Bridges Galapagos tour.
First, a caution for Grandparent/grandparents traveling with a younger grandchild without the parents….do be sure that your grandchild is comfortable traveling without their parents….on the first day of our tour, a grandmother and nine year old decided to go home the next day, the child was missing his mom too much so the grandmother decided to take him home. He was shy, but that evening he was running around with our nine year old grandson and appeared to be settling. Too late, flights had been arranged, we were still in Quito, they did not even get to see the Galápagos Islands. That’s about $15,000 down the drain.
That left 35 people on the tour of a possible 40. The ship, Santa Cruz ll has a capacity of 90. More on that later.
My husband and I had been to the islands twice before with Tauck in about 2008 and 2018 on the Isabela ll. We loved it, so it seemed a good choice for our third Bridges Adventure to follow up after our African safari adventure two years ago.
It was a first time in Quito for us, the Isabela ll tour begins in Guayaquil.
Quito is at 9,200 ft. Our twelve year old granddaughter was immediately affected by headaches and did not feel well until we left Quito. I felt weird, my son in law was also affected. I had been most concerned about my husband because he had not coped once before, but he was fine.
We did not realize that to get to the islands, we first had to fly to Guayaquil, which meant we had to have our bags ready at 5am. We landed in Guayaquil, stayed on the plane and then continue on to Baltra. I question why this tour did not begin in Guayaquil, which is where our previous tours began, it would have saved that very early wake-up time.
We arrived a day early, flights generally arrive very late at night, the drive into the city takes almost an hour, so we did not get to our hotel until around 1-15am. The next day, our family took the funicular ride to the top of the mountain, we took in a local museum and walked around the area of the hotel and took in the local market.
The next day, we were taken to the outdoor Equator museum which was interesting and fun with some experiments for the children. Then on to the UNESCO colonial city which we really enjoyed. It was very very crowded all over. We walked around entering a particularly ornate church amongst other sites
