The Galápagos

Fly or sail along the equator about 600 miles off the west coast of Ecuador and you will reach the Galápagos Islands, a chain of 21 or so (depending on the opinion of the source) volcanic or formerly volcanic islands. They are without a shadow of a doubt Ecuador's number one tourist attraction yet in spite of the draw, the country self-limits the revenue generated by the Islands by allowing just 150,000 visitors in any one year. And they require each visitor be accompanied by an approved guide. Pretty serious stuff.

Despite the fact they are islands in the tropics, the Galápagos are fairly inhospitable: they are effectively lumps of hardened lava sitting in the middle of the ocean with little fresh water, few hotels, no gorgeous beaches, and the seas you sail or motor across to get between the rocks that make up this archipelago are not always the friendliest. In fact, the Galápagos are pretty ordinary in every way save one: they house one of the most remarkable collections of endemic wildlife in the world. And that keeps people, including me this summer, coming to the Islands every single year.

The Galápagos are perhaps most notable as the primary source of inspiration for Charles Darwin in the development of his theory of evolution of species by natural selection or genetic alteration. Darwin spent all of five weeks in the Galápagos way back in 1835 but the conclusions he gleaned from the data gathered in that little more than a month would have a profound impact on human thought as it related to the creation of the Earth and everything living on it. The isolation of the Islands had yielded a unique set of circumstances that allowed similar species of creatures to evolve in quite different ways.

Sea lions asleep on the beach on Isla San Cristóbal. There are humans within about 10 feet of them.

In a way, Darwin (and the rest of us that followed I suppose) got really lucky here. Think about it. Mankind in a similar form as it exists now has been living all over the world for a couple of hundred thousand years and has been interacting with (and mostly ruining) each ecosystem and environment it has come into contact with. But because the Galápagos are almost completely inhospitable to man, the extent of human interference on the Islands is limited to just a couple of hundred years, not long enough to change the behavior of entire species. In fact, it's barely long enough for mankind to start screwing up the environment there without doing massive irreversible damage, although we have managed to make two or three species of tortoise extinct and did see fit to introduce goats (which eat the same plants as tortoises) and rats (which eat anything if they are hungry enough) to throw off the delicate balance of nature. But we'll come back to all that.

While there appears to be some evidence of indigenous people from around the Pacific visiting the Galápagos more than 600 years ago, the first written account of the Islands was created in 1535, just about 480 years ago. In that year, Tomás de Berlanger, the first Bishop of Panama, was sailing south to Peru when the winds that were driving his ship south calmed and he drifted off course and ended up at the Galápagos. While the freshwater on the islands saved the lives of both him and his crew, his report back to his superiors was that the islands weren't worth visiting or settling and, oh by the way, that there were a good number of giant tortoises living there. Nobody seemed to care much in the 16th century about rushing right out to see a bunch of really big tortoises, I guess.

After de Berlanger's visit in the 1500s, man eventually did find a use for the Islands (read: we found a way to exploit the natural resources). Pirates and privateers used the islands as a place to hide after committing crimes on the high seas and presumably hunted the local animals for food. Later on, whalers removed an estimated 200,000 giant tortoises from the Islands for use as fresh meat to feed the crews when they were out to sea. The tortoises can survive for months without food or water so they were simply stacked in the ship's hold upside down until they were needed for dinner. 200,000 is about six and a half times the current population by the way; not a small number at all.

Giant tortoises in the cool mud in the highlands of Isla Santa Cruz.

The almost wholesale removal of the tortoises could have been disastrous and could have changed the natural history of the Islands if it had continued long enough. Fortunately it did not. Later settlers in the Galápagos seemed less interested in eating tortoises than their own livestock they imported with them and that turned out to be a good thing, because settlement in the Islands was really pushed pretty hard at one point. Sure settlers brought other problems but at least they weren't eating the tortoises.

The Galápagos were annexed by Ecuador in February of 1832, a little more than three years before Darwin arrived. For the next 100 years or so they variously tried to sell the islands, encouraged settlement by people from all over the world (which sort of worked) and then resisted selling them to the United States which coveted the Islands as a strategic point to monitor the Panama Canal. Ecuador did allow the U.S. to construct an airfield during World War II but in 1959, they made a quite different decision and designated the Islands as a national park. And that's where they stand today with a population of remarkable creatures and whatever humans were around when the national park decision was made.

The Ecuadorians are pretty darned serious about this national park concept. They have restricted immigration and settlement in the Islands to those born there or those marrying someone born there to limit the human population and protect as much of the place as a sanctuary for the birds, mammals, reptiles, fish and whatever else lives there that doesn't walk on two legs. As of 2016, there are about 25,000 permanent human residents in the Galápagos Islands. Just five of the major islands (Islas Baltra, Floreana, Isabela, San Cristóbal and Santa Cruz) are inhabited. The largest town in the Islands is Puerto Ayora on Isla Santa Cruz with about 12,000 residents; the second largest is Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on Isla San Cristobal with about 6,000 inhabitants. The country's commitment to keeping people out is extremely impressive, especially since the Islands represent a quick buck in terms of tourist dollars.

A male frigatebird with its wings spread and red wattle inflated in an attempt to woo a female frigatebird.

A brilliantly colored Sally Lightfoot Crab scurrying across the volcanic rocks.

Our Galápagos journey this past August started on Isla San Cristóbal in the town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno before stopping at Isla Plazas, Isla Seymour Norte, Isla Santa Cruz and Isla Baltra along with assorted other rocks not counted as islands of the Galápagos in any of the books I read before or during our visit. Just for some size perspective, the largest of the 21 Islands is Isla Isabela with an area of 1,792 square miles; several of the smaller islands have areas of less than one square mile. Comparatively, Isabela is about half the size of Hawaii (The Big Island) and my now hometown of Arlington, VA is about 26 square miles. We're talking some small islands here, folks.

They are also really spread out. After a night on shore on San Cristóbal, our other three nights in the Islands were spent on a ten cabin catamaran which cruised during the day and then really traveled during the night. Our first night on ship featured an overnight sail (or motor, if you prefer) between San Cristóbal and Isla Plazas that started at midnight with the engine very loudly starting up and ended at 6 a.m. with the anchor dropping equally loudly and seemingly right in our cabin. Since you are required to travel with a guide and there is so much distance between islands, the only way to get a good look at what's in the archipelago is to sleep on a boat. Day tripping from islands just doesn't get you the same look at what is so amazing out there because there's so much distance to travel.

A pile of marine iguanas sunning themselves before getting ready to feed. Sombrero Chino.

So enough history and statistics, let's talk about what it's like to be in the Islands. Having just been on several days of safari last year in Botswana and Namibia, the natural inclination is to compare the Galápagos to the African bush since both trips involved a lot of looking at wildlife. That would be entirely unfair to both Africa and to the Galápagos. Comparing the two is like comparing apples and bananas; both have their good points and bad points but other than being fruit, the two are pretty much not similar at all. As an aside here, let me say the bananas in the Galápagos were absolutely incredible. And I pretty much HATE bananas.

But back to my point. Unlike Africa, there are no giants in the Galápagos. Well, not really. I mean sure the tortoises are huge for their species but it's not like they are elephants, hippos, African buffalo or lions. I mean really spectacular large animals which are complex and fierce and which all have the power and means to kill a human pretty easily. You also don't get species after species after species popping up day after day. In Africa last year, we kept a list of all the new animals we saw each day and we added at least four species to our list each of the six days we were on continent. All that is not why you travel to the Galápagos.

Instead what you get is a super intimate look at a limited number of species of animals, most of which can be found nowhere else in the world and pretty much all of which are completely unafraid of mankind. And by that I really mean completely unafraid. Like you can walk up to sea lions and iguanas and even birds and they won't move. They don't register man as a predator because relative to their time on the islands, we haven't been hunting or killing them. Comparing the experience in Africa means you sacrifice quantity but what you get is a huge increase in quality. This is a place to watch wildlife in the most intense way.

A pelican with Isla San Cristóbal in the background.

The other advantage the Galápagos have over Africa is that you can explore on the land and in the sea via snorkeling or scuba diving. You can't really snorkel in the African bush. Sure there are rivers but hippos are scary enough when I'm in a boat and there's no way I'm getting in the water when there are crocodiles around. The Galápagos waters are filled with colorful fish, sea lions and sea turtles and the waters are mostly crystal clear. You also get to have up close and personal encounters with six foot long sharks which presumably are harmless to humans. At least that's what I was thinking when one swam straight towards me.

But the most impressive aspect of this trip has to be that the Galápagos are a massive show and tell for the concept of evolution due to their isolation. Darwin's ideas of natural selection are so clear and obvious. It all totally makes sense in a way it likely does nowhere else on the planet. Consider the marine iguana, a species that likely arrived in the Islands on some piece of driftwood somehow. They are reptiles like other iguanas and lizards but they get all their food from the bottom of the ocean. No other species of iguana voluntarily enters the ocean and most would likely perish as soon as or quickly after they did, either from lack of body warmth, lack of ability to get out of the water, lack of food, lack of ability to swim or by ingesting salt water into their body.

But the Galápagos marine iguana goes into the ocean every day to feed and comes out safe every day, Well, unless they fall victim to some sort of predator I suppose. They are equipped with tails for swimming and claws for climbing unlike any other lizard in the world. Their digestion system allows them to eat lichen from the ocean floor along with a healthy amount of seawater which is expelled through special glands near their noses. No other lizard can do such a thing. And they have simultaneously solved the body warmth and developed a camouflage protection mechanism by evolving to match their skin to the color of the volcanic rocks, a dark grey color that lets them heat up quickly in the sun and hides them from predators. You won't find an animal anything like the marine iguana anywhere else in the world because there is no set of circumstances that would have forced iguanas to evolve in this way anywhere else on the planet.

A land iguana near his cactus, Isla Plazas.

There are other similar stories to tell. The only species of cormorant in the world that doesn't fly is found in the Galápagos because there is no need to fly to evade predators. The cacti on the Islands are different depending on the presence of land iguanas. Where there are no land iguanas, the cacti grow close to the ground because there's nothing there to eat them; where there are land iguanas, the cacti have trunks to keep their paddles out of the reach of land iguanas and their trunks have bark that will shed if an iguana tries to climb. So how do the land iguanas eat if their food has evolved to stop them from eating? Well, now they just wait for cactus fruit to drop. Each cactus has an iguana (and only one iguana) underneath it where they wait without food or water until the cactus is ready to give up its bounty.

The tortoises have also evolved based on their diet of choice. On islands where plants that tortoises like to eat are low to the ground, the tortoise has what I would call a traditionally shaped shell, with its perimeter at a similar height above the ground all around the tortoise's body. But on islands with plants a good way off the ground, the tortoises have a more saddle shaped shell with a peak just above the head which allows the tortoises to stretch their necks up and eat food higher off the ground. Take a tortoise with a different shell and drop it on an island with food a couple of feet high and he's not likely going to last very long. He'll starve to death.

All of this is on display in a spectacular way in the Galápagos. It's like a laboratory where you can see, hear and (at times most especially) smell all of this taking place right before you. And everything I've written ignores Darwin's finches, the same bird with different beaks depending on the microenvironment in which they live and the animal more than anything else that coalesced Darwin's theory of evolution. The finches are admittedly the least obvious example of evolution in action for me because there are rarely multiple types of finch sitting next to one another and the differences are so subtle to be barely perceptible to me.

Our time in the Islands was spent drinking this all in. I had hoped to see as many different animals as possible on this trip but I knew seeing them all would be all but infeasible. While sea lions, tortoises, blue footed boobies, frigatebirds, iguanas (both land and marine), crabs, swallow-tailed gulls (the birds in the first photograph in this post) and pelicans are visible almost everywhere, there are other species which are more selective about where they call home. These rarer species include the Galápagos penguin, the hammerhead shark, flamingoes, flightless cormorants and albatrosses. I would have honestly loved to have seen a hammerhead shark or an albatross. Unfortunately, I struck out on both counts, being unlucky at Kicker Rock off the west coast of Isla San Cristóbal with the sharks and not visiting Isla Española which is the only spot where the waved albatrosses inhabit.

Flamingoes, Isla Santa Cruz.

But if I hadn't seen any of these more unique species, I think I would have been a little disappointed and I did get to see just one less than 24 hours before our departure from the Islands. The last landing of our trip to search for wildlife was on Isla Santa Cruz just before sunset. Our trek took us over a beach known as Bachas Beach where from the depressions in the sand sea turtles had been laying eggs recently; you could see the turtle shell imprints in the dunes where the females had pulled themselves out of the hollows.

Behind the beach is a brackish lagoon and as we looked over the sea turtle nests we saw a couple of bright pink flamingoes skimming the surface of the water for the shrimp that gives the flamingoes their distinctive color. We spent the next 30 to 45 minutes watching these two birds roam around the lagoon quite indifferent to the appearance of 17 gawking tourists standing on the beach watching them eat. It was for sure the most concentrated experience watching a single type of animal on the entire trip. The fading light and the way the setting sun set the pink color of the birds aglow just put a wonderful cap on our whole Galápagos experience. I'm glad we came across these two. I missed out on flamingoes in Africa and Florida in the last couple of years. Ecuador made up for those misses.

The Galápagos were unlike anywhere else I've ever been in my life and it's all because of Charles Darwin and the commitment of the government of Ecuador to keep these Islands the way they are. I've compared this experience a lot to visiting Africa; and while I think almost every week of heading back to the Dark Continent for more experiences, I likely won't rush back to the Galápagos any time soon just based on the enormous list of other places I want to experience. But I know pretty well that I won't get what I got out of this trip anywhere else on the planet. I'll keep the door cracked a little; I'd honestly still love to see albatrosses and Isla Isabela looks incredibly different than the other islands we visited. It was a privilege to visit.

Sea lion resting his head on a bed of vegetation, Isla Plazas. Taken from about three feet away.