From Paris to the Galapagos, Ecuador

Buenos dias!
We are in Ecuador in South America. New continent for us!
This blog will be short but I still wanted to write it to help if some of you want to go to Ecuador and especially the Galapagos Island, as we discovered some things that can be useful.
Monday the 15th of September, we woke up early, got in the Uber I booked the day before. No trouble getting to the airport, we arrived nice and early as usual. And that was a good thing.
We went to check in our bags, but no, first we needed to print our boarding passes and tags to put on our bags first. It is not done by the people working there anymore, we had to do it ourselves at a machine. As we checked in online beforehand, I sometimes wonder what is left to do by the people working there, but anyway.
We print everything: the boarding pass are on thin paper and we will find out that some of them won’t work properly as it is not well printed but well.
We finally get to the counter to check our bags but got told that we need proof that we will be leaving the country. I had read about that, and I, naively, thought that having booked accommodation in Peru and having our flight from Peru booked would be enough… well it is not. They need a proof that we have a flight or a bus leaving Ecuador. Crap! We get away from the line and jumped on our phones to try to book a bus leaving from our last place in Ecuador to our first place in Peru: we were planning on booking it when we got there, but we are now desperately trying to get tickets online, except that we found nothing online. Nothing at all. I have to admit: I got extremely stressed and probably got pretty rude to the kids and Kev, as I really struggled with those kind of situations. I’m sorry guys! I start looking a plane tickets and find some from Quito to Lima (which is not at all what we are planning on doing) but at that point, I didn’t care. I bought them with the cancel anytime option and we’ll figure that out later.
We get back in the line to check our bags and this time, we get through, showing our tickets to leave Ecuador.
From there pretty easy: regular flight, around 10 hours. The kids watched so many movies, me too, I slept a bit, Kev too. We get headaches.. normal plane things.
We got one stop in Bogota, Colombia for a couple of hours, then onto our next flight for Quito, the capital of Ecuador. We arrive at the airport pretty tired, Emma especially (she fell asleep in the second plane, but it was not long enough). We got though passport control pretty quick. We got a taxi picking us up at the airport to take us to an hotel nearby.
We arrived and the kids get excited as there are llamas and alpacas in front of the hotel! That is cool! It was around 6pm, local time, which means something like 11pm in France where we came from, so we are tired. We ordered some food to eat in our room. Emma falls asleep before we got to order food, so we let her sleep. She’ll eat tomorrow.
While waiting for our food, I jumped online to cancel the plane tickets we bought in the morning and found out that yes, you can cancel anytime, but you lose the extra money you paid for that option, which in that case was $437 (aussie dollar). Great. I’m sure there was a better thing I could have done, but in the panic of the morning, I didn’t think about anything else.
We ate our food and jumped in bed. We need to get up early the next morning to get our plane to the Galapagos!
Wake up around 5.30pm, as the taxi is picking us up at 6am. We arrived at the airport, got through security with no issue. We found a place to have breakfast: it is expensive, but it is in an airport, so we knew that.
We knew that when arriving in the Galapagos, we will have to pay 200US$ per adult and 100US$ for each kids as an entry fee to the Galapagos national park. Kev was looking at that again on his phone for some reason and came across something else we needed, which we didn’t know about. Something called TCC (or TCT in Spanish), this is Transit Control Card. It needs to be done online before taking a plane to the Galapagos. And here is the panic mode again. I frantically get onto the website on my phone (which by the way, I hate doing this kind of things on, as my finger can not type on a phone, I’m much better on my computer). I entered all the information for the 4 of us: name, passport number, address, email, phone, where we stay in the Galapagos, for how long, ticket number of our entry flight (you know the 12 numbers long one), ticket number of our leaving flight (another 12 numbers long one), who my second cousin third time remove is… (I’m kidding for the last one!). When I get on the payment page, because of course you have to pay for that as well (20US$ each), I entered the wrong card number and press back (like a newby) and… I had to do all of it again…. I cried, I won’t lie! I entered everything again and we get our email confirming we have our TCCs! Yeah… I’m exhausted!!!!
But well we are good to go. I wolfed down my food that is now cold in front of me and we go to the gate to get into our plane, finally on our way to the Galapagos.
To sum up, if you want to go to the Galapagos Island, you need: a proof you are exiting the country (plane or bus ticket leaving from Ecuador), your TCC which cost 20US$ to do online beforehand and when you arrive on the Island, 200US$ in cash (no card payment) per person (100US$ for kids under 12 I think).
See you in our next blog, in the Galapagos!
Mel

15.9.2025. Up early and make sure everything is packed. Downstairs to an uber waiting to take us to the airport. We got there nice and early and found the flight details on the big TV board thing. It was time to check our bags so we lined up for that. The guy said in French to Mel, have you got your boarding passes yet? No, that's why we're lining up. So at the airport in Paris, you have to go to a machine first, where you print out your own boarding passes and luggage tags. Fine, let's do that. That's done, let's line up to check our bags. The guy asks Mel, what's our flight number out of Ecuador. None, we plan on taking a bus to Peru. Oh, do you have the number for the bus? We can't get on our flight until we give this guy a bus number. Right, let's book a bus then. We get out of the line and move aside. Then we start looking for bus companies in Ecuador that can take us to Peru. There is a few, but none that book that far in advance. A little bit of panic is starting to set in now. Mel had the idea to just book flights that we can cancel anytime. At least we will get to Ecuador. That move worked, but we later found it would cost us close to $500 to cancel. Anyway, we lined up again. This time the guy says your bag is oversized. What, these bags have been all over the world and this has never been an issue. Now we're starting to get pissed off. Turns out it's because of the straps, once again, never been an issue before. All we had to do was take it to the oversize counter, so no real big issue in the end, just more frustration. We got on the plane, and 10 hours later landed in Bogota, Colombia. Had a quick changeover and we're on our way to Ecuador. We landed in Quito, the capital. It was about 5pm local time and our next flight wasn't until 9 the next morning. We weren't going to spend that long in the airport, so Mel had booked us a room at a hotel near the airport. We taxied to the hotel, booked in and paid. I pointed out to the kids that there were Lama's or alpacas over in a pen. Once we'd dropped the bags they went straight out to have a look. I ordered some dinner for everyone, except Emma, she was already asleep. Not long after we were all asleep. The next morning came quickly. We hopped into another taxi we'd organised the day before and headed back to the airport. This time it's a short flight, out to the…. Galapagos Islands!!! 2 hours later we landed in the Galapagos. Off the plane and head over to customs. No need to check our passports, though it wouldn't have surprised me if they did. The only thing they checked for was that we had filed for the TCC, the transit control card. Not a physical card, no no. Something once filled out and paid for, you just download. That was another $80usd we hadn't planned on spending, but there you go. Move slightly to your left and talk to the next person. Pay the $600usd national park entrance fee, $200 each for Mel and I and $100 each for the kids. There was a breakdown of where all that money is supposed to go, I can't remember all that. I do remember it saying that 40% of it is meant to come back to the Galapagos to help with its conservation. We would later learn from more than one guide, that basically none of it comes back to the Galapagos. Almost all of the money stays in Quito. After the airport, we hopped on a bus to the ferry, $15. The Little ferry, $1 each, took us across the water, around 200 metres and dropped us off on the other side. Where we hopped on another bus to take us to Puerto Ayora, the town we're staying in. We walked for 20mins from the bus stop to our stay and checked in. Not completely happy with what we got, it's not as exactly as advertised. Mel mentioned it to the owner who later came back and gave Mel the password for the faster wifi, yay! It has a decent shower and 3 double beds. An outside eating area and kitchen that we thought we had to share but is apparently all ours. So we have a fridge, stove, coffee machine and microwave. We're here for two weeks, so we're hoping to unpack and set up a bit, but there is basically no drawer space or cupboards, so the bags are sitting on the ground as we have done all year so far. After a bit of a rest, we went out and saw some of the city. We saw our first sea lion and our first iguana. Then we decided we would grab some food at a cheap restaurant for dinner. It cost us $20usd for dinner, it was cheap, it was simple, but it was tasty. Back to the stay and into bed. The whole trip was only a bit more than a day and a half, it's now the 16th, but because of the rotation of the earth it took a lot longer. We went back in time 16 hours or something like that. Anyway, we're knackered.
KevRead more