One thing above all draws the curious, the adventurous and those who love nature to the Galapagos, rough-hewed volcanic islands 1,000 kilometres west of Ecuador: the animals.
They swim. They fly. They lounge. They lumber. Sometimes, they do more. Naturalist Klaus Fielsch squats beside the trail along Tower Island's clifftop. He picks up a twig, twiddling it as he tells his listeners how seabirds teach themselves to fish. They toss and catch sticks to practice speed and aim, he says.
The twig's movement catches the attention of a young Nazca booby nearby. The football-sized seabird web-foots closer.
Fielsch sees the approach and gently flicks the stick toward the bird.
The booby moves nearer. Big, pale eyes target the twig. An even bigger, pastel beak snatches it, and the triumphant bird turns and waddles away, its flat feet slapping the bare ground.
Such interaction is rare anywhere, but odds leap in the Galapagos where wildlife, ready for its close-up, generally goes about its business as if humans aren't there. Even the eldest human watcher becomes a child of wonder in this cradle of life nuzzling the equator in the Pacific Ocean.
Although sailors with their own oceangoing boats, and backpackers going cheap, can dip into the islands, strict rules set by Galapagos National Park, which controls 97 per cent of the land (a huge marine reserve surrounds it) make independent travel impractical. Most visitors choose cruise tours where permits, certified guides and fees are arranged by the operator.
Taking the organized option, I've joined a small group of journalists aboard the 40-passenger ship Isabela II of Metropolitan Touring, an Ecuadorean company that pioneered tourism in the Galapagos more than 40 years ago. Metropolitan books its North American travellers through Dallas-based Adventure Associates. Our seven-day trip will visit six of the 13 major islands in the archipelago.
After a two-hour flight from the mainland, our passenger jet lands at the airstrip on Baltra, first built during the Second World War by Americans protecting the Panama Canal. Barely onto the tarmac, birders have their first sighting: a small ground finch. It's one of 13 subspecies of finches found in the Galapagos and named after Charles Darwin, whose visit in 1835 added fuel to evolutionists' theories. The bird is so near that some cameras can't focus on it.
It's our first experience with what sets the Galapagos apart from most other wildlife hot spots: proximity. You see animals thrillingly close. Many seem fearless, unmoved by the presence of humans.
"Here, you're just another critter, a fellow inhabitant of the planet," says Fielsch, expedition manager for Metropolitan Touring.
He calls the failure to flee a "neurological flaw" developed over generations by species with few natural predators in the islands and decades of protection from harm by humans. "They should fear anything they don't know," he says, but they don't.
Shuttle buses take us across hardscrabble Baltra, where Jerusalem thorn trees thrive, but not much else. Small ferries, their roofs piled with travellers' luggage, carry us over the narrow Canal de Itabaca to Santa Cruz, the archipelago's most inhabited island.
Arid lowlands give way to cooler central highlands. Tree daisies tower, and moss drapes and sprouts on moist branches. We turn off the slender highway for a short hike on Rancho Mariposa, where tall grasses provide a banquet for wild giant tortoises. Following lanes that their roaming, grazing bulk has mashed in the vegetation, we find a domed shell with the occupant at home. Its legs are the width of small trees. Ever so slowly, a head emerges from the bony hut to give us a reptilian once-over.
A barn owl preening on a rock shelf in a semi-dark lava tube on Mariposa provides an environmental lesson. A fingernail-size feather floats down to visitors in the cave. I pick it up, admiring its beautiful design.
"You can't keep it," says Isabela II expedition leader Carlos King, who has joined us for the walk and seems to be reading my mind.
It would be an exquisite souvenir, but guides carefully guard against the transportation of such things among islands. Each landfall is a unique environment, and matter from one should not be allowed to reach another and set off unnatural change.
Understanding, I reluctantly let the feather fall to the tube's floor.
We descend to Puerto Ayora, the Galapagos's largest town. Here, we'll board the Isabela. Beforehand, the Charles Darwin Research Station provides additional time with tortoises. Lonesome George is the star at the facility, which studies and breeds tortoises and land iguanas to resupply declining wild populations. George lives up to his name. The 90-kilo hulk is the last living member of his subspecies. Worse, even comely females of closely related lines haven't caught the eye of the elderly reptile, almost certainly dooming his branch of the family tree to break.
It takes only an afternoon's walk on Tower Island, and Thomas Kruger of Chemsee, Germany, exclaims, "Perfect! My dream is fulfilled."
The northern isle, closed to large vessels, is a chattering, clattering other world of Nazca and red-footed boobies tending their young, male frigate birds ballooning their crimson throat pouches in hopes of attracting a mate, juveniles of all species on this nesting ground learning life lessons, and storm petrels, tropic birds and swallow-tailed gulls slicing the winds sweeping across the rocky plateau.
Tower's stony, uneven trail, reached after a climb up the boulders of Prince Philip's Steps, calls for agility and sure-footedness. Many of Isabela's passengers are middle age or older; an expensive trip such as this (more than $4,000 per person) is out of the financial range of many younger travellers. For any age, sweat and physical effort are the price of amazement such as Kruger's.
An overnight sail and a second crossing of the equator (the ship's GPS systems display Earth's belt line as "00.00.00") brings the vessel to Tagus Cove on Isabela Island. Vintage graffiti painted or cut on the rocks is an ugly but fascinating log of ships that passed this way. The earliest scrawl dates to 1836, a year after Darwin's visit aboard the Beagle; the later marks stretch to the Second World War.
Just above the water's surface, along the line where barnacles grip the rocks, we spot two only-in-Galapagos residents.
Hopping across the stones are small penguins, the world's northernmost. Distant ancestors, possibly caught in the cold Humboldt Current barrelling northward from Antarctic waters, made landfall - and a new subspecies -here at the equator.
Another bird that can't fly but swims is nearby. The flightless cormorant spreads stumpy wings to the hot sun, drying them after an underwater chase for a fish dinner.
With plentiful food, no better place to go and a need for streamlining, the bird's body adapted, shrinking its wings and giving up oils in its feathers that would have made it too buoyant to dive deep.
A short but steep trail from the cove overlooks the green soup of Darwin Lake and cloud-crowned La Cumbre volcano across the strait on Fernandina Island.
A crowd of scaly, spine-backed, salt-caked marine iguanas forms a sort of welcoming committee as passengers wade through mangrove-shaded shallows and onto Fernandina. The black reptiles, warming themselves after feeding underwater on algae, are so numerous and so inert that arriving humans must watch not to stamp on clawed arms or feet.
Fernandina, youngest of the Galapagos islands, is still forming. Lava flowed from its volcano as recently as a year ago, and the ropes and glops, shields and clumps, swirls and straws of congealed lava that visitors cross may be less than a millennium old. The payoff of the trudge is sea lions lounging like big, wet dogs on the beige beach. Some snuggle next to each other in sleep while pups yip for their mother's attention. Dozing iguanas punctuate the sprawl.
Life here is uninterrupted by human concern or sentimentality. A fly-blown, pitifully thin pup, plainly ill, is left to its fate. The remains of an iguana, curled in the animal's final sleep, are undisturbed.
The ocean dances, pirouetting among lava arches and a grotto on James Island's Puerto Egas trail. Fur seals, another equatorial oddity, have claimed this rough sanctuary. A fat mother, her pup snoozing against her in a cooling pool, lazily swats flies away with a flipper. A youngster levers itself up a nearly perpendicular wall to rest on a ledge. A marine iguana turns its face to the sun's warmth above a seal pup sleeping soundly in a shaded crevice. Tiptoeing sideways among them all, as they do on each island, are red-orange sally lightfoot crabs scavenging tidbits from tidal pools.
Magnificent frigate birds ride the air wave above the Isabela as the ship cruises to one last island on our route, lunar-like Bartolome. It promises the photo everyone wants: skyward-jutting Pinnacle Rock. The silhouette was made famous in the movie Master and Commander, and the view belongs only to those willing and able to make the hot, steep climb up a walkway's 370 steps and several inclines to the island's summit.
Winded, Isabela's intrepid make it to the top as daylight begins its abrupt departure. (At the equator, the sun rises about 6 a.m. and sets about 6 p.m. year-round, and deep darkness bookends those hours.) They photograph the volcanic spearhead and descend, chased by voracious mosquitoes.
Author: Mary Ellen Botter | Source: The Gazette [October 29, 2010]