Traveling to the Galapagos Islands to Live the #FlightieLife

The Galapagos Islands have been a place I've been dreaming of going for as long as I can remember. So when I was invited to be a honorary flighty by Flight Centre Canada for a nine-day press trip and experience a G-Adventures Galapagos trip, how could I ever say no? It's my first sea lion sighting and it makes me very excited. They're just chilling. One just took a poop off the side of this little dock over here. They're amazing. The wildlife on these islands steal your heart and your time with them becomes quickly some of your best. Upon arriving in the Galapagos, I realized that it is difficult not to run into a sea lion or a pelican, marine iguana or a crab. These beautiful creatures make up a great part of the population in a place where man and wildlife live in harmony. It's truly a beautiful sight to see. I'm exploring Santa Cruz, which is an island in the Galapagos that is really dry. It's very desert-like and there's tons of cactus. It's not what I expected, that's for sure, in terms of the landscape. What do you think of this place? It's beautiful. It's unique with like all the different everything about it. The animals, the vegetation, everything. It's hard to explain. Just breathtaking. We just stumbled upon this incredible gorge that everyone's just swimming in and I don't blame them because you know what I'm just gonna, I'm gonna get in. Why wouldn't I? There are several places on the island where you can see the famous Galapagos tortoises and if you're lucky, even become one yourself. I am walking in the wild and there are wild tortoises everywhere. Some of them are huge. What's really cool about them is they're endemic. These species of tortoises are endemic to the Galapagos and actually Galapago means tortoise so that's why they named these islands after them. There are 11 types of tortoises that are endemic to the Galapagos and the difference between endemic and native that I just learned is endemic means they're from here. They were here before the Galapagos became the Galapagos and they cannot be found these types of species anywhere else in the world. Native means that the animals, mammals, they were brought here or they came here after the Galapagos became the Galapagos and they have made this now their home but you can find them in other parts of the world. Just like a lot of the wildlife here in the Galapagos, there are a lot of plants that are endemic to the islands meaning that they're only found here. One of them is the escalesia tree which is really important, super cool too. It can grow up to 21 meters high and it's really important to the island because during the dry season sometimes they get only a little bit drizzle of rain and this tree has moss that grows at the top of it and it collects that little bit of rain and disperses it to the other trees and plants below so that they can continue to grow. It's also food for a lot of the wildlife so it's a pretty important tree here in the Galapagos. This tree here, I didn't know. We were just walking through this pathway and these trees were everywhere. This is palo santo which is one of my favorite scents. It's the oil I wear. I always bring pieces with me on my travels now and just burn them in the rooms, the hotel rooms or guest houses that I'm in and this is palo santo. You can actually kind of rub your finger along the bark and get that amazing smell. So cool. Natasha and I are spending the day riding bikes around Isabel Island and we're just gonna see what we can find, what we can get up to. We don't really have a plan but sometimes, actually most of the time, those are the days that I love best when traveling. There's no plan, you just go out and adventure and see what you can find. We've been riding our bike down this dirt road and we're like in desert. We just see cactus everywhere. It's really dry and very silent. There's not anyone else around us and we stumbled upon this like these rocks, tons of rocks made from lava and it's pretty cool. We're trying to walk all over it but it's pretty difficult because it's pretty spiky but the view is amazing. On the streets tonight having delicious, it's amazing. This whole fish cost $20 and it's good enough for two people. Hello food buddy, how is it? Where else would you find this? My time in the Galapagos was even more special than I could have ever imagined and has made my love and connection with wildlife and nature that much stronger. I want to give a huge thank you to the team at Flight Center and G Adventures for having me on this incredible trip. I learned that travel agents have pretty awesome jobs traveling the world and helping others do the same and it was great to get a glimpse of the flighty life.