Galápagos Islands



This fall, when we were planning a winter trip, we decided to visit the Galápagos Islands, in Ecuador, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The islands, located about 600 miles off the west coast of Ecuador, are home to many unique species of flora and fauna (invertebrates, reptiles, and birds).

Our travel itinerary begins at the Burlington, Vermont airport, (BTV) on JetBlue.  We fly to JFK (NY City) and transfer to LAN airlines and fly to Guayaquil, Ecuador (GYE). There, we board a small plane for a two hour ride to the Galápagos Islands arriving at the San Cristobal airport (GPS).  We leave at 1:00 PM on Saturday, January 19 and arrive on San Cristobal Island on Sunday, January 20 around noon. This is a 24 hour trip.

We are taking a land based tour which means that once we are in the islands we will make our own arrangements to visit the various places on the islands. The islands are a National Park and are tightly controlled by the park service. There are only a few places that we can travel to by ourselves. We will either hire private guides or join tours to explore the different visitor sites.

We will be staying on the three major islands, San Cristobal Island, Isabela Island and Santa Cruz Island.  We are traveling between the islands by public boat transportation.  We will arrange boat tours to the outer islands once we are in the Galápagos Islands.

We are planning to blog daily about our journey. However, there will be places where we will not have Internet access.  We will post our daily entries when we have Internet access.