Baltra Island and San Cristóbal Island are the only 2 airports in Galapagos you can land on to start Galapagos tours.

When you travel to the Galapagos islands, normally you will fly from any destination of the world to Quito, Ecuador. Then you take an airplane to one of the 2 Galapagos islands mentioned above to finally embark on one of the many Galapagos island cruises.

Like other Islands in Galapagos, Baltra island is very dry. Baltra’s vegetation consists mainly of bushes and cactus.  

Baltra island is not within the boundaries of the Galapagos National Park and the many iguanas you will see are not even native to Baltra island: the native Baltra iguana got extinct before the second world war.

So when somebody on those Galapagos island tours stress that Galapagos is The untouched paradise on earth, be reminded on Baltra island: where people land, wildlife is in danger…

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After Baltra we visited Rabida Galapagos: our second island during our Galapagos island holiday.

It took our Galapagos island cruise one complete night to sail from Baltra to Galapagos. We want to tell you to make sure you bring your anti seasick pills with you, otherwise you could be in for a very sleepless night.

But once your stomach has settled, your travel to the Galapagos becomes priceless when you wake up just before the shore of Rabida Island.

We had breakfast on our Galapagos cruise ship admiring from far a big colony of sea lions basking on the red-brown lava soil of Rabida.

After breakfast we jumped into our "panga" to set foot on Rabida. Although the sea lions couldn’t be bothered with our presence, our guide warned us not to get to close into the territory of the dominant male. Especially since there were a few newborn sea lions present

We admired lots of blue-footed boobies fishing of the coast of Rabida Island. The island itself is quite rough with only Palo Santo trees and Opuntia cacti.

The main reason however that trips to the Galapagos stop at Rabida Island is the snorkeling: we saw abundance of colourful fishes including a white-tipped reef shark as big as me, scary…

During lunch we sailed from Rabida Galapagos to Isla Bartolome (see our next post).

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