...well, when you add in all the additional 'real-world' costs on a week-long Galapagos liveaboard trip, I can easily see (for the average North American diver) the entire tab running in the $ 7000 - $ 8000 range, divided into 15 dives comes to $ 500 per dive!
...and now that you mention you got unlucky about the water temps and had a 'substandard' trip experience as a result, would it have made better sense to blow $ 8000 on maybe (4) separate $ 2000 trips or (3) $ 2500 trips and reduce your risk exposure to unfortunate/substandard dive conditions ? Blowing $ 8000 on only 5 days of diving is just WAY too risky in my book...just sayin'.
Do you know of anywhere else you can swim through a couple hundred hammerheads to chase a 50+ foot long whale shark? And then there are giant mantas, Galapagos Sharks, Silky sharks, dolphins, sometimes Orcas, penguins, enormous free swimming morays, huge schools of jack thick enough to blind you to whale sharks, schools of tropicals, so many sea lions and turtles you forget they count...and that's a couple of days. Throw in some of the western sites once again on itineraries and add mola molas to the mix, steaming volcanic vents under the water, flightless cormorants diving and, well, that is what ends up making it worth the price and trouble. It's not just good diving, it's incredible diving. How can any diver not want to go there?
You might say I'm not objective and you would be absolutely correct. Unlike others, we don't sell the world...we only sell Galapagos. Why? No place else on earth anything like it. People go back and back to some places because they're cheap. I doubt there's anyone who has dived the Galapagos who wouldn't love to go back, and many do, and not because it's cheap. Oh, and the topside's not too shabby either.
And ps...those numbers are inflated. You can do it for $5500 including flights, hotels on the mainland, etc. Look for specials and it can cost even less. So then you're talking closer to $325 per dive. You could go dive in the Atlanta Aquarium with a whale shark. That's $300. I hear it's 40 feet deep. Seems so sad to have a whale shark kept in such a confined space. But I digress...
Look, I'm the first to help people find the best deals there are and yes, even the best deals equal expensive relative to other destinations. But I can't see going more often to somewhere less desirable trumps the experience you carry with you for the rest of your life. Kinda like saying wouldn't you rather have four 1980 Ford Escorts than one 2011 Audi Q5 isn't it?
