Beyond Amazing - Galapagos (and Daniel!)

Galapagos Islands | Dec 23 - Jan 1, 2022

Planning a visit to a “bucket list” location like the Galapagos can be daunting…especially if you are a working parent on a budget. Whereas many people will tell you that you need to go via a “got you covered, take you everywhere and serve your every need” cruise, that just wasn’t in our budget…and quite frankly, isn’t our style either. We’ve traveled to 5 continents and doing it on our own – getting local flavor – that’s the way we’ve planned all of our trips…But to do the Galapagos right, (in a pandemic!)..well, we were beyond thankful to have KimKim (and Daniel specifically) on our team.

Originally planned to go in December 2020, we needed to postpone during the pre-vaccination Covid days. So, we punted a year – and rejiggered our thoughts. We shared what our interests were…hiking, horseback riding, snorkeling...and a little down time. We shared our budget. We shared our needs and wants. And KimKim came up with several options for us to look through and decide between. Once we were a go, we felt great about our itinerary – and even got hotel confirmations to help us feel like we for sure had a place to go (something we worried about a little since we’d never done business with KimKim before.).

At the last minute – weeks before our trip – we asked to add a new option to our plan. Again, KimKim came through. In the end, we were able to explore four islands and had a really wonderful understanding of the geography, endemic animals, and saw every bird, reptile, amphibian, and mammal on our list more than once. We’re an active family – we were genuinely very happy with how busy our days were but that we also had evenings and sometimes afternoons to do a little swimming in the ocean and enjoy local flavors.

We had guides meet us at every point, helping us navigate tricky things like the boats between Santa Cruz and Isabela…if we needed dinner ideas or reservations, they were there. And if a guide was running behind, we had Daniel on WhatsApp always willing to check things out and ensure we had what we needed in real time. As we were there over the holidays, we also appreciated Daniel explaining local traditions to us so we weren’t operating as ugly tourists (and also knew to buy some grapes to bring in the new year!)

In short, we cannot recommend KimKim / Daniel highly enough.