Having heard of a huge vulcano on the island Isabela (which is the biggest of the Galápagos islands), we decided to pay it a visit. We had the picture of the Canaries in mind where you can see quite a few neighbouring islands from the tops of the vulcanos.
We took the speedboat from Puerto Ayora on the central island Santa Cruz which took us in two shaky hours to Isabela. It turned out that while Isabela is for sure a very nice South Sees style island, it is not what you expect when you travel to Galápagos — too many people, too commercial, simply not this bizarre “on which planet are we?” feeling.
The next day, we rode up to the rim of the vulcano. It is indeed huge — the crater has a diameter of about 10km. Also the riding (with horses that couldn´t care less about what we were saying or doing) was fun; however the whole thing was just not what we had expected. The view was very limited, we did not even see the whole coastline of Isabela, not to mention the other islands.
I guess if we came to Galápagos again, we would rather spend those days on the New Flamingo 🙂