Eva and Les

This was a fantastic 8 day boat cruise on a luxury class motor catamaran that has a maximum of 16 passengers, and about 10 crew. We arrived on board at about 12:45am, along with an English couple, Jan and John, who had been travelling about 4 months – others would join us later. We knew the boat would be a hit with Eva, when we were told that we’d have to take our shoes off before going to the inside areas! The boat really was fantastic, and I’d recommend Galasam and the Queen of Galapagos to anyone. There were 3 decks with chairs and shade on 2 of them, as well as an air-conditioned lounge and dining area. Our cabin was HUGE, about 3.5m square, with two beds, two small tables and a full length and width opening tinted window by the side of Eva’s bed. It had an additional large ensuite with a bath that had full length/width window, so that when you had a shower, you just looked out to sea! It was ...

Puerto Ayora, Galapagos Day 1 We had to get up at 4:45am in Quito in order to get to our flight to Galapagos Islands, which is about 1300km east of Quito and is part of Ecuador. Quito was quite cold (around 10 degrees C), despite it being pretty well on the equator, its height of nearly 3000m and cloudy/rainy conditions when we were there, made it quite cold. We had to fly via Guayaquil, an hour’s flight south, where we had to stay in the plane for an hour while they tested the cold cycle on the aircon. Not fun, even if it WAS April Fool’s Day! About an hour later, we landed at Baltra, which is a small island just to the north of the island of Santa Cruz. Our hotel was on the south side of Santa Cruz, some 42km away. We could not find anyone who spoke English, and I was happy to use Spanish to find out that we had to pile into free busses that took us to where there were flat-topped boats waiting to take us over the short stretch of water to then get a bus or taxi...