Wild and wonderful in the Galapagos Islands

He may have had what Richard Dawkins calls “the most powerful idea ever”, but Charles Darwin was, by the standards of today’s environmentally sensitive tourists, a vandal. Indeed, when HMS Beagle landed at the Galápagos Islands in September 1835, the local wildlife must have wondered whether the ship’s naturalist was there simply to have a laugh at its expense.

Pity, in particular, the giant tortoises. In his Journal of Researches, Darwin boasts that “I frequently got on their backs, and then, upon giving a few raps on the hinder part of the shell, they would rise up and walk away; but I found it very difficult to keep my balance”.

Things are, of course, very different now. Darwin cemented his reputation 24 years later with the publication of On the Origin of Species and – thanks in particular to the 13 different species of finch he observed there – the Galápagos archipelago is forever associated with his name. The giant tortoises have since become icons, too.

Tourists, have also learnt to modify their behaviour. But working out how visitors fit into the Galápagan scenery – assuming we should be here at all – has proved complicated. Ecuador, which owns the islands, declared them to be a national park in 1959; Unesco granted them World Heritage Status in 1978, with the surrounding waters later being designated a marine reserve. Strict residence and fishing controls were introduced in 1998; programmes to eradicate feral goats imported by mariners are still being undertaken. Yet of the 13 main islands, five (Baltra, Floreana, Isabela, San Cristóbal and Santa Cruz) are now inhabited by about  40,000 people, most of whom are involved in the tourism industry.

Of course, tourists generate plenty of cash for the local economy when they visit the Galápagos islands on cruises and tours. They also pay a $100 (Dh367) park entrance fee. But the inexorable rise in visitor numbers – from 41,000 in 1990 to more than 100,000 in 2005 – raises its own difficulties. Visitors arrive by air (two hours from the Ecuadorean mainland), but the view is a sobering one: dark and bleakly mysterious, the islands prickle the calm of the Pacific with a brooding menace, the black volcanic rock scraping upwards into mist-shrouded calderas.

From the sky, the archipelago seems remote, untouched; 1,000km of open water separates these islands from the coast of South America. I saw no houses, no boats, no single sign of life until we began to bank down towards the strip that marks out the tiny airport on Baltra island.

Baltra is a nugget of rock to the north of Galápagos’s main inhabited island, Santa Cruz. The two are separated by a tiny channel, so the airport transfer involves a trip over the water by skiff (fare $0.80; the US dollar is the national currency). Brown pelicans roosted in the reeds by the shore, gulping at us as we passed; magnificent frigate birds wheeled overhead like computer-generated pterodactyls. From the landing stage on Santa Cruz, I was driven into the interior by Raúl, who works at the Galápagos Safari Camp, a newly opened lodge up in the highlands. Everything started small on our journey; the red soil was spattered with tangles of bleached-white wood, cactus plants and bright green grass. My first close encounter was with a cricket, then a bright yellow butterfly and a flock of finches (the birds so tame that Raúl had to beep his horn to get them to fly out of our way). But as we climbed into the hills, the vegetation grew in height, rising lusher with every metre of elevation.

The Galápagos Safari Camp lies at the end of a dirt track: the last farm before the national park begins. The view from the sleek, modern curve of the newly constructed main building is astounding: a broad sweep of the coast, pricked with conical hills, with the neighbouring islands looming beyond the coast in sharply defined gradients of grey.

My ‘room’ was set below – one of eight luxury tents imported from Australia by the owners, Stephanie and Michael Mesdag, who hope to lure visitors here for a spot of R&R at the beginning or the end of a cruise around the islands. The prospect of a Galápagos lion padding through the scalesia and pale green palo santo trees might stretch credulity, but the Safari Camp is nevertheless a place of fantasy – the perfect opportunity to take stock of the islands for the first time.

I arrived to tropical dampness and an almost immediate, sluicing downpour that left everything slick with a glistening sheen. The hot, wet season runs from January to June here, then gives way to a chillier, dryer period, when the islands are enveloped by a mist called the garúa. It’s a weather system unique to the Galápagos: the product of the cold underwater currents that meet here on the otherwise season-less equator. In the evening, as I enjoyed an exquisite meal of seared tuna served on the lodge’s veranda, the darkness fizzed with sounds of insect life; by next morning the birds had taken over, letting rip in a mighty dawn chorus.

Later that day, I found myself aboard the vast Galápagos Legend, a 98-passenger luxury cruise ship that calls at Santa Cruz every Tuesday and Friday. Ninety-seven per cent of the islands’ area lies within the national park, and there are few places where visitors – accompanied by a registered guide – are allowed to disembark. So whether you travel in a small group on a tiny charter boat, or aboard a behemoth such as the Galápagos Legend, the landing sites are the same, the routes inland carefully prescribed.

In our case, we were ordered into small teams – Albatrosses, Boobies, Cormorants, Dolphins, Frigates, Gaviottas (gulls) and Iguanas – for our twice-daily disembarkation via pangas, small motor launches. Every evening aboard the Legend, we were briefed as to where we would land the next day, and what we would see. And unlike on most other nature treks, the caveat “if we’re lucky” was never uttered. Instead, we were showered with the prospect of outlandish encounters: “Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, you will see flightless cormorants, sealions, flamingoes and penguins.” It was pronounced as fact, and it invariably turned out to be true.

Alongside a crash course in nature photography, some mental snapshots: marine iguanas piled on top of each other, flightless cormorants stretching their stunted wings on the rocks of Fernandino as fur seals slumber nearby; sea turtles bumbling along cropping algae from the sea floor; sealions everywhere – swimming with us, fighting with each other, or just lolling on the beach.

At night, the lights of the Legend attracted plankton to the surface, which in turn lured flying fish, which themselves arouse the interest of sea lions, and then Galápagos sharks: an entire food chain laid out before us in the gloom. And alongside the big stuff, there were smaller moments to cherish: flocks of finches pecking for seeds; the shy but spectacular Galápagos dove peeking out from behind a bush; warblers, mockingbirds, herons and woodpeckers; sally-go-lightly crabs in their bright livery.

We met our first land iguanas on the island of Isabela. Cast in fiery colours, they stood stock-still in the shade, unperturbed by our presence. Get past the exotic, once-in-a-lifetime animal encounters, though, and it’s the landscape that leaves the most lasting impression: the red, iron-rich sand of Rabida, the cracks and fissures of the lava on Fernandino, the blow-holes and rock pools on the shores of Santiago, the monochromatic splendour of the islands at dusk.

Even in my last 24 hours on the islands, back on Santa Cruz, I witnessed things that are in themselves worth travelling thousands of miles to see: vivid pink flamingoes sifting for krill in a lagoon near Bachas beach; a sea turtle heading back to the sea, having just laid her eggs up on the shore; a vast hollow tube of lava, big enough to walk through and hundreds of metres long.

Nothing, however, beats your first encounter with a giant tortoise in the wild.

You can see baby giant tortoises at the Darwin Centre, a captive breeding station near Santa Cruz’s town of Puerto Ayora. It’s here that they are reared before being reintroduced to their islands; it’s also here that Lonesome George ploughs his solitary furrow.

The Darwin Centre’s efforts are laudable, but the problem with seeing baby giant tortoises is that they look, well, just like normal-sized family pets. It’s in the highlands that you see the real thing.

When we finally arrived at a farm lying at the edge of the tortoises’ protected area, they weren’t exactly hard to find: a couple were parked like Minis in a field; another was half-submerged in a pond with a duck standing on its back. I hadn’t been prepared for quite how large they were, or how grave they looked as they munched their way through the landscape.

As we all captured the moment for eternity on our camera a chirrup of finches was briefly matched by the beep and snap of autofocus and camera shutters.

After a while, we left them to it. I sincerely hope Darwin would have done the same.

The Galápagos Islands lie on a volcanic hotspot – the meeting point of the Nazca and Cocos tectonic plates – and are drifting gently south-east. The oldest island is Española, which geologists reckon is more than three million years old, and lies to the east. The youngest two are Fernandina and Isabela (the largest land mass in the archipelago, with a spine of five active volcanoes).

 

These lie to the west, nearest to the hotspot, and are  750,000 years old. The relative differences in age account for the islands’ characters: lava, cacti and simple food chains in the west; fertile soil, greenery and cliffs full of birdlife in the east. But just why are the animals so tame? Because the islands were never attached to any major landmass, all the animals now endemic to the archipelago either swam or flew here and – in the absence of any competing fauna – occupied all the available evolutionary niches. The finch took on the role of woodpecker and vampire bat; tortoises graze like cattle. Because there were no predators equivalent to humans for them to be scared of.

 

Direct flights to Baltra and San Cristóbal airports in the Galápagos Islands leave from Guayaquil on the Ecuadorean mainland and are operated by Tame (00 593 2 290 9900; www.tame.com.ec) and AeroGal (00 593 2 294 2800; www.aerogal.com.ec). A transit card costs $10 (Dh36) and the park entrance fee is $100. Guayaquil is served by KLM (08705 074074; www.klm.com) via Amsterdam; and Iberia (0870 609 0500; www.iberia.com) via Madrid.

The 63m luxury yacht La Pinta started operation on March 14. The vessel accommodates 48 passengers in outside cabins, all with picture windows.

Bales Worldwide (0845 057 0600; www. balesworldwide.com) offers weekly departures as part of a 14-day La Pinta Cruise holiday, from £3,790 (Dh27,400) per person.

The price includes return KLM flights from London Heathrow via Guayaquil and Quito.

Emirates, Etihad, BA and Silverjet fly direct to London daily.

Galapagos Safari Camp, Santa Cruz Island, Galápagos, Ecuador (00 593 9179 4259; www.galapagossafaricamp.com). Double tents start at $400 (Dh1,469), half board.

For more information log on to:

www.vivecuador.com

www.savegalapagos.org