Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE
TV explorer Monty Halls on uprooting his family from Devon to live in the Galapagos
TV explorer Monty Halls on uprooting his young family from Devon to live among the giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands
At the fish market in Puerto Ayora, some of the customers are getting a bit pushy. One barges in front of me and my two small daughters, grunting impatiently as he slaps the counter.
Another, causing a great f lap, seizes a piece of fish and careers off. The fishmonger doesn’t make a fuss. He just shakes his head with a smile. The law here on the Galapagos Islands says that these local customers may do whatever they wish.
They’re not human, of course. The loud, demanding one is a Galapagos sea lion, rearing up on its tail and honking with its whiskers a-bristle. The cheeky thief is a brown pelican, making off with a fish- head in its pouch. On a bench by the stall, watching proceedings with a lazy eye, is another fat sea lion.
Local bylaws state that humans may not approach within 6ft of the wildlife. But no one has mentioned this to the animals, who can come as close to the people as they fancy. And they frequently do, waddling or flapping up close in the hope of a morsel of food, or simply from sheer curiosity.
My daughters, Isla and Molly, were five and three when, with my wife Tamsyn, we all set off to live in the Galapagos Islands on a conservation mission last year.
Our trip has been captured in a three- part Channel 4 series, My Family And The Galapagos. It was a magical experience in a remote world that, to a child, is like a fairytale kingdom filled with adventures.
And not just for children. I’m 51, a former Royal Marine and a TV documentary maker as well as a marine biologist. I’ve filmed wildlife programmes all over the globe and this was my fourth visit to Galapagos, a network of remote islands whose unique wildlife first inspired Charles Darwin to develop his theory of evolution.
Conservation work, of crucial importance on these islands, keeps bringing me back. If we can’t protect the wildlife here, what hope is there for the rest of the planet? For Tamsyn, Galapagos had always been on her bucket list. When we first started planning the trip, we thought it might be an exciting experience for our children. It’s turned out to be much more than that – an adventure that’ll shape the way they think for the rest of their lives.
And though I didn’t know it at the time, it began before we even left our home in Devon. Isla playfully placed a straw nest in my suitcase, with a teddy in it. I told her we could take the soft toy, but wouldn’t need the nest... and thought no more of it.
After a gruelling flight across the Atlantic to South America, changing planes in Ecuador for the journey onward to Galapagos, we touched down 36 hours later at the airport on Baltra, just north of the main island of Santa Cruz. It came as a shock, but we’d brought a problem with us.
With 30 commercial flights a week ferrying in 200,000 tourists a year, the role of immigration officials in safeguarding the fragile Galapagos ecosystem is crucial. Stowaways are already wreaking havoc: for instance, fire ants that arrived on cargo ships about 100 years ago now infest the islands. They are dangerous pests that not only bite humans but prey on reptiles and birds – more invaders like this are definitely not welcome.
We were keen to comply with regulations prohibiting the import of food and vegetable matter that might contain insects or seeds. So I was aghast to realise a scrap of straw from that nest was still in my suitcase – and I was potentially facing a fine of up to £19,000 for breaching regulations. Luckily, those responsible for biosecurity on the islands are used to accidental stowaways, and I was sent on my way with a gentle warning.
The Galapagos are an archipela- go of volcanic islands, about 600 miles off the west coast of South America in the Pacific Ocean, and were once a favourite bolthole for pirates. Today, four of the 18 islands are inhabited by a total of about 30,000 people. Around 18,000 of them live in Puerto Ayora, a burgeoning town on Santa Cruz, which relies heavily on the tourist industry.
We were staying two and a half miles outside the town, in a lodge on the slopes of a volcano. We’d come expecting to find ourselves in the back of beyond. But as we looked down the mountainside at the sprawling boom-town with its streets of pre-
fab buildings stretching out towards us, it occurred to me that Puerto Ayora is three times the size of Dartmouth, the closest town to us at home. So much for being beyond the reach of civilisation.
Despite their exhaustion, our two girls were thrilled to see their accommodation, a wooden lodge on the cusp of a ‘cloud forest’ – miles of trees wreathed in mist on the island hillside. Somehow, they found the energy to trampoline on the beds.
That lodge must have the most beautiful back garden in the world, thousands of acres of woodland where a third of the plants can be found nowhere else on Earth. They include the towering daisy trees or Scalesia pedunculata that resemble weeping willows on stilts.
As we trekked down to collect supplies on our first day, the iguanas were so numerous we were almost tripping over them. They’re not exactly tame, they just didn’t bother moving out when the humans moved in. They’ve never had to learn to fear man. As Tamsyn says, if our ancestors had always treated wild animals as equals, every city would be a wildlife park.
Giant tortoises, one of the truly iconic animals of the Galapagos, made an immediate impression on all of us. They can live up to 140 years, and no animal on the islands has been more persecuted by man. They had a kind of timeless wisdom about them, gently going about their business following ancient routes that crisscrossed Santa Cruz. We would see them at the side of the road or sitting in fields in the highlands, where they were so numerous we could spot up to ten on one trip, watching the world go by as they had done for millennia.
Not everything was so idyllic. Our guide, a conservation scientist nicknamed JP, took Tamsyn to see the effects of plastic pollution. Prevailing currents once brought life ashore on the islands, washing it on driftwood from the South American mainland 600 miles away. But now the currents bring plastic waste, not new life. Tamsyn was horrified to discover one bay where the sand had been totally covered by litter, from drinks bottles and children’s toys to gigantic plastic containers.
‘It was totally covered,’ she told me. ‘There was tons of plastic, as far as the eye could see. And the truly horrific thing was that this stretch of beach had been cleaned only three weeks earlier by volunteers. Every turn of the tide brought another avalanche of waste.’
As a result, the entire family signed up for an island-wide clean-up, joining hundreds of Santa Cruz residents collecting plastic. It was an emotional day that’s had a profound effect on the children, especially Isla. Now back at home in Devon, her favourite activity on a Saturday morning is to go down to our local beach and collect bags of plastic.
As I see it, we have a choice. We can either do nothing, or we can do something. Either way, we have to accept that more plastic will keep washing up – but if we act, and take responsibility for clearing it up, then one day this pollution will start to reduce. We watched the people of Galapagos fighting back against plastic and it was inspiring.
Other conservation work filled much of our time. One particularly memorable trip (and there were many) involved catching an ocean sunfish, the largest bony fish in the sea, to take DNA samples. I achieved a personal ambition by attaching a camera to a green turtle, to monitor how long it takes an animal to recover from the indignity of being captured and tagged by scientists. Answer: a 15-minute rest is long enough to restore a healthy turtle’s energy levels.
The most shocking footage in our programme was totally unplanned. A protected marine reserve exists around Galapagos, where foreign vessels are forbidden to fish. As a result, the island waters are one of the last havens for the world’s endangered shark population.
News of angry demonstrations in Puerto Ayora sent me down to the town. In the marketplace, I found outraged locals protesting at an act of brutal greed by a Chinese fishing boat captain: he’d sent his ship into the protected zone, cutting a swathe through shoals of sharks. More than 300 tons of sharkmeat had been found in the hold – killed for shark’s fin soup, seen as a symbol of status and luxury in China.
Sharks are apex predators, just like lions – and even more endangered. If we don’t stop the mass fishing, the next generation will live in a world without sharks. Imagine the worldwide horror if hunters had driven lorries into an African game reserve and taken 600 lions. Like big cats, sharks are slow to reproduce. We simply can’t afford to let illegal fishing happen in this, the last global citadel for sharks.
When I went diving to film hammerhead sharks, hoping to find a shoal
‘We were almost tripping over iguanas’
numbering thousands, I counted less than 20. Perhaps we were looking in the wrong place, or at the wrong depth, but the evidence is becoming overwhelming. Sharks, which predate the dinosaurs, are on the verge of extinction. The spot where I was diving, off Wolf and Darwin islands, is seen as one of the last great shark havens, but I saw little evidence of it.
On the islands the children acted as human passports for us, making friends wherever they met. Both are red-headed, and every day we heard murmurs from the locals of ‘bonita roja’ – pretty red hair. Lots of people wanted selfies with them, especially Molly, who’s a proper red-headed Celt. Children don’t worry about cultural differences or the language barrier when they’re travelling – they just spot another child and get stuck in. Off the tourist track, Galapagos people can sometimes be shy of foreign visitors, so the girls helped us break the ice lots of times. Their intrepid spirit did cause us a heart-stopping moment or two. Breakfasting one morning on sand dunes beside the ocean, I looked around to realise Molly wasn’t there. It was only a matter of seconds since she’d been next to us, but she’d vanished. As I followed her footprints over a shallow rise, I spotted her on the vast expanse of white beach... dancing alone at the water’s edge in her bright pink dress, with the surf behind her. She looked so happy. Luckily, we had a camera to hand to capture the moment.
What child could be bored, with endless trees to climb, beaches to explore and animals to watch? Even better, there were no electronic distractions: our lodge didn’t have a TV or even an internet connection.
Since we returned to England, we’ve noticed how quickly our children, now six and four, are growing up and changing every day. Of course we’d love to take them back to Galapagos, perhaps in five or ten years, but they’ll be so much older then.
Our family will treasure the memories, and perhaps one day the girls will watch our film with their own children and grandchildren and say, ‘That was me! Swimming with sharks!’
My Family And The Galapagos is coming soon on Channel 4.