Family Trip to the Amazon Basin and Galapagos Islands

Galapagos Islands | Feb 5 - Feb 19, 2023

Our family of four went to Ecuador and visited the Amazon basin and the Galapagos Islands from Feb 5-20, 2023. Our local trip specialist was Tamer Obeid. Tamer was there for us the whole time. He was a text away and always responsive if we had a problem or a question. Special thanks to Tamer for providing us with dinner and a cake on my son’s 26th birthday. Tamer is an asset to KimKim, and we greatly appreciate his help and support.

In the Amazon basin, we visited the Napo Wildlife Center. Our guide was Remy, and he was incredible. He grew up in the local community and was aware of all the animals and made many of their sounds. Perhaps the highlight of our visit was seeing the Giant River Otters up close and spending time with the Kichwa Añangu Community. We also climbed to the treetop canopy, visited the parrot clay licks, hiked trails, and did lots of wildlife watching from the canoe.

In the Galapagos Islands, we stayed on Santa Cruz, Isabela, and San Cristobal and had different guides each day for our excursions. Perhaps our favorites were Joel and Lambo. They went out of their way to help us get good photographs and provided their GoPro photographs from our excursion.

Joel pulled two non-swimmers wearing life preservers while he was leading our group. He would occasionally dive down to take photographs of sharks and rays at Pinzon, our best snorkeling trip. Lambo would also dive deep and show us where an object was, like a seahorse, to photograph. He led us around the Tunnels to see enormous sea turtles.
The best place we stayed in the Galapagos was at the Iguana Crossing Hotel on Isabela. The view from the hotel was gorgeous and the service was excellent.

Note that everything on our trip did not run smoothly. We had some transportation problems, and three of us had stomach issues during our travels that lasted many days. Having said that, it was still the trip of a lifetime and one that we would gladly do again.