This was the trip I’d been quietly building up to for years. The Galapagos has been on my list since I was a kid reading about Darwin in school, and I’d been wanting to get to Colombia ever since friends started coming back from Bogota and Medellin with stories about the food. Putting them together into one trip was a bit of a logistical puzzle, but the geography lined up and so did the dates. So I went.
What follows is the long version. Two countries, three islands in the Galapagos, and a city in Colombia that completely changed my mental model of South American food.
San Cristobal: Home Base in the Galapagos
I spent most of my Galapagos time on San Cristobal Island, which felt like the right call. It’s one of the smaller and less developed islands, and it has the original capital town of the Galapagos, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. You can island-hop from there for day trips. I liked having one base instead of moving every couple of nights.
The town itself is small. Sea lions sleep on every available bench, dock, and patch of sidewalk. They are completely unbothered by you. You’ll be walking back to your hotel and have to step around a 400-pound sea lion snoring on the boardwalk. After a day or two, this stops being remarkable and just becomes part of the texture of the place.
A Short History Lesson: Darwin Got Here First
San Cristobal is where Charles Darwin first set foot in the Galapagos in September 1835, aboard the HMS Beagle. He was twenty-six years old. He spent about five weeks total in the archipelago, collecting specimens and making the observations that would, decades later, become On the Origin of Species.
Walking around San Cristobal with that context is wild. You’re looking at the same lava flows, the same finches, the same iguanas Darwin was looking at when the basic framework of modern biology was still cooking in his head. There’s a small monument and an interpretive center on the island where you can read about the visit, and it’s worth an hour even if you’re not particularly into the history. The whole concept of natural selection is essentially the souvenir Darwin took home from this trip.
Snorkeling at Kicker Rock (And Swimming With Hammerheads)
The single best day of the trip was snorkeling at Kicker Rock, known locally as Leon Dormido. It’s a vertical-walled volcanic formation rising straight out of the ocean, and the channel between its two halves is one of the most reliable places in the world to swim with hammerhead sharks.
I’m going to be honest with you. I’ve snorkeled in a lot of places. I have never had an experience like this one.
You jump off the boat into open ocean, deep blue water below you, and the visibility is incredible. Within minutes I was looking down at hammerheads. Not one. A whole school. They were maybe forty feet below us, gliding in formation, doing their hammerhead thing. They don’t care about you. You’re not interesting. They have a hammerhead schedule to keep.
We also swam with reef sharks (also unbothered by us), giant sea turtles that basically stop for traffic, and a whole pod of sea lions that absolutely did want to interact. The sea lions were the highlight in a different way. They torpedo around you, blow bubbles at your face, and look at you like you’re the world’s most boring playmate. I have video of one swimming up to my GoPro and just staring into the lens.
If you go: book the early morning tour. The current is calmer, the visibility is best before the wind picks up, and the hammerheads are most reliable around dawn.
Espanola Island: Boobies and Iguanas
I did a day trip to Espanola Island, which is one of the older and more biologically dramatic islands. The boat ride from San Cristobal is rough, two hours each way and not for sensitive stomachs, but the wildlife you get on the other end is unmatched.
Espanola has both blue-footed boobies and Nazca boobies, and you can walk right past them on the marked trail. The blue-footed ones are exactly as charming as you’d expect, with feet that look painted on. They do a mating dance where the male lifts his feet alternately and shows them off, completely without irony. The Nazca boobies are bigger, white with black face masks, and they nest in pairs on the rocky cliffs.
The marine iguanas on Espanola are also a thing. They’re the only iguanas on Earth that swim and forage in the ocean, and on Espanola they’re a particular reddish-green color that sets them apart from the iguanas on other islands. They pile on top of each other on the black lava rocks, soaking up heat, looking like tiny dragons.
The Giant Tortoises
I ended my Galapagos time the way you’re supposed to: with the giant tortoises. There’s a tortoise sanctuary in the highlands of San Cristobal, La Galapaguera, where you can walk among the tortoises in their natural-ish habitat. Some of these animals are over a hundred years old. They’ve been alive longer than my grandparents.
There is something specifically humbling about being near an animal that has been alive that long, that moves that slowly, and that has no interest in you whatsoever. They are the planet’s most patient creatures. I spent an hour just sitting on a log watching one tortoise eat one specific leaf.
Quito and the Volcanoes
On the way home from the Galapagos I had a long layover in Quito and decided to use it. Quito sits at about 9,000 feet of elevation, surrounded by volcanic peaks, and the standout is Cotopaxi, one of the highest active volcanoes in the world.
I didn’t have time for the full hike, but I did a sunrise drive to a viewpoint where you can see Cotopaxi’s symmetrical snow-capped cone rising out of the high plateau. The light at dawn at that altitude does something to colors. I got photos that I genuinely think are some of my best work, the kind of shot where the light, weather, and timing all line up and you couldn’t stage it if you tried.
If you’re going to be in Quito for any length of time, go see the volcanoes. The city itself is fine, the colonial old town is worth a couple of hours, but the surrounding landscape is the actual reason to stop.
Three Days in Bogota: Coffee, Food, and a New Perspective
I flew from Quito to Bogota and spent the last leg of my trip doing essentially nothing but eating and drinking coffee.
Colombian coffee culture is its own thing. I knew the country was famous for the beans. What I didn’t appreciate until I was there is how seriously the cities take cafe culture as a daily ritual. Bogota has a high-end coffee scene that rivals anywhere in the world, with roasters and cafes that are doing single-origin pour-overs from specific farms in specific micro-regions. I went to four cafes a day. I am not exaggerating.
The food scene was the bigger surprise. I’d been told Colombian food was hearty and good, but I wasn’t expecting Bogota to have the level of contemporary, ingredient-driven restaurants I found. I had multiple meals that were among the best I’ve had this year. Ajiaco, the Bogota chicken-and-potato soup, is genuinely transcendent on a cold rainy night, and Bogota gives you a lot of cold rainy nights at 8,500 feet of elevation.
Three days was the right amount of time to get a taste without overdoing it. The neighborhoods of La Candelaria and Chapinero are the obvious starting points, but the food in Usaquen is where I had my best meal of the trip.
Final Thoughts
The Galapagos delivered every bit of the wildlife experience I’d been hoping for, and Bogota delivered a food and coffee experience I hadn’t known to expect. Together they made for one of the more unbalanced but rewarding trips I’ve put together. Aerial views in Hawaii made me want to chase landscapes. Snorkeling with hammerheads made me want to chase the underwater equivalent. And like the way Peru changed my sense of scale, the Galapagos changed my sense of what wildlife encounters can be when humans aren’t constantly the main character.
Go to Bogota for the coffee. Go to the Galapagos for everything else.
Galapagos and Colombia: Hammerheads, Volcanoes, and a Crash Course in Coffee Culture
This was the trip I’d been quietly building up to for years. The Galapagos has been on my list since I was a kid reading about Darwin in school, and I’d been wanting to get to Colombia ever since friends started coming back from Bogota and Medellin with stories about the food. Putting them together into one trip was a bit of a logistical puzzle, but the geography lined up and so did the dates. So I went.
What follows is the long version. Two countries, three islands in the Galapagos, and a city in Colombia that completely changed my mental model of South American food.
San Cristobal: Home Base in the Galapagos
I spent most of my Galapagos time on San Cristobal Island, which felt like the right call. It’s one of the smaller and less developed islands, and it has the original capital town of the Galapagos, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. You can island-hop from there for day trips. I liked having one base instead of moving every couple of nights.
The town itself is small. Sea lions sleep on every available bench, dock, and patch of sidewalk. They are completely unbothered by you. You’ll be walking back to your hotel and have to step around a 400-pound sea lion snoring on the boardwalk. After a day or two, this stops being remarkable and just becomes part of the texture of the place.
A Short History Lesson: Darwin Got Here First
San Cristobal is where Charles Darwin first set foot in the Galapagos in September 1835, aboard the HMS Beagle. He was twenty-six years old. He spent about five weeks total in the archipelago, collecting specimens and making the observations that would, decades later, become On the Origin of Species.
Walking around San Cristobal with that context is wild. You’re looking at the same lava flows, the same finches, the same iguanas Darwin was looking at when the basic framework of modern biology was still cooking in his head. There’s a small monument and an interpretive center on the island where you can read about the visit, and it’s worth an hour even if you’re not particularly into the history. The whole concept of natural selection is essentially the souvenir Darwin took home from this trip.
Snorkeling at Kicker Rock (And Swimming With Hammerheads)
The single best day of the trip was snorkeling at Kicker Rock, known locally as Leon Dormido. It’s a vertical-walled volcanic formation rising straight out of the ocean, and the channel between its two halves is one of the most reliable places in the world to swim with hammerhead sharks.
I’m going to be honest with you. I’ve snorkeled in a lot of places. I have never had an experience like this one.
You jump off the boat into open ocean, deep blue water below you, and the visibility is incredible. Within minutes I was looking down at hammerheads. Not one. A whole school. They were maybe forty feet below us, gliding in formation, doing their hammerhead thing. They don’t care about you. You’re not interesting. They have a hammerhead schedule to keep.
We also swam with reef sharks (also unbothered by us), giant sea turtles that basically stop for traffic, and a whole pod of sea lions that absolutely did want to interact. The sea lions were the highlight in a different way. They torpedo around you, blow bubbles at your face, and look at you like you’re the world’s most boring playmate. I have video of one swimming up to my GoPro and just staring into the lens.
If you go: book the early morning tour. The current is calmer, the visibility is best before the wind picks up, and the hammerheads are most reliable around dawn.
Espanola Island: Boobies and Iguanas
I did a day trip to Espanola Island, which is one of the older and more biologically dramatic islands. The boat ride from San Cristobal is rough, two hours each way and not for sensitive stomachs, but the wildlife you get on the other end is unmatched.
Espanola has both blue-footed boobies and Nazca boobies, and you can walk right past them on the marked trail. The blue-footed ones are exactly as charming as you’d expect, with feet that look painted on. They do a mating dance where the male lifts his feet alternately and shows them off, completely without irony. The Nazca boobies are bigger, white with black face masks, and they nest in pairs on the rocky cliffs.
The marine iguanas on Espanola are also a thing. They’re the only iguanas on Earth that swim and forage in the ocean, and on Espanola they’re a particular reddish-green color that sets them apart from the iguanas on other islands. They pile on top of each other on the black lava rocks, soaking up heat, looking like tiny dragons.
The Giant Tortoises
I ended my Galapagos time the way you’re supposed to: with the giant tortoises. There’s a tortoise sanctuary in the highlands of San Cristobal, La Galapaguera, where you can walk among the tortoises in their natural-ish habitat. Some of these animals are over a hundred years old. They’ve been alive longer than my grandparents.
There is something specifically humbling about being near an animal that has been alive that long, that moves that slowly, and that has no interest in you whatsoever. They are the planet’s most patient creatures. I spent an hour just sitting on a log watching one tortoise eat one specific leaf.
Quito and the Volcanoes
On the way home from the Galapagos I had a long layover in Quito and decided to use it. Quito sits at about 9,000 feet of elevation, surrounded by volcanic peaks, and the standout is Cotopaxi, one of the highest active volcanoes in the world.
I didn’t have time for the full hike, but I did a sunrise drive to a viewpoint where you can see Cotopaxi’s symmetrical snow-capped cone rising out of the high plateau. The light at dawn at that altitude does something to colors. I got photos that I genuinely think are some of my best work, the kind of shot where the light, weather, and timing all line up and you couldn’t stage it if you tried.
If you’re going to be in Quito for any length of time, go see the volcanoes. The city itself is fine, the colonial old town is worth a couple of hours, but the surrounding landscape is the actual reason to stop.
Three Days in Bogota: Coffee, Food, and a New Perspective
I flew from Quito to Bogota and spent the last leg of my trip doing essentially nothing but eating and drinking coffee.
Colombian coffee culture is its own thing. I knew the country was famous for the beans. What I didn’t appreciate until I was there is how seriously the cities take cafe culture as a daily ritual. Bogota has a high-end coffee scene that rivals anywhere in the world, with roasters and cafes that are doing single-origin pour-overs from specific farms in specific micro-regions. I went to four cafes a day. I am not exaggerating.
The food scene was the bigger surprise. I’d been told Colombian food was hearty and good, but I wasn’t expecting Bogota to have the level of contemporary, ingredient-driven restaurants I found. I had multiple meals that were among the best I’ve had this year. Ajiaco, the Bogota chicken-and-potato soup, is genuinely transcendent on a cold rainy night, and Bogota gives you a lot of cold rainy nights at 8,500 feet of elevation.
Three days was the right amount of time to get a taste without overdoing it. The neighborhoods of La Candelaria and Chapinero are the obvious starting points, but the food in Usaquen is where I had my best meal of the trip.
Final Thoughts
The Galapagos delivered every bit of the wildlife experience I’d been hoping for, and Bogota delivered a food and coffee experience I hadn’t known to expect. Together they made for one of the more unbalanced but rewarding trips I’ve put together. Aerial views in Hawaii made me want to chase landscapes. Snorkeling with hammerheads made me want to chase the underwater equivalent. And like the way Peru changed my sense of scale, the Galapagos changed my sense of what wildlife encounters can be when humans aren’t constantly the main character.
Go to Bogota for the coffee. Go to the Galapagos for everything else.
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