my third attempt and informed me that I had reached my daily limit.
I headed back towards the waterfront and found our little tribe in the shade of a tour operator’s awning across from the town pier, munching on freshly made croissants from the Proinsular supermarket. David and I made a few more withdrawals from a bank machine right next to the supermarket, we lined up the kids to use the public bathroom (20 cents per person, which included a couple of squares of TP) then hiked across the street to the taxi stand. The first driver we found spoke very little English but was helpful and friendly, and he quoted us $50 per taxi for a 2-3 hour visit to both Los Gemelos and El Chato. The rate fit what we were expecting, so we hopped in one taxi and Caiden joined us, the Swansons grabbed another and we were off.
We made a quick stop at the Yate Espanola office to fork over a huge wad of cash to settle our balance for our upcoming tour. Vanessa, the woman with whom I had been corresponding with via email for weeks, scribbled a receipt on a battered piece of paper and gave me some instructions for meeting our van on Saturday morning. Then I hopped back in our taxi and our little caravan was off.
Los Gemelos (“The Twins”) are a pair of sinkholes in the middle of Santa Cruz, and though we knew we weren’t going to be blown away by a couple of oversized craters, a short visit and a hike was a perfect diversion for the day. Our drivers turned into the dusty little parking lot at Los Gemelos and pointed out the weathered wooden sign, which sported a hand-painted trail map. We shrugged on our day packs, slathered a last-minute layer of sunblock on the kids, and marched off down the grassy path.
The sinkholes were on either side of the highway and pretty large, roughly 200 meters across and 100 meters deep. We didn’t have to walk far to reach them, and after only a few minutes we were peering over a rickety fence into the depths of the first. The sides were steep and were covered with vegetation, as was the crater floor, where trees had rooted long ago and stretched skyward. We spent a few minutes admiring the view, snapping pictures and letting the kids climb up on the fence for a better look. Then we trotted off down the path, which ran along the crater’s edge, until the fence ended and there was nothing between us and the abyss but a few feet of earth. We carefully stayed between the kids and the edge and continued walking until the trail turned away from the sinkhole and into the brush, back towards the road.
We reached the road, which by now was shimmering in the heat, and crossed it to follow the path back into the brush. The second sinkhole was less than 50 meters down the trail, and it looked much like the first.
After a few minutes we followed the path back to the parking lot where our drivers were waiting for us. We climbed into the air-conditioned taxis (we discovered later that the Swansons’s taxi did not have A/C, nor did it have seatbelts in the back seat, so it’s more accurate to say “climbed back into our air-conditioned taxi“) and drove the short distance to El Chato Reserve, a park where giant Galapagos tortoises roamed.
When we arrived Juliann and I learned that poor Violet had just started screaming in pain in the other taxi. David and Tanya carried the wailing little girl to the shade of the welcome center with worried looks on their faces.
The welcome area had a little restaurant, picnic tables, a bar, and three large, empty tortoise shells. Caiden, Addison, and Braeden gleefully started climbing all over the shells while Tanya and David tried to figure out what was wrong with Violet. She was sobbing that her tummy hurt and Tanya laid her down on a bench to examine her belly. A nearby tourist stepped forward and offered her help, introducing herself as a doctor. Tanya gratefully stepped aside and the doctor had a quick look at Vi, then told us that the pain might subside if the little girl used the bathroom, but even if it did we might want to get some images at the hospital to make absolutely sure nothing was wrong.
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Tanya took Vi into the restroom while Caiden, Addison, and Braeden hammed it up on the tortoise shells. Minutes later Violet came bouncing out of the bathroom, Tanya close behind her. The beaming little girl proclaimed loudly, “I peed and now I feel better!”
This sent the other kids into gales of laughter, and Violet sprinted off to clamber up a tortoise shell. Tanya and David decided to continue the tour of the reserve, and agreed that when we got back to town we would stop at the hospital to see if they could get some images of Violet’s tummy.
We finished taking pictures of the kids goofing around the tortoise shells and struck out to see the reserve. Narrow paths cut through the tall, dry grass, and trees with thick blankets of greenery dotted the landscape, offering plenty of cooling shade.
The kids made a game out of finding the tortoises, which despite their size were a little hard to see in the mottled shade of the trees. The general rule in the Galapagos is to stay six feet away from the animals at all times, so the kids would get as close as they could to each tortoise until we yelled out “six feet!”, and they would stop with a giggle, and then stare in wide-eyed wonder at the ancient reptile.
The tortoises paid us little attention, turning their leathery heads to examine us critically for a moment or two before returning to napping or eating.
One pair of tortoises were engaged in some loud “Tortoise Love”, and the kids watched in fascination as the two clumsy reptiles fumbled about and made loud, awkward noises. We moved on.
The kids counted ten tortoises in all, and we circled the parched grounds in less than an hour. We finished up our visit by checking out the lava tunnels, underground formations created by streams of lava cooling on the outside while hot lava still flowed inside. A hand painted “TUNELES” sign at the end of a path pointed down a flight of creaky wooden steps, and we descended into the cool cavern. Another sign just inside politely asked visitors to keep their voices down, as an owl who lived in the tunnels spooked easily. Keep 4 hot, excited kids quiet in an underground tunnel system? No problemo.
The tunnels weren’t all that impressive, but the kids found them creepy and thrilling, and we enjoyed ourselves. Eerie electric lights were strung on the ceilings, and we crept along with the kids in the lead. It only took twenty minutes to walk the full course of the tunnels and we emerged again, a bit cooler and ready to get back into our taxis and head to town.
Back in Puerto Ayora we paid our taxi drivers and thanked them, then crossed the street to the hospital, a dingy, low-slung concrete building. Tanya and David took Violet inside while Juliann and I hung out on a bench on the sidewalk with the three older children. They emerged less than thirty minutes later with a scrap of paper in hand and puzzled looks on their faces.
The doctor had assured them there was no need for an image, and that the culprit was most likely a UTI, for which he prescribed antibiotics. He had scribbled the prescription on a piece of battered scrap paper, which Tanya now examined skeptically.
By this point we were all hungry, and we set off for a deli around the corner that Juliann and I had found on TripAdvisor. The deli was thankfully close, and in less than 10 minutes we were seated at two comfortable tables in the cool dining room, the adults at one table, the kids at another.
The deli served up delicious pizzas and sandwiches, which we dug into gratefully and washed down with cold Pilseners. At the end of the meal the kids ordered ice cream at the counter and sat at the front of the restaurant to eat their treats and watch the pedestrian traffic of the Galapagos flow by.
We settled our check, wiped ice cream from satisfied, sticky faces, and walked back to the town pier, where the kids tried to get as close as they could to the sea lions lounging on wooden plank benches while we hailed a water taxi.
We spent the rest of the day cooling off in the pool, making dinner in the worn and cluttered kitchen, and enjoying a few too many rum drinks after the kids were tucked into bed. We turned in early because the next day we had a sunrise start scheduled for our first island tour:
Santa Fe!