Galapagos Tour

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Iain-le-roi

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Messages
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Location
Manchester
# of dives
50 - 99
Hi everyone

I am thinking of booking a trip to Galapagos and would like to combine diving and sight seeing. Is there a LAB trip that does them both i.e visits the dive sights and also combines this with the popular above the land tours or would I need to do them seperately?

Thanks for any advice...

Iain-le-roi
 
Hi Ian - if you are doing a liveaboard to Galapagos then you really want to be on a boat going to Darwin + Wolf, which offer some of the most exciting diving in the islands - quite possibly the world. There are currentlky 7 boats that offer a 7 night itinerary to these northern islands, which combine with 3-4 land visits to islands in the south - Deep Blue, Lammer Law, Sky Dancer (now called Galapasgo Sky), the 2 Galapagos Aggressors, Estrella Del Mar and the new Humboldt Explorer. The latter two optioms may not have permits for land trips - I would need to check that. There is a lovely 85ft sail boat the Nautilus that conducts dive trips in ther southern islands combined with island stays and includes several land trips. Price varies alot and does not necesarily denote quality but you can check out all boats and availability on DIVE ADVICE TRAVEL - Welcome to Dive Advice Travel or send me an e-mail offline to check latest availability and any last minute spoecial deals. Just had a client come back who e-mailed me from Guayaquil and sent me images of 100ft viz at Darwin + Wolf with whalesharks, schooling hammerheads, eagle and marble rays, schools of barracuda + jacks. Simply sensational. Whale shark season is normally June thru November but it appears they were pretty lucky last week. You can also combine a week dive cruise with a 7 night naturalist cruise and we help coordinate which cruise works best with the dates. I am a great supporter of Andando Tours, who have a fleet of beautiful vessels and offer some of the best itineraries and rates for their naturalist cruises. Happy to advise you offline - my e-mail dom@ diveadvice . com Cheers
 
On our site, we do have a Galapagos Live-Aboard Comparison Chart which shows you how many land visits by boat, how many dives at Darwin/Wolf, prices, etc with a link to more information on each boat such as their itinerary and a photo gallery. The Estrella del Mar and Humboldt Explorer do not offer the land visits that the Aggressors, Deep Blue and Galapagos Sky offer. They do offer a final afternoon visit to the Santa Cruz Highlands to see tortoises as well as a visit to the Darwin Station. We have not added LammerLaw to the chart, but will once she is in the water.

Only live-aboards dive Wolf and Darwin. Some Naturalist cruises do offer the option of a day or two of diving, however, you will miss whatever other activity was scheduled for the cruise that day and you will pay extra for the diving. The dives are handled by local dive operators, so basically a speed boat collects you from your cruise, takes you diving and returns you to the cruise in the afternoon.

So your options are basically to a) focus on diving and get in a couple of land visits, b) focus on land visits and get in a couple of days of diving; c) do back to back cruises for the epitome of both diving and land visit experiences d) choose one type of cruise or the other and supplement it with land-based diving or land-based land visits.

Several do offer dive programs from one island, especially from Santa Cruz. Nautidiving, Silberstein, etc. We first developed the concept of island hopping dive tours which now others have copied. Our summer charters are mostly full this year and the rules are currently changing yet again with both the live-aboards and land-based operators. Island hopping without diving is fairly well developed in the Galapagos, but don't necessarily always visit the best sites there are to visit.

If your focus ends up being a Naturalist Cruise and you opt to get in a few days of diving before or after your cruise: a) Santa Cruz does offer the best land-based diving. b) Notify your cruise company in plenty of time as they often don't want to provide non-day of departure/return flights. c) Consider going in for diving before your cruise so you don't lose that last day due to mandatory surface interval before flight d) Best to dive from where your cruise departs. They depart from both Baltra and San Cristobal. You would need to make plans to get from one island to the other otherwise, which can be a bit tricky and cause you to lose a day in transit sometimes.
 
My choice is definately a) to focus on diving and get in a couple of land visits. Does anyone know which land visits you do as part of the LAB dive trips?

Basiacally I am trying to weigh up if I need to do an additional trip as well as the diving to see the land based highlights or whether the visits you do as part of the LAB cover the "must see" Galapagos "dry" sights?

Cheers, Iain
 
Hi Iain - all the liveboards offer slightly different itineraries with different land visits and as Dive Galapagos mentioned above, two of the boats do not currently have permits for island visits within the national park. Please note that Santa Cruz where you find the giant tortoises in the highlands, and Isabela where you also find tortoises and lots more, are not strictly in the park, so you can visit there without permits. In the perfect world, the best way to explore Galapagos is for two weeks with one week on a dive liveaboard and the 2nd week on a naturalist cruise with a good land itinerary. You can't possibly do everything in a 7 night trip, though they do a pretty good job at offering the best they can. Anywhere inbetween is a compromise - Dive the Galapagos offer you a wealth of info on their website, as we do on ours, so in the end it is about seeing how much time you have, and your budget. Personally I have found that Andando Tours offer some of the best naturalist trips with great itineraries, fine boats and superb guides. If you want to do it all in one go, then spend two weeks - its already cost you alot in flights, park fees, etc to get there so look at it as added value to stay a 2nd week !
 
I would say no, LABs do not cover the land based highlights, but rather offer only 2 visits on their itineraries. Yes, Bartolome is a highlight, an iconic site that it is the most photographed site in the Galapagos (from atop). A huge highlight for someone who is not traveling out to Isabela is snorkeling Bartolome with penguins. N. Seymour is great for nesting blue-footed boobies and frigates as well as land iguanas. All boats visit either the Darwin Station (Santa Cruz) or the Interpretation Center (San Cristobal). These are open for anyone to visit as Dom pointed out.

The non-dive visits at National Park sites are:

Aggressors: N. Seymour and Bartolome.
Deep Blue: N. Seymour and Sullivan Bay. Bartolome snorkel.
Galapagos Sky: Bartolome land visit/snorkel and Santiago.

Wikipedia does a fairly decent job of describing the various visits in Galapagos.

An option I would highly recommend if you don't want to do two cruises is to go diving on a live-aboard and then head over to Isla Isabela for a few days.

Isabela is such a beautiful, sleepy fishing village that has sandy streets, crooked tree trunk light posts, 2 resident diving soon-to-be-if-not-already legends (Mathias Espinosa and Pierre Constant) and there's even great food. The water is stunning and you usually see penguins upon arrival. You get get there by public boat or small plane.

Sometimes near the town pier, you can watch maybe 500 blue footed boobies doing their kamikaze dive bomb feeding. Take a trip down to Los Tuneles which is such an amazing, amazing place. It's a labyrinth of lava arches inside the breakers with crystal clear water full of huge sea turtles, eagle rays, sea lions, fish, white tipped reef sharks and more. Turtles have developed something of a highway through there. You can stand on an arch (with 2 active volcanoes in the background) and watch them pass each other on the way from the mangroves to the open sea as if on an interstate with lanes clearly designated. Land before time visits and posing with penguins for photos if you wish. Los Tuneles is also a blue footed booby nesting ground. We always spot mantas just before entering and almost always get to snorkel with them. Last Nov, we had 9 males chasing 1 female. We left them after 30 minutes, but not before I got clipped. Though I am a strong advocate against touching any marine life, they were almost always close enough to touch.

You can also trek Sierra Negra Volcano and if you do, I would highly recommend taking the extra jaunt over to Volcan Chico, a parasitic cone as opposed to separate volcano, where the vistas are magnificent to the sea and the landscape is usually best described as a lunarscape. Stunning site where you can see steam escaping from fumeroles and feel the heat of the lava beneath you...truly other wordly. Sierra Negra has the second largest caldera of an active volcano on the planet.

There's a fantastic campground half way up the slopes of Sierra Negra that is perfect for lunch after a trek. They have to be notified in advance, but everything they serve is from organic fruit and vegetable gardens on the stunning premises. They bake chicken and bread in outdoor lava rock ovens over fire. They are also a half way house for young tortoises after the Isabela breeding center and before being released back into the wild. Between Sierra Negra and Campo Duro, makes for a wonderful day in the highlands.

There's great snorkeling on your own from Isabela, including turtle cleaning stations where I've seen them on their hind legs like a dog begging to give the cleaner fish better access. The Breeding Center for tortoises is fascinating as Isabela has more species of tortoises than other islands due to AA lava fields they could not cross as well as the only flat back tortoises in the islands...some of which now live at the Breeding Center after being rescued from Cerro Azul's last eruption and bear the scars on their shells.

In addition to everything else, there's a 3 kilometer long white powdery sand beach, most of which is inside the National Park, therefore mostly empty and pristine. Marine iguanas nest through there. At places, you can snorkel and watch them feeding underwater. And always, turtles and sea lions.

Sorry to go on, but I absolutely love Isabela. I've gone with clients directly from a live-aboard to Isabela. I remember one marine biologist said he expected to be disappointed in Los Tuneles as I raved a little too much, but was surprised that instead, he was "in awe". Another LAB client of mine (Brit living in Belgium) said he didn't know which he liked best...diving Darwin and Wolf or our extension to Isabela. He finally concluded, "Let's put it this way...it would have been a travesty to have missed this."

Hotels over there begin too cheap to recommend and go up to about $400 per night. There are a couple in the $50-$60 pp per night range that are excellent and on the beach. Tours to Los Tuneles or Sierra Negra range from $60-$150 pp. You can get in more diving while there if you wish.

So unless you are an avid bird watcher, a LAB with an Isabela extension is as good as it gets if you are not doing back to back cruises, one live-aboard and one Naturalist cruise.
 
You can get to Isabela by ferry from Santa Cruz, or by a puddle jumper local flight from Baltar or San Cristobal. Be aware the local flights have very limited bagagge allowance.
 

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