It took us an hour and a half to fly the 750 miles over the Pacific into Isla Baltra, one of the smaller of the dozen islands that comprise the Galapagos. I was expecting a flush of tropical green but this was like landing on Mars. The Galapagos, at least near the airport, is a moonscape with a thin coating of prickly grey frosting. A desert speckled with cacti, surrounded by ocean.
After you land, pass customs, pay a ransom to enter and pick up your luggage you take a bus to the "channel", which is what they call the small break in the reef between Isla Baltra and Isla Santa Cruz. You then hop on a boat that crawls across the channel at 2 miles an hour, zig-zagging around shallow reefs. It was cool - about 70, but the sun was very strong. We'd arranged for a taxi to pick us up for the final leg - a 45 minute drive, up and over the peak of Santa Cruz to the town of Puerta Ayora on the southern coast. At the highest point of our 45 minute drive, the familiar Ecuadorian Andean mainland returned - pastureland, green fields. It was misty and sprinkling and then we descended back into the desert.
We checked into our AirBnB and asked the landlord, a transplant from Vancouver, how to get to the beach. "Oh, we are absolutely the closest house to the beach, just walk one and a half miles that way" he said pointing out the window. We turned the corner outside our house and headed to the beach path. The strange white building is the Center for Sustainable Living, which has exhibits on how to live carbon neutral.
There was another small house prior to the beginning of the path.
The path itself was such a strange landscape. A hilly, narrow walkway that weaved through a silver forest of scrub, cacti and trees.
The trees looked ossified, like they'd been preserved.
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