I spent 30 years with Galapagos Travel, and made maybe 15-18 trips to the islands all told. My connection with the islands started far earlier however, when my mother traveled there independently in 1982. At the time there were weekly flights from the mainland, and that’s it, plus a rusty old freighter that traveled between the mainland and the inhabited islands. She had quite the adventure on that trip and for years talked about the amazing experience. It would be another 12 years before I first traveled to the archipelago, in 1994. Shortly thereafter I landed a job at Galapagos Travel, leading to many more island adventures.

Right from the start I could see that Galapagos Travel did things better. So much better. We operated the longest trips to the islands, spending either 11 or 15 days in the archipelago, plus three nights in Quito. Our tours were educationally focused so you wouldn’t just see the islands, but also learn about them and what made them so unique. Our days were more longer (essentially from sunrise to sunset), with activities planned around the wildlife behavior as well as photo opportunities. We adopted the catchphrase See More, Do More, Learn More, and lived that philosophy!

The underwater world in Galapagos is every bit as amazing (I just don’t carry a camera when I’m snorkeling). Several of my stand-out memories from Galapagos have been in the water though… there was the time a young sea lion pup hopped on my back and rode around like I was his personal surfboard… or the time we saw a group of 4 Orcas swimming in a straight like that was going to intersect with the yacht - with no time to plan (or think rationally) 4 of us grabbed our snorkel masks and jumped in the water fully clothed so we could see them up swim by directly below us! Or watching marine iguanas feed underwater, or flightless cormorants “fly” by underwater, or Galapagos penguins…

text and photography by Mark Grantham