Photo Link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/BdZq4NBUHrvaCwks7
My parents and sister’s flight back to JFK was only <2 hours after my flight to Ecuador, so we left to the Lima airport together. We bid farewell (I’ll be seeing them end of July when I go back home for grad school apps/seeing friends/Burning Man…I swear I have seen them far more often since I quit my job than before when I was in Chicago), and then I hopped off to Quito. Went back to a decent elevation – 2800m – so I took it easy the first night and just went to bed early. The next day, I did a free walking tour that was offered by my hostel – only the 2nd time I have ever done so since quitting to travel, after Sarajevo. And like Sarajevo, the walking tour was awesome. While Quito is nowhere near as cool as Sarajevo was (Quito is honestly “just another” Spanish colonial city), I once again made some cool friends on this tour. Though a part of me thinks that the reason it was so easy (even by backpacking standards) to make friends in Ecuador is because it is somewhat off the gringo trail of South America (backpackers usually rush through it between Colombia and Peru), so the people who are here are really into outdoor stuff, which Ecuador is awesome for.
So anyways, met some cool people, got drunk that night at the hostel bar with them. The next day, while hungover, me and 3 others did what was for me an acclimitization hike for Chimborazo, and what was for them a more strenuous hike, up the volcano Pichincha. We took a cable car up to 4100m, where there were fantastic views of Quito, before hiking 5km and 700m up to 4800m. Even in my hungover state, I found this hike to be very easy and straightforward, especially since I went at a much slower pace than usual to help out the other 3. However, because of our slightly slower pace and our later start, quite literally as soon as we reached the peak, it started heavily hailing. It was SO much fun going down the steep descent, sliding down the sand with hail pelting us and making the path more precarious. Once we got past this short, steep section, it was then a long and steady slog back to the starting point. The path was nice and muddy from the hailstorm, but the fun really started when the lightning strikes began. We were walking along the top of a ridge, so were exposed for the entire ~90+ minutes it took to finish this part of the hike, while getting more and more drenched as the hail transformed to rain with the decrease in elevation. Not gonna lie, I was actually genuinely scared for what might have been the first time in my life when a lightning strike hit like 20 meters ahead of us on the hiking trail itself. We sort of sprinted as much as we could down this ridge (which was not much, given the increasingly muddy conditions), before finally making it to the starting point where we took refuge in a hut and dried off our drenched clothes for a bit. The adrenaline rush during that final stretch with the lightning was honestly unbelievable, and I was actually grinning like an idiot the entire time. Even though the other three were slightly more traumatized by me, they also found the experience incredible in hindsight, when we comisserated over drinks that night. It was like a way, way more hardcore version of when Steve and I hiked down Mount Olympus in the pitch black, using my phone as a flashlight.
After that incredibly memorable hike, I spent the next 3 nights and 2 days in Cotopaxi National Park. I stayed at a lodge called Secret Garden Cotopaxi, which had a great 95 USD deal (Ecuador’s official currency is actually the US dollar – so unlike Cambodia, where they mix dollars and local currency, here it is only dollars) where it included 3 nights, all meals, unlimited water and fruits, and 2 hikes, so I only paid an extra 30 bucks for a horse riding day. Once we got to Cotopaxi, we did one of the 2 free hikes, which was a waterfall hike. The lodge itself was located at about 3500m – same as Cusco, and great for acclimitization. The waterfall hike was up to like 3700m, and we did this in those giant rainboot/hiking boots that they provided. While the pictures just look eh and it even sounded eh going in, this was honestly such a fun hike. There were countless river crossings that were shin deep (my socks got drenched despite these sturdy boots), we were scaling rock cliffs numerous times where a drop would probably lead to paralysis, and it was just such an adventurous hike that never one felt dangerous because of the guides that were with us. Absolutely one of the more unique hikes I have ever done.
Even moreso than in Quito, the people at this lodge were really cool. You had the usual large contingent of Israelis that you always see in South America (Israelis are BY FAR the single biggest nationality of traveller in Latin America, due to the gap year they get between their military service and university, with military service having paid them while they had little to no living expenses), and beyond that just a ton of cool Europeans and the odd American who were all super interested in outdoor activities, which for me just made them a more interesting group. And becuase Ecuador is a more outdoor oriented destination (as opposed to urban/partying), the average age skewed a bit older and I was right around the median, despite my ripe old age of 29. But anyways, hung out with a bunch of cool Dutch and English people with one Italian and one other American that first night, got drunk off 15 USD Argentinian Malbec bottles, and then woke up early the next morning for another acclimitzation hike, up the volcano Pasochoa. That morning, we were treated to an unbelievable view of the Cotopaxi volcano (a smidge taller than Kilimanjaro!), as in Ecuador, the pattern seemed to be clear mornings followed by foggy and cloudy afternoons with the occassional thunderstorm then. We had to wear those rain/hiking boots again because the path was incredibly muddy, and while this was supposed to be an easier hike than Pichincha, I found it more difficult due to the obnoxiously muddy conditions. It was quite literally two steps up and one step down, almost like hiking up the sand dunes of Namibia. I hated this at the time, but I have to say, it once again made for an incredibly memorable hike. Ecuador started off with a bang 3/3 great hikes. The cherry on top was that during this hike, one of the girls in our group was going at a slower pace so she went up with a volunteer at the lodge well after the rest of the group did with our hiking guide. However, it was only this volunteer’s 2nd ever time on this hike, so they got lost on the way down. They started yelling our guide’s name, and while we were sludging along the mud and trying to avoid falling, we heard them and tried to figure out what was going on. Our guide then led us to a fork, told us to take the left where it was just one path back to the lodge, and then he ran back and rescued the girl and the volunteer, getting back 3 hours after we did. Honestly I was lowkey jealous that I wasn’t the one lost, because it sounded so amazing (though the girl was a little traumatized when she got back, she was able to laugh it off that night). Hung out with the same group of people that night, and then in my final day in the park, went horseback riding. Unlike my Kyrgyz adventure, this was all flat land riding, which meant tons and tons of galloping. In what was turning out to be quite the eventful trip, about halfway through the horse activity, an Israeli girl fell off her horse mid gallop. Luckily, there were no horses directly behind her, and she escaped with just a bruise. But unfortunately we couldn’t gallop after that. But still, it was such a fun activity. While I would still rank my Kyrgyz 5 day trek up and down the magnificent Central Asian mountains a good deal higher, it was still so much fun to just sprint on a horse. And galloping is doubly fun because you can just sit down on it, whereas for trotting you have to raise your legs up and down with the horse so you don’t bruise your butt. But I do think my Kyrgyz trek really helped here as I was able to gallop from the get-go while the others took about an hour or two to get comfortable (they were all quick learners!), and I had minimal to no body pain after getting off the horse due to having weathered that storm in Kyrgyzstan.
The Cotopaxi trip was honestly incredible, and I was a bit sad to head back to Quito. Spent a rest day in Quito, and then took the 4 hour bus the following day over to the city of Riobamba. Riobamba is an absolutely forgettable city (atleast Quito, like other colonial capital cities, is pretty, if not generic), but is the base location to climb up Chimborazo. At just over 6250m, it is the closest point on earth to outer space, due to the Earth’s equatorial bulge. That alone made it a bucket list item for me (and THE reason I even wanted to visit mainland Ecuador). However, Chimborazo entails trekking up steep sections of ice, which I hadn’t really done before (wasn’t sure if the glaciers in Iceland and Argentina counted), so I signed up to climb up a 5000m mountain called Carihuairazo first, which does have ice trekking, and the company I signed up for Chimborazo said to do this first just to get comfortable with that.
Of course, if there is one thing that I have learned over the past few years, it is how to deal with unexpected roadblocks and obstacles. With my luck, the day after I arrived in Riobamba, what was supposed to have been a 3 day indigenous protest against the neoliberal policies of the government (concerning the environment, cost of living, and of course rising fuel prices) took place, blockading roads across the country and effectively making each city its’ own island. This of course meant that the roads to both Carihuairazo and Chimborazo were both closed off. I basically spent a few days in Riobamba optimistically waiting for things to get better – there wasn’t much to do besides walk around a forgettable city, read, and eat some delicious food, probably the best in Ecuador. Easily on par with the more celebrated southern neighbor of Peru (obviously that final dinner in Lima at Mayta was an exception but that was fine dining so I’m not counting it). There was this incredible market near my hostel that had <$3 lunches that stuffed you to the brim and were delicious…some sort of mashed potato like food but with a base of maize, and then delicious cuts of meat and a fried egg on top. I unfortunately was also unable to meet with my friend James, as we had planned to do Chimborazo together. He was stuck doing the Quilotoa Loop – an acclimitization trek at around 4000m around a volcanic lake – due to the road closures. We had met way back in April 2021 during the El Mirador trek in Guatemala, and he even had his monkey skull with him to take a celebratory shot out of post Chimborazo. Honestly was really bummed by being unable to attempt a summit of Chimborazo, but oh well, that’s life. However, I needed to get to Quito to catch my flight to the Galapagos (as my scuba operator said that the trip was still running as planned). I somehow managed to meet 3 Americans in Riobamba, one of whom said his travel insurance would cover an evacuation helicopter ride to Quito. Jumped on that, and got back to Quito a day before my Galapgos flight. Was honestly lowkey badass to grab an escape helicopter due to political unrest…had Fortunate Son blaring on repeat in my head of course.
Of course, with my luck, the one day I had in Quito proved to be quite momentus as the indigenous protestors closed in on the city in their peaceful marching. I had a 9am flight to the Galapagos, and what should have been a 30 minute drive to the airport turned out to take over an hour as I woke up at 3am and was checking twitter until a Quito traffic account posted at 4:30am that the roads to the airport were temporarily cleared of roadblocks, so I quickly got a cab at that time and did a fun little obstacle course drive to the airport, evading giant mud piles and burning tires and trees. While at the airport at 6am, I saw on twitter that the protestors had closed off the path the police had cleared once again.
Anyways, I do have to say that the Galapagos was absolutely worth the crazy journey to get to. I had been messaging my dive operator and they said that it was still running as scheduled, and their next few liveaboard cruises (all spaced 1 week apart) were fully booked, so I basically had to make this flight. There were 15 of us (capacity was 16, but one solo Kiwi lady was staying in her own room as no other solo females signed up) – 5 Americans, 5 Germans, 2 Dutch, 2 Turks, and 1 Kiwi. Besides me, all were here just for the Galapagos, so they literally flew in and out just for the liveaboard. One American girl had just graduated UT Austin and was with her dad as a graduation gift, but the youngest other person besides us two was in their mid 30s, and there were three people 60+! Given the exorbitant cost (basically ran me just over 5k USD with equipment rentals and Galapagos national park fees), liveaboards tend to attract older, more financially stable people who are addicted to diving. Also, the other 14 all had like 300+ logged dives with three people who were certified dive instructors and at over 2000, while I was sitting at 43 dives, but weirdly enough I was in the upper tier in terms of number of dives since COVID which is why the tour operator let me join even though I was below the suggested experience level. The people were all really cool as well. They all had like 10k+ USD worth of camera equipment, so my GoPro footage, as good as it was, was probably the worst footage of anyone in the group. I bought my GoPro off Arjun in Feb in NY since he upgraded to a GoPro 10, but I am so so glad that he sold me his older one, with a diving case and stick as well.
So the premise of the liveaboard was you basically sail around in a yacht and reach farther out diving spots, and dive all day. We did 19 dives over the course of the week, which appeared to be standard for all Galapagos liveaboards, so I of course went with the cheapest boat option. Even at this “budget” price, the food was outstanding, the beds comfortable, and the divemasters were incredible. There were a couple of days where we did 4 dives a day, a couple with 3, and a couple with 2, and there was 1 dive on the first day which was a “checkout” dive – just to get back in the groove for people (almost all of us including myself) who were rusty, and get used to our rental equipment if we were renting.
The Galapagos is widely considered to be some of the best diving in the world, and I have 3 friends who have dove here in different liveaboards. Two of them – my college friend Arjun and a travel buddy I met in Egypt and then randomly again in Zambia, Xu – swear by the Galapagos as by far the best diving they have ever done (as does my 3rd friend, the one I saw the Northampton game with in England, but he’s also closer to my experience level). And even when looking up scuba diving stuff online, Galapagos liveaboards are viewed as a consistent Mount Rushmore spot for scuba diving. I do have to say, despite the outrageous price point and the sky high expectations, the diving here absolutely delivered. It legitimately might have spoiled all future diving for me considering how good it was. We saw literally 1000+ hammerhead sharks, well over 50 Galapagos sharks (aka silky sharks), 4 whale sharks (!!!), 2 mola mola (!!), and countless turtles, iguanas, eagle rays, and sea lions (their eyes get massive underwater) over the week of diving.
The absolute highlight of the trip was the diving sites off of both Darwin and Wolf Island. Both are in the far northern reaches of the Galapagos archipelago, and are 24+ hours by boat from the nearest inhabited islands, so only accessible via liveaboards. The diving conditions are brutal with the unpredictable currents, the water is cold (low 20s in celsius), but the wildlife is outrageous. Schools of hammerhead sharks galore, the odd whale shark, consistent galapagos sharks (these basically look like slightly smaller Great White sharks), turtles peacefully drifting about…just out of this world. The raw number of shark sightings was just mind blowing. The visibility was quite mediocre (10 meters if we were lucky), and there wasn’t much in terms of pretty coral, but I think the big fish sightings more than make up for anything else. And the dive conditions…collectively, all of our fingertips were sore from all the tight gripping and rock/coral climbing we did to move and not get swept away into the blue (aka into the depths away from the coral reef walls by the islands where we stuck by). There was one point where we were kicking up as hard as we could to move up, but were stuck at ~33 meters in depth, because of the strong downward current. Obviously worst case here is to inflate your BCD (the “life vest” you wear), but the most dangerous thing in diving is to go to surface too quickly, so this was something we avoided until we hit some rocks and then climbed our way up to 15 meters and above the downward current. A lot of the dives were simply just dropping down to 20ish meters, holding on for dear life on a patch of coral or rock (we were of course wearing gloves), and then watching the show as all the sharks and other assorted marine life literally swam right by us. Hammerhead sharks are just so, so cool…such a bizzare yet badass look. And whale sharks…my god, I already knew they were the largest fish in the water (since whales are mammals), but you really don’t appreciate the gargantuan size until you see them in person. So we were all diving with nitrox, which is all but mandatory here – nitrox is actually a misleading name, as typically you dive with a tank that is 21% oxygen and 79% nitrox. With “nitrox” you dive at higher oxygen levels, and for us that was 32% oxygen and 68% nitrox. This allows you more bottom time – so with a regular tank, if you get to, say, 28 meters, you can only spend a few minutes there before needing to go up, otherwise you need to spend a lot more time doing decompression stops (basically stopping for a few minutes at 15 meters, 10 meters, etc.) so your lungs readjust to the air compression (this is why it’s very dangerous to just shoot up to the surface). But with nitrox, you can basically spend 30 minutes at a deep depth, and the only stop you need is three minutes at the 5 meter level before ending the dive. However, the flip side is that with nitrox, you cannot go too deep (cap is typically in the low 30s of meters, while recreational diving is only “sancitoned’ for up to 30 meters so not an issue). However, while chasing one of the whale sharks we saw, the excitement plus the strong downward current meant that we were face to face with the beast at a staggering depth of 41 meters. I didn’t grab a GoPro video here because of the outrageously strong currents and I was struggling to maintain buoyancy (aka not get dragged too far up or down), but it’s actually kind of hilarious in hindsight because in the other peoples’ videos you can hear all of our dive computers (a watch that tracks dive time, current depth, info about safety stops, etc.) frantically beeping in the background. Definitely not recommended but it made for a great dive experience.
After Darwin and Wolf we headed down further south to Isabela island, where the water was a bone chilling 16 degrees celsius. However, this was the spot to see some of the weirdest fish around, the oceanic sunfish, or mola mola. They basically look like giant half-fish – they are bigger than human, and almost seem to be missing half of their body given their shapes. We got super lucky and spotted them just below 30 meters at this dive site, and this is definitely the funkiest looking fish I have ever seen.
Funnily enough, I was the only diver to do all 19 dives – to be fair, the Texas dad could have done 19 but he sat out one because his daughter was not feeling well so they both did 18. The dive conditions were absolutely brutal on Darwin and to a lesser extent Wolf, so I was basically napping between dives. Literally was wake up, breakfast, dive, snack, sleep, dive, lunch, sleep, dive, snack, sleep, dive, dinner, sleep on those days with 4 dives. We found out at the end that there was a COVID outbreak on the boat (lol), so I guess a combination of already physically exhaustive diving plus potential COVID meant that it really took a toll on us. However, I could visibly see my diving skill improve with each dive, and this entire trip has made me a much, much, better diver. And the crazy tough conditions with current made it all the more memorable. My roomate, a German dad in his early 40s who was here solo, put it best when he called this “survival diving”, where you are alert and sharp so you don’t get swept away into the ocean (we all had GPS trackers in case we got swept away and surfaced on our own in the Pacific). But yea, just an awesome, awesome experience.
The tour also included some overland sightseeing, including sea lions above land, and the various different Galapagos birds, as well as of course the giant tortoises. Gotta say, I was very underwhelmed by this all. I guess it’s because I have had so many absolutely outrageous wildlife spottings (Masai Mara and Serengeti, gorilla trekking, tiger safari in India, Galapagos scuba diving, and even to a lesser extent the macaws of the Peruvian Amazon), that simply “good” sightings are very meh for me. It reminded me a bit of Ushuaia actually, with the rocky island nature and almost New England nautical feel of it…I wonder if the familiarity makes it seem worse for me? But yea, if I went to the Galapagos and didn’t scuba dive I would find it to be a scam of Dalai Llama or Yellowstone proportions, but the scuba diving is obviously incredible.
After this great trip, we exchanged emails to hopefully set up a future google drive so we all have access to each others photos and videos, and I went to spend a couple of recovery days in the coastal city of Guayaquil (the protests were primarily in the mountain regions, including Quito). Plan is to fly to Bolivia for ~3 weeks, and then head back home for 2 months for Burning Man, seeing friends in NY and Chicago, and of course, MPP/MPA grad school applications for the fall of 2023.