URBAN JUNGLE
tingling, experience of my life! During our time we also visited Sante Fe Island, with its idyllic, glittering white powder beaches, still, clear waters, and Sally Lightfoot crabs in brilliant shades of red, orange and purple. Close by, we gazed at sea lions and marine iguanas napping side by side while a colony of comical, bumbling blue-footed boobies passed through, careful not to step on their sleeping neighbours. The tranquillity was Edenic.
On North Seymour Island, we trekked across desolate volcanic landscapes peppered with lava stones and towering, withered cacti. At one nesting ground, we watched as frigate birds with their massive red gullets and swallow-tailed gulls with their eerie redrimmed eyes kept vigil over their tiny, fluffy nesting babies. It amazed us that even in such barren lands, nature somehow provides, enabling life to flourish. Seated on the extinct volcanic island of Bartolomé, as the sun set behind Pinnacle Rock, Justin and I debated Darwinism. Did the marvellous natural beauty we’d encountered on these enchanted islands fit the hypotheses devised by the English naturalist, or were they created by a celestial being, a higher power? On our last day, we spent a leisurely afternoon in Puerto Ayora, the de facto “city centre” of the Galápagos. The main street was lined with pretty cafes, colourful handicraft shops and cheery mosaic artwork that covered the walls of shops and random roadside walls, alongside artistic graffiti. We headed to one of the waterfront cafes to enjoy an afternoon siesta, but were surprised to see sea lions had beaten us to it—they were napping under the chairs to escape the sun. We wondered how that fit into Darwin’s theory. Later in the afternoon, a bunch of enterprising sea lions shuffled around the
The overall experience was truly extraordinary, but what we remembered most were the prolific wildlife and dramatic landscapes that informed Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection