After a couple of days on Isla Santa Cruz, Duke and I decided to visit Isla Isabela. This island is a two hour boat ride away. Because we’re westerners we expect that the standard of the boat rides are gonna be safe and that there’s gonna be rules for when the boat goes and not depending on the weather, however, that was not the case. For the first time in a long while, both my boyfriend and I thought that this was it.
Because of all the extreme weather and hurricanes in Florida and further on, it created big waves and swells in the Pacific as well. We didn’t know about this until we arrived Isla Isabela after the worst boat ride ever. Suddenly we were there, in the Pacific, in what we expected was gonna be a safe ferry – but which was a little boat filled up with tourists. Some of the passengers of course became sick of the waves and all of us were anxious as fuck.
The day we came to Isla Isabela, we had to just relax. I was thinking: how are we gonna get out of here? We have to take the boat back, or pay a huge amount of money to take an unsafe plane back to Santa Cruz. We took a deep breath and tried to enjoy the days out there by taking a lot of strolls and walks in the area. And well, it helped!
We rented a bike and went for the Trail Of Tears one of the first days we spent there. A great bike trip with a lot of “stick outs” where we could see beautiful and intimate beaches and lagunes, tortoises and iguanas. In the end of it, approximately 5 km away from the centre, we got to a sort of wall built of bricks by prisoners during a dark period of Isla Isabelas’ history. This wall was called The Wall Of Tears.
The walk was nice and the one beach along Isla Isabela very white and beautiful, however the place is way overpriced and not structured at all. A lot of tourists agree that it gotta be a lot of corruption within Ecuador when these islands still, in 2017, is not developed to its potential and the actual people that live there live miserable.. A salad may cost 15 dollars, the people are not warm or welcoming or understanding at all and can’t speak any English when tourism ironically is their main source of income.
I think it’s sad, you know, because I can see a lot of potential for these people in these beautiful surroundings. But of course the country won’t develop when a lot of the money goes to those who already have much and when the system of government, the system of the police and the military is corrupt from the inside and out. Maybe, hopefully, in the future, the Galapagos will be developed to its potential.
