Cruising the Galapagos
Bucket-list visit to otherworldly islands is an evolutionary trip
Bucket-list trip to otherworldly islands is truly evolutionary.
There are places in the Galapagos Islands where you feel like you are looking at the end of the world, or at the very least, life after humans. That comes when you’re atop Prince Philip’s Steps on Genovesa Island, known colloquially as “Bird Island” for reasons that become abundantly clear long before you step ashore.
There are the places in the Galapagos where you feel like you are present at the dawn of creation, billions upon billions of years ago. Namely, Sullivan Bay on Santiago Island, where signs of life are scant amid sprawling lava formations.
And then there are the eternal vistas of Galapagos underwater, where giant sea turtles, among other marine creatures, still are abundant.
If you’re going to go all the way down to visit the litany of mind-blowing sights offered by these weirdly diverse — yet, in some ways, same-y same — islands about 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, you’ll want to stay at least a week. And the best way to experience as much of them as possible is by traveling on one of the many sleep-aboard tour boats that ply the equator-straddling archipelago’s 21 islands (five inhabited) and 107 rocks and islets.
These come in four classes ranging from “tourist” on the cheap end up to “luxury” boats, which feature gyms, Jacuzzis and entertainers. Our eight-day, seven-night cruise was on the 75-foot Floreana, a midrange “tourist superior” boat that was more than enough to meet the needs of my wife and me, both 1990s backpackers now in our mid-40s. The cabins are tiny — about the size of an East Bloc railway
sleeper circa 1992 — but you are really only in them to sleep, shower and change clothes. Ocean days, nights
Life aboard the boat conspires to kill time on a daily basis just as nature on and around the islands obliterates it on an epochal scale. There’s a routine: The sun peeps through the portholes around 6:30 a.m. You go on the upper deck for coffee with some of the crew and your shipmates (as few as 10 on smaller boats, more than 100 in the largest), and then it’s down for breakfast (eggs, cold cuts, fruit, cheese and bread, accompanied by an ever-varied selection of novel Amazonian juices). Then you clamber down to board one of the rubber Zodiac dinghies for a hike on the nearest island.
Then it’s back to the boat for a little break and a trip to a nearby snorkel site, followed by lunch and a siesta, another snorkel (while the sun is still hot) and then another hike just before the sun goes down around 6. (Being on the equator, every day is about the same: crack o’ dawn around 6, sun blazing by 7, starting to set by 6, and gone by 7.)
Then there’s a happy hour, during which you can amuse yourself spotting all the sea turtles, sea lions, manta rays, dolphins and sharks nearby; dinner (often thick tuna steaks), followed by a briefing of the next day’s activities; an hour or so of postprandial stargazing on the upper deck if the clouds allow; and then sleep, as the captain plows through the open Pacific. And then you wake up, and head up to the deck for coffee and anticipation for what the next strange and wonderful new island will bring.
Which is always something different than the previous day. As noted visitor Charles Darwin once put it: “[B]y far the most remarkable feature in the natural history of this archipelago … is that the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings … I never dreamed that islands, about fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted.” Otherworldly islands
Far-flung, end-of-theworld-recalling Genovesa Island is one of the world’s most amazing seabird colonies, its rocky shoreline studded with fragrant palo santo trees and low bushes, nesting sites for Nazca and red-footed boobies and their mutual nemesis: the piratical frigatebird, who loves nothing more than forcing the boobies to disgorge their hardearned catch for their own nourishment and to steal their nest-lining twigs for no good reason other than to mess with their heads, if you ask me.
The nest of the Nazca booby is a sight to behold, a construction only its occupant could love, or even decipher as some sort of structure: guano-ringed, seemingly random piles of sticks and pebbles that these house-proud mothers fuss over fastidiously during their long weeks of incubation, seeing some pattern we cannot.
Meanwhile, little cinnamon-tinged owls patrol on silent wings for finches, and perched, show as little fear to the approach of a group of humans as a grackle does a grazing horse. And all you can hear on this island are the calls of the birds and the wind in your ears, maybe the waves crashing on the lava rock shores.
On Santiago Island, a late 19th-century volcano eruption left behind mesmerizing patterns in the ebony formations of cooled lava. Pahoehoestyle formations predominate: swirled patterns that look like giant black Twizzlers laid out on a table. (“Pahoehoe” is Hawaiian for rope.) These are interspersed with jagged, splintery formations of a’a lava — Hawaiian for “ouch,” at least according to Victor Hugo Mendia, our Ecuadorian guide, a former commando in that nation’s navy, who walked barefoot across this island, ouch lava or not.
About the only life of any kind at Sullivan Bay is what is known as “pioneer” grasses and the odd cactus, each of which has found a way to drill its roots into what tiny fissures these brand-new lava flows have granted so far in this blink of an eye in geological time. (Give it a million years, and it will probably be as lush as Maui.)
And again, as on Genovesa, there is that eternal wind in your ears, and the cobalt blue sea crashing against this jetblack coastline.
In the water, snorkeling and/or diving in the Galapagos lacks the stunning color of the world’s great reefs. There’s not as much coral, and not as much Day-Glo variety in the palette of the reef fish.
But it is here where giant sea turtles show no fear of the snorkeler who approaches with respect and caution, where you might see a tiny Galapagos penguin rocket past you, or a flightless cormorant streaking through the water in pursuit of little octopi and eels, powered by their webbed feet and legs and hindered by their useless wings. Or you might find yourself gamboling with a roguish sea lion; wafting amid a billowing cloud of eagle rays, mottled rays or stingrays; or, if you are scuba-certified and venture out to some of the northernmost islands, diving amid whole schools of hammerhead sharks.
And most otherworldly of all: you might find yourself underwater with a dozen or so marine iguanas, some about 3 feet long, many effortlessly diving much deeper than you can in search of the algae they subsist on. As often as you come across them when snorkeling in Galapagos, you’d think you’d become accustomed to seeing another creature in possession of hands, more or less like your own, five fingers, fingernails, the whole shebang, diving alongside you, but you never do. Restored environment
And so under this spell of elemental beauty and different tenants everywhere you lose sense of time. About one day in, you stop carrying your wallet. About two days in, you start dreading some fluke that might allow reception on your smartphone. About three days in, that gizmo is only useful as a camera. Clocks, news, emails, nagging texts, insistent phone calls: all seem to belong to a distant world, one far removed from this asylum for barking sea lions, lumbering, mud-wallowing Galapagos tortoises, nonchalant sea turtles and defiantly-staring owls.
If you are chronically unhappy about the planet’s environment, this is one place where man is actively aiding the forces of nature in rectifying the devastation we’ve visited since their discovery in the 16th century. Feral goats, dogs, cats and pigs have been eliminated from some of the islands where once they ran rampant over defenseless species, thus saving some endemic plant and animal species from possible extinction. The pirates and whalers who once docked in the bays and inlets have long since been banished from this paradise, ending their horrific butchery of the giant tortoises and fur seals.
Today the Ecuadorian government rigorously controls tourism and development on its treasurebox archipelago: 97 percent of the land-mass is a national park, wherein tourists must always be accompanied by a guide, and obey the rules — no straying from trails, no peeing or anything else, only a handful of visitors allowed at any one of the 60 or so approved sites at any given time, to name a few. Some scientists now say that the Galapagos Islands’ environment is restored now to levels of health not seen since Charles Darwin roamed the archipelago with his notebooks and field glasses. British wildlife expert Mark Carwardine calls it “probably the most famous wildlife-watching destination in the world.”
And what Darwin said about the Galapagos of the 1830s remains true today: “Extreme tameness … is common to all the terrestrial species … A gun is here superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree.” ‘Trip of a lifetime’
Some of that terrestrial animal life — yellow warblers, great blue and night herons, brown pelicans, and, alas, fire ants — will be familiar to Houstonians. Others — flightless cormorants, marine iguanas, those tiny penguins and those giant tortoises — are found nowhere else on earth. And these islands really are like nowhere else on the planet.
This is a place where rival tribes of indigenous mockingbirds engage in clan-based turf wars, utterly ignoring the humans in their midst. Where the lower reaches of tall cacti are sheathed in thick skins of bark. Where one species of seagull has evolved night vision and hunts exclusively after dark. Where tortoises the size of go-carts trudge through cool highland jungles in search of puddles to wallow in and passion-fruit to munch. And where one species of nondescript finch has taken to vampirism while another has taken to woodpecking. (It was the development of this diversity of eating habits and those variable beak sizes that set Darwin on the path to his earthshaking theory of evolution.)
You’ll find yourself watching fire enginered and sky-blue Sally Lightfoot crabs scuttle across what seems to be an otherwise bare seaside lava slab, only to notice that it is in fact alive with dozens upon dozens of basking, squirming and spitting marine iguanas, their dark skin offering them temporary camouflage.
Phrases like “trip of a lifetime” and “lifechanging experience” are thrown around so much they’ve come to be cliches, but they really do apply when you are talking about the Galapagos Islands.
On our return to port at cruise’s end, even in the tiny, eminently charming town of Puerto Ayora, my wife and I shared a “cast out of Eden” feeling we’d never known before. We vowed one day to come back again, and unlike Adam and Eve, it’s possible that we can.