Unusual Love Stories: Post Office Bay

Dylan Thuras: When was the last time you made friends with a complete stranger? Not a person you met through mutual friends, and honestly, I don’t even think online dating counts. Because in that case, at least you know a little bit about the person, what they look like, some movie quote that represents their personality. But in this case, I’m talking about a complete stranger. A person who you would not have met in any other way, except for this instance of strange, ineffable chance. Something you could call maybe fate. Well, there’s one place in the world that orchestrates meetings like this on a regular basis. To get there, you’re going to have to travel 500 nautical miles from the nearest landmass, because it’s way out on an island. And it’s not the kind of place you might expect to make a new friend. It’s a post office.

I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today, we’re taking you to Post Office Bay on the Galapagos Islands. It’s a post office where stamps mean nothing, because this post office is run completely on luck and the goodwill of the people who happen to visit.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Carissa Chen: You never get to be in a place where, I guess they don’t see that many humans. By they, I mean like animals.

Dylan: This is Carissa Chen. She’s a writer based in Taipei, Taiwan, and she’s worked with Atlas Obscura before. She actually contributed to our latest book, Gastro Obscura. And right after Christmas of 2019, she visited the Galapagos Islands with her family. Her mom had always wanted to go.

Carissa: And so you would just see these baby sea lions that are, you know, just lying on the beach and you’d walk up to them and they would just kind of stare at you lazily, like, okay, whatever.

Dylan: The Galapagos Islands are famously remote. They’re about 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, and they’re home to tons and tons of animals and plants that aren’t found really anywhere else on earth. This natural bounty is famous for inspiring Charles Darwin to help formulate his theory of evolution.

Carissa: I just thought like we were going to the Galapagos and that was it was like tortoises and finches and like that was what we were going to see.

Dylan: But then something else grabbed her attention. Their tour brought them on a boat to an island called Floreana. And there on Floreana, off a walking path near the beach, there was a little wooden barrel on a post with a tiny roof covering it.

Carissa: It’s this sandy section of the island. And there’s just like this wooden structure. It kind of looks like a birdhouse, like a bigger birdhouse.

Dylan: That’s when their guide explained to them that this little birdhouse was something else entirely. It was a mailbox and it had been there for hundreds of years.

Carissa: And when you go in, when you open it, there’s a bunch of plastic bags filled with postcards.

Dylan: Starting around the 1700s, the Galapagos Islands became a really popular stopping point for sailors on whaling voyages. Think, you know, Moby Dick. It was super dangerous work and it also meant that sailors were out on the sea away from home for months or even years at a time. And along the line, someone said, “hey, there are so many crews passing through this island, through the Galapagos, that maybe there could be a way to send messages along.” So a little ad hoc post office was set up. One sailor in 1814 described it in his journal as pretty much just a box nailed to a post. But you put your letter inside and then just hope that a vessel passing through in the future might be headed to the place that you wanted your letter to go, and another sailor would deliver it for you. There was no guarantee, of course, that your letter would ever make it to its destination. I mean, it probably wouldn’t, the odds were against you. But maybe, maybe some stranger would do this thing for you. Carissa found that idea strangely and deeply romantic.

Carissa: There’s this little precious, not monetarily precious, but just a thing that means a lot to only a few people. It’s only meaningful to a couple of people. And yet, you know, people are safeguarding that through bad weather, through storms, through, you know, rough seas, through whatever, all just so that the recipient gets this little piece of news that lets them know about their, you know, their dear ones back on this island. So like, I don’t know. I just, I felt like that was, it’s really poignant.

Dylan: Amazingly, the post office bait tradition is still going strong hundreds of years later. There’s only one rule.

Carissa: Deliver them by hand and get them to the person.

Dylan: No using the regular postal service. Hand delivered all the way.

Carissa: And I didn’t know if it was like, you know, you take them back and then you like slip in the mailbox. But like, I took it really literally: deliver it by hand, meet up with the person and give it to them.

Dylan: So Carissa filled out some postcards, addressing some to herself and others to friends. And then she went through the mailbox looking for ones that she could deliver. She dug and she dug, looking for postcards being sent to Taiwan. Finally, she found one.

Alex Nguyen: So I got a message from Carissa. She said, “oh, I got your postcard. Where do you live?” I tell her, “oh, really? I can get a postcard so quickly. I cannot imagine.” And we find out, actually we live in the same city.

Dylan: This is Alex Nguyen. He’s a tour guide based in Taipei and his job has taken him to tons of super cool places, places like Machu Picchu, where he’s been 14 times. And in 2019, he finally made his first trip to the Galapagos Islands and to Post Office Bay. At the post office, his tour guide fished through the box and called out where each postcard was from. Like, “anybody going to New York? What about Mexico City?” There were exactly zero from Taiwan.

Alex: In Taiwan, actually, very, very few people have the experience there because it’s very, very far from Taiwan.

Dylan: Far as in, took Alex about 20 hours to get there. So as he dropped his postcard into the box, he had very, very low hopes of ever seeing it again.

Alex: Actually, I don’t expect anything. I think I left this postcard, maybe it will take two or three or more years and then I will receive this postcard.

Dylan: Carissa came home from her trip in January. She unpacked, settled in, and about a week later, happened to check her mail. And she found a postcard from the Galapagos, her postcard.

Carissa: And it was mailed. And I was like, that wasn’t the agreement.

Dylan: Yeah, someone had just picked it up and then dropped it in the mail. A pretty major Post Office Bay faux pas.

Carissa: Like, why did you do that? Took all the fun out of it. So I was pretty sad about that.

Dylan: It made Carissa even more determined to hold up her end of the bargain with the postcard that she’d picked up. And that’s when she remembered the sender had written their username for a messaging app that’s popular in Taiwan. So, naturally …

Carissa: He was super excited. He was like, “oh my God, like, I can’t believe it actually found someone. I thought it was gonna take so much longer.” Like, he was so excited.

Dylan: I know what you’re thinking. Is this the start of a rom-com? Carissa was just a girl traveling with her mom. Alex was a boy who’d been all over the world. They weren’t looking for love, but love found them.

Carissa: I know, so many people said that. I know. Like, every person I told this to was like, oh my God, this is the meet-cute.

Dylan: And Alex looked up Carissa’s picture and was kind of like, “uh … oh!”

Alex: And then also I find, oh, Carissa actually, she’s a very beautiful lady. So I said, “oh!” I saw the picture—“Oh, it’s a beautiful lady.” So it’s like dating, you know? It’s very, it’s very special experience. Yeah. Yeah.

Carissa: And so we made plans to meet like the next day or something. And, you know, by this restaurant, actually right near where I live.

Alex: So we quickly find one day and I booked one Chinese restaurant and we meet there and eat xiaolongbao, you know? It’s like anything, it’s a Chinese food. Yeah, Chinese restaurant.

Dylan: Carissa says she was kind of nervous.

Carissa: I got there early on purpose. ’Cause I was like, I do not want to be the person scanning like the room to be like, are you, are you the person I’m looking for? Like on an awkward blind date kind of thing. I was waiting outside and he saw me and he immediately, he said, he said, “oh, you must be Carissa. You look like an American.” And I was like, “it’s that obvious?” I look like—and he was like, “yeah, you look like an American.” He was like, “I knew it had to be you.” So, yeah.

Dylan: And then they actually had a really nice lunch. It helped that they had something in common to chat about. They could talk about the Galapagos and being interested in travel.

Carissa: The conversation flowed pretty easily and we got along. So yeah, it was, it was really cool.

Dylan: There was just one big problem with our meet-cute. Well, actually two.

Alex: At the time I already have my girlfriend.

Carissa: He was engaged. He’s married by now. And I have a boyfriend. So, but you know, that is not to say that it couldn’t happen, right? Somebody else might have delivered their postcard and now they’re married to the person. Very, very cute story. I wish, yeah. I mean, if my life was a movie that would be the perfect setup.

Dylan: So Carissa and Alex’s postcard exchange didn’t end up resulting in a whirlwind romance, but that’s okay. It did result in something pretty rare. A meeting with a perfect stranger that turned into a friendship.

Alex: The most important is you can meet a new friend.

Carissa: I think there is something special about having shared that connection and just knowing that that’s possible. You know, that not everyone in the world is scary and you need to be suspicious of them, and that you can bring a postcard to somebody and have a great lunch and be excited to have met them, you know, through this very roundabout way that feels very pure in some ways.

Dylan: Next time you’re in the Galapagos Islands, you can stop by and leave a postcard at the Post Office Bay on the island of Floreana. It’s totally free. It might never get to its destination, but on the other hand, you might also make a new friend. Special thanks to Carissa Chen and Alex Nguyen for telling us their stories about Post Office Bay.

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This podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Witness Docs. This episode was produced by Amanda McGowan. Our production team includes Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Willis Ryder Arnold, Sarah Wyman, Manolo Morales, McKenna Smith, Gianna Palmer, Tracey Samuelson, John DeLore, Peter Clowney, Guinevere Govea. Our technical director is Casey Holford. This episode was mixed by Luz Fleming. Our theme music and end credits are by Sam Tyndall.

This story originally ran in 2021; it has been updated for 2025.