KEY POINTS:
William Dampier, pirate and naturalist (what a great combo), reported in the 1680s that en route to plunder Spanish ships around Mexico or the Philippines, the pirates would fill their holds with 200 Galapagos tortoises placed upside down on their carapaces and kept alive for slaughter during their journey.
The buccaneers knew the tortoises had such slow metabolisms that they didn't need food or water for extended periods.
Dampier included close observations of the Galapagos wildlife in his journals, and the great naturalist Charles Darwin took that journal with him on the voyage on the Beagle.
I took chapter 17 of Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle on board our Galapagos boat and the descriptions of the landscape and animals are very much consistent, even today.
Darwin recounts repeatedly flinging a marine iguana into the ocean to observe it returning to the same rock time and time again "This singular piece of apparent stupidity," Darwin called it. Well, you can't fling iguanas anymore. Or chop them up to examine seaweed in their gizzards. Oh, no. The lizards are precious.
Daily, tourists alight from dinghies and are guided along strictly marked walks, like herd animals.
The first bird trail we followed was biologically rich and, astonishingly, the birds, sea lions and iguanas are still unmoved by human presence. The blue-footed boobies and their daft expressions, the frigate birds with cherry-red inflatable chests didn't flap off.
The most surprising aspect of the wildlife is that it appears to deliberately exploit its photogenic qualities.
Darwin famously remarked how tame the animals were. They have further evolved. Since his time, and with visits of around 80,000 tourists a year, the animals and birds seem to have developed a strong sense of posing for the cameras.
I call it the theory of "vogue-lution". The giant tortoises stretch their necks for the cameras. The ridiculous blue-footed boobies approach and perform Charlie Chaplin soft shoe shuffles for the videos. We pass one booby sitting on the ground on North Seymour Island and Rozzo, our guide, says, "I think this bird is nesting". On cue it stands up and points to its egg with its beak. We took the photo.
While I snorkelled in the warm aquamarine waters in the channel between Santiago Island and Chinaman's Hat Island, our snorkelling group sees a dozen little Galapagos penguins, the only equatorial penguins in the world.
We are admiring them as they sit on the rock, when whoosh, a sea lion swishes between us, and deliberately heaves itself up on the rock behind the penguins. It then proceeds to frame the penguins for a photo, nose in the air. Someone even has a waterproof camera and takes the obligatory shot. George Miller could not have directed the moment better.
Land iguanas will happily stump up with their crazy orange hair-dos and do Godzilla impersonations, glaring at the lens (even though they are humble vegetarians, spending their lives waiting for bits of old cactus to drop).
This tameness and closeness of the animals makes the Galapagos very special, even if the animals appear to be affected by the cursed cult of celebrity.
The park authorities have identified key staging areas on each island, and other breeding colonies are left well alone.
Park workers and a bunch of Judas goats have heroically eradicated all goats from the northern part of Isabella and all of Santiago Islands (two of the largest), allowing ecosystem balances to start returning.
But park management is still fraught. The Ecuadorian fishing fleet pushes hard, politically, for access to more and more of the marine area. There are illegal fishing boats from other countries plundering the waters to the north. And for a poor country like Ecuador it is hard to manage, though the parks have a strong message in their public displays and publications about the fragility of the ecosystem.
Our visit follows a well tested pattern. We walk early in the morning before the heat of the day, snorkel during the hot time, and then travel to the next destination around cocktail hour.
One morning we climbed the volcano on Bartholome Island in a fine dawn "mizzle". The volcanic landscape, with Pinnacle Rock, was featured in the movie Master and Commander. I got very wet and climbed the steep, slippery boardwalk in bare feet, but what a view.
A rainbow of colours has been extruded from the ground over the past thousand or so years - yellows, bright reds, ochre browns, the landscape jagged and jarred by the activity.
Far below in the bay, two or three white boats sat at anchor. Bartholome has a small forest on one side, but the eastern slope which we climbed, featured only a few small succulent plants and the odd lava lizard. It is brand new in geological terms, with the promise of further evolution over the next millennia.
The following day we made landfall at Santa Fe Island, which has exquisite stands of tree cactus and pale yellow land iguanas. Every island different to the last. By island hopping, you understood how Darwin perhaps unconsciously absorbed the mechanics of evolution there, and then spent years perfecting his argument.
In The Voyage he states: "Considering the small size of the islands we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater and the boundaries of most of the lava streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period geologically recent the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhere near to that great fact - the mystery of mysteries the first appearance of new beings on earth."
The second-to-last port of call was my favourite, the Plaza Island, so called because grey cracked slabs of granite gave it some semblance of a European piazza. We anchored after dark and when the engines cut, all that could be heard was the belching and roaring of sea lions in the dark.
At sunrise we beached and walked past stands of cactus, and bright orange and red sea purslane. The track led along the top of a cliff where ocean birds nest, and shearwaters skim the waves 50m below.
At the end of the cliff, a bunch of has-been bull sea lions lay around creating a gross smell together, kept out of the harem by tougher, younger guys.
It was the most picturesque island and more boats were arriving as we headed off for the airport on San Christobal to catch the plane back to Quito.
CRUISES
World Expeditions have eight-day Galapagos cruises accompanied by naturalist guides exploring this isolated volcanic archipelago in search of seals, tortoises, unusual bird life, iguanas and lizards. Prices start from $3900 per person, joining at Quito. Prices include all meals, internal flights, transport to and from cruise and accommodation. Cruises depart weekly on Wednesdays and Fridays.
MORE INFORMATION
Phone World Expeditions on 0800 350 354 or visit www.worldexpeditions.com
- AAP
