Islas Ballestas - Poor man's Galapagos, what is it and how did we end up there? The Peru version

To get to the Galapagos islands you need to plan ahead, way ahead. We are not good at that, so here's what we did instead!

If you read my post about Isla de la Plata, you would be aware of the existence of Galapagos-like places, places that have a similar climate and ecosystem as the real thing, in addition to being cheaper and easier to access. Islas Ballestas is the Peruvian version of such a place, and here is how it went for us:

How did we get there

We decided to travel from Arequipa to Lima through the coast, with a few stops along the way so we don't have to be in a bus for 20 straight hours. One of those stops was the coastal town Paracas. The town was very commercial, and most of the beaches were private property of the hotel standing in front of those beaches. That meant that we did not have where to put our tent to sleep, so of course we did not like the town too much.

There was also not so much to do in the town, we came from Ica, and we were not interested in fishing trips or overprices whale watching. We did have a day to spend there so we walked around, and close to the pier we found someone who offered us a tour to Islas Ballestas or how they called it, Fake Galapagos.

The tour

Just like the Ecuadorian version, this too felt shady to us. On this occasion the tour company did appear on Google, and there were plenty of people with us so we decided to go for it.

The tour started with a classic more than an hour waiting for our boat to arrive, and once it did we went our way.

The tour itself took about 2 hours, and all of it was on the boat while the guide was explaining what we are seeing. We were shown some white rock islands and were told that the white color comes from birds shitting on the rocks, we were shown Candelabro de Paracas - a sign on one of the islands tha is believed to be left by the ancient inhabitants of the area. The main attraction was watching some sea lions catching sun on the rocks, making some noise and posing for pictures. After seeing all of that, we returned to the shore and continued our journey.

Final thoughts

We felt that this experience was not worth our time or our money, and looking back, we might have skipped Paracas altogether. But we might have been unlucky, because after all this is a national park, and the wildlife in it is impressive. Have you been there and had a different experience? Tell us!