Galápagos & Peru Round Trip: Day 11 – Excursion to Pinzón, 2 hours on and in the Pacific Ocean

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This is our experience of a snorkeling trip around Pinzón Island on the west coast of Santa Cruz, Galápagos.

Be sure to book in advance! 4 days are ideal

Be sure to book any of the day tours in advance because they sell out quickly. At least we experienced this in May. 2-4 days in advance and you’re on the safe side. We got the last two spots on the boat we were on, and depending on the location, not many boats go there. Tomorrow, for example, we will be on a boat for about 10 people and it’s the sole boat for this trip to Daphne we booked.
Today we’re with two other boats, each of which has 10 spots. This might not sound overly crowded, but we learned that frequent trips of so many boats to Pinzón has made the sea lion, turtle and shall population migrate away from the island. There also used to be penguins, but they also fled.
We found out all of the above just after we booked the trip in of the numerous travel agencies.

It pays to compare providers in advance

Agencies basically sell the very same seat on a boat, for very different prices. You should definitely check out prices before you book. A Scottish couple we met today paid USD 120 each, our trip cost us USD 100 per person. We found this to be the cheapest option available, obviously the offers do not vary much, although I have to say we were by far on the most comfortable boat.

Both of the other boats were smaller, did not have a second deck for the captain to steer the boat and were in poorer condition. The staff on the boat, including our guide Carla, was friendly and knew about the animals we would eventually see today. Somehow we always end up with one large family on these kinds of trips, declaring the entire space on the respective boat to be theirs, acting like divas on land, but not even capable to swim properly, let alone stick their heads under water…

Best travel agency on Santa Cruz, Galápagos

While you can’t do anything about the travel company, you can definitely check out three to four agencies in different streets. This price we found on Ave Charles Darwin.
One even better travel agency that I’d like to recommend though, is adjacent to the bar The Rock, when you make a left turn from Ave Charles Darwin to Calle Islas Plazas. The guy named Sergio spend half an hour calling each and every boat owner to find a last minute tour (two (!) days in advance) for us. Although we were out of luck going to North Seymour on our last day tomorrow, he gave us two different options and told us all about tour operations, animals migrating due to the frequency of visiting boats etc.. He also keeps some hand-written recommendations in a bunch of languages on the walls in his agency. We found him to be the most honest guy we came across.

That said, what did we see on the trip?

It was amazing to swim with sea lions and the fish and sea stars are just as colorful as in Egypt or Mauritius (the two places I can compare it with). The underwater world itself is not quite as colorful, there are a lot of lava stones and you can see bizarre formations, but corals were rare.
Especially at the second snorkeling spot at La Fe we thought that it must have been careless swimmers who caused it to look like this.
While Penguin Bay (it’s just the name, no penguins anywhere) at Pinzón Island was a great place to see sea lions and swim with them (our boat was the first to arrive, so we were about ten swimmers and four to five sea lions in the water (we saw more on the rocks, but they were lazy), the second one was for turtles and white-tip sharks.
Honestly, there is not much else to see there. It was like on a Mexican beach, with some turtles swimming around, apart from that, nothing else than sand (we saw three of them and it was amazing, but I would have wished for more), but other than that, there were just rocks and stones. The largest shark we saw was about 1.50 meters.
All in all, the trip was cool, but let us compare it to tomorrow‘s experience and I‘ll tell you which one is better.

// find them on Facebook: Galápagos Mocking Bird Travel Agency

More of our trip to Galapagos and Peru