Jeanette and Pat go to South America

After arriving at Baltra airport and paying our tax of $100US each we met our guide and the 11 other passengers that would be joining us for the next week.

We were a mixed lot, ranging in both age and nationality (and personality). There was Manfried and Traute, a retired couple from Hamburg, Germany, who had just finished a cruise of the Antarctic; Barb and Rosemary, also retired, from Atlanta Georgia (we have discovered that people from the US always give there town and state, rather than country when introducing themselves); Barb´s daughter Kristen and her friend Sarah, two primary school teachers currently living in Santiago Chile; Marcus, a young doctor from Sweden, Mike a (Canadian) pilot with Air Canada, and his wife Suzanne a wedding photographer; and Tris and Jasna, two Brits living in Buenos Aires. Our guide was Fausto, a delightful, upbeat, friendly Ecuadorian who has been a guide for about 15 years. We had five crew, Isaac our captain, Juan, first mate (and dinghy driver), Freddy the cook, Wilmer the steward and Manuel the engineer.

We headed off to our boat, and home for the next week. The M/Y (motor yacht) Samba was all we had imagined it would be, or better. There were 7 guest cabins, each with a decent toilet and shower (not those temperamental heads that we have been used to on boats we have chartered). The Samba is 40 years old, and "Tourist Superior" class - we decided that we didn´t require anything more than that. The airconditioning in the cabins was apparently a problem for some of the guests, but for us it was perfect.

Amazingly the Samba runs tours weekly from Tuesday to Tuesday without a break. We got on the boat at around 12 o´clock, only about 4 hours after the last guests had left. The crew also work for between 4 - 6 weeks before getting time off.

The Galapagos is a very controlled environment, so all our visits were together as a group. You aren´t allowed to go anywhere without your guide. While this is a little constrained, it is the only way they can preserve the unique environment while still allowing people to visit and enjoy the wildlife.

Every excursion starts with donning a life jacket and all 13 of us plus Fausto plus Juan, getting onto the dinghy for either a "wet" or "dry" landing. A wet landing just means getting off at the beach and wading in to shore, while a dry landing involves wearing your shoes and landing usually on rocks. Typically our visits were 2 - 3 hours, and we usually had something like 2 visits and a snorkel each day.

Most nights the boat motored to our next destination while we relaxed or slept. We were surprised at how big the Galapagos islands are - we motored for from 4 to 12 hours per day at 9 knots. We were also surprised by how barren the volcanic islands are, although this varied from island to island.

Our first highlight was our first landing, where we had to wait for the sealions to move before we could land, and we nearly stepped on the hundreds of marine iguanas who simply basked in the sun and totally ignored us. This was to become our daily experience. If you like lizards, Galapagos is the place to go. The sealions were all in families - and it is baby season, so there were many many inquisitive baby sealions who wanted to check us out (the bull of each family was always on the prowl though so we had to be careful).

Some of the animals we saw on land were giant tortoises, sealions, land and marine iguanas, blue'footed boobies, flamingos, Nasca boobies (and their babies), flightless cormorants, albatrosses (huge), crabs, fur seals, pelicans, penguins and gazillions of finches. Each day we would be introduced to different species, as many of them are unique to only one island, but the iguanas and sealions were ubiquitous.

Another highlight was snorkelling. We went for one or two snorkels each day, and the first surprise is these equatorial waters are COLD! Apparently it is to do with the Humboldt current, and the coldness increases the diversity of the sealife. If anything there was more diversity of life under the water, and our snorkelling (despite the cold) was definitely a high point. Some days we snorkelled with sealions, others with turtles (watch your t-shirt or it might get nibbled), sharks (not great whites, but big enough to startle us), penguins (nowhere else in the world can you snorkel with penguins - its a bit cold in the Antarctic), stingrays (so graceful), and multitudes of different, multicoloured fish.

One day we were "whale watching" (tourist speak for motoring on the Samba) and we actually spotted a whale! It was an Orca and came very close to the boat - we are hoping that Suzanne´s photography skills captured the moment.

Our food on the Samba was tasty and plentiful. A big surprise was on the last night when we had a celebration cake. Coincidentally it was Pat´s birthday, which he admitted when Fausto was trying to find out who had the next birthday!!! Another great moment was crossing the equator (although the promised equator cocktail failed to materialise, and it was a little hard to spot the white line).

Mostly the Galapagos is not inhabited by humans, but there is one town - Puerto Aroya, with 17000 people, and a couple of small villages. We learnt the history of the inhabitants - some of whom have very colourful stories.

The week came to an end very quickly, and Tuesday rolled around again. We would highly recommend the Samba. It had a great itinerary (and we discovered that a number of the other boats don´t even go to the Western Islands for example) and it was a true tour of the Galapagos Islands.