January 29th – February 4th 2023, Galápagos Islands.


I know I am in the Galápagos Islands because, when walking from the plane to the terminal building on Baltra Island, there’s an iguana asleep in a flowerbed right by the edge of the footpath. At first, I assume it’s a piece of concrete — a sort of Galápgoan version of a garden gnome, put there as a “welcome tourist!” gesture.

But no, he’s real.

Next, the bus that takes everyone from the little ferry linking Baltra Island to much larger Santa Cruz Island, has to stop along the way because there’s an iguana crossing the road. And rather slowly at that. Why did the iguana cross the road? I’ve no idea because one side looked pretty much the same as the other — a barren mess of half dead plants, cactus and mangrove, and volcanic lava debris. From Puerto Ayora, the main town on Santa Cruz, in fact the main town in the whole archipelago, I took a ferry to Puerto Villamil on the neighbouring island of Isabela, a bumpy ride lasting several hours and which I thought would never end. But it was worth it.

The Galápagos Islands are Ground Zero when it comes to evolution. There are 21 islands, some 900 kilometers out into the Pacific Ocean and they straddle the equator. A few are little more than rock outcrops but a dozen or so are sizable and three, Isabela, Santa Cruz and San Cristobal, contain almost all of the 33,000 people who live in what is a province of Ecuador. When Charles Darwin came here in 1835 during the second voyage of the Beagle, the place had been largely isolated for millions of years. The Spanish arrived in 1535 and various buccaneering British sailors followed suit and mapped the place in 1684. But for all that, the Galapagos had largely been ignored . . . but not by nature.

Darwin was 22 years old when he began his work, spending most of five years observing nature in and around the Pacific, and just five weeks in the Galápagos. But it was sufficient time for him to join a whole pile of dots suggesting that plants and animals adapt to their environment in order to survive and prosper. Twenty three years after that voyage of the Beagle, he published his On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and nothing has been quite the same since. The islands are well aware of their place in natural history and the importance of preservation. Large signs at entry points warn visitors against trying to remove any plants or animals. Regular baggage checks, at ports and when traveling between islands seek to ensure no one brings in, or out, anything living organic.

Nearby signs say ‘Please don;t disturb me, I’m sleeping’ — and no one does.

The first thing that strikes the visitor to the Galapagos Islands (well, this one at any rate) is that there are animals everywhere. And, the amazing thing is, they don’t seem afraid of people. In fact, they don’t seem the least bit interested in us at all. Sea Lions loll about on seaside footpaths and seats, on boats and on jetties. Some even sleep on benches put there for humans but happily turned into beds by the Sea Lions, who contentedly defecate where they flop. There are even notices saying “I’m sleeping, please do not disturb”.

The animals have taken over. . .

The same live and let live approach attends the fish market on Santa Cruz. Fish are landed and women gut and clean them for selling, under the watchful eye of pelicans. Every now and them, they earn a scrap, which keeps everyone happy.

The ever-watchful, ever-hopeful fish market Pelican.

Cabo Rosa tunnels: a network of sunken lava tubes now home to fish, turtles, sharks and birds.

On my first morning on Isabela, I take a snorkeling tour to the tunnels — a place about an hour west along the southern coast of Isabela. First stop is Roca Union, a single rock outcrop maybe a kilometer or three offshore on which sit several boobies. There are two types of the bird there when we visit — the Red Footed Booby and the Blue Footed Booby, the first on top of the rock, and the blue-footed cousin on a ledge below, facing inwards and not at all interested in us.

Blue Footed Booby.

The booby is a strange looking bird. It has a head and face quite like a gannet and a body about the size of a small goose. But its legs are very stumpy and it waddles, rather than walks, lifting each foot in turn in a rather exaggerated gesture outwards and upwards, and then forwards, as though they have glue on their soles. It was this manner of funny walking that earned it its name — booby means silly in Spanish, says our guide Diego Rivadeneiva.

Deigo takes us to the tunnels at Cabo Rosa which are made of lava and through which the liquid volcanic rock flowed into the sea. What’s left today is a complex mass of black rocks and broken open tunnel tubes and arches, perfect cover for sea creatures. On top of the tunnels, there are nesting sites used by boobies and we get very close to some who, again like other creatures, seem almost completely unfazed by our presence.

Snorkeling around the lava tunnels and a whole different world opens up. There are fish everywhere — parrot fish and puffer fish, and yellow tail damsel fish — all of them sporting electric blue, yellow and pink colours, and there’s Pacific sea horses.

Under one of the arches created by the lava, White Tipped Reef Shanks are sleeping. They lie in the water, floating just off the bottom, completely still and seemingly unaware or our presence, or at least uninterested in our being there. They are not huge, perhaps a meter and a half in length and don’t look dangerous at all. According to Diego, who leads us to them, they sleep during the day but at night, will go further out to sea to hunt shellfish and octopus.

The big thrill comes when we encounter sea turtles. Snorkeling about on the surface, all the time looking down, suddenly one looms out of the half-light ahead — a big thing, maybe three feet long and a foot and a half wide. He (and it is a he) snuffles along the bottom, ripping out greenery, and sending clouds of sand into the water. Lots of electric-coloured fish hang around his mouth, feeding off whatever is in the debris from his pulling up and chomping. We see three or four of them, all sort of lumbering through the water, their flippers active but not flailing in any way, just looking very relaxed and going about their feeding.

Again, they seem utterly uninterested in us, and not the least bit disturbed by us. I ask Diego about this — why aren’t creatures fearful of humans? Because, he says, they are not hunted and it is illegal to touch them, let along try to remove any. And so, they just get on with whatever it is they are doing and they are left alone.

Beach-dwelling iguana and young.

The iguana’s camouflage makes it almost indistinguishable from lava.

The same appears to be true for the iguanas. They are everywhere close to water — on the beach, on rock outcrops along the beach, on boardwalks — big ones up to three feet long and scores of tiny ones. It appears that they breed rather successfully. You can be sitting on a barstool, look down and suddenly notice that the long black shape in the sand by your feet is not a sleeping cat but an iguana! Wherever mangroves-meet-sand-meet-jetties, there you will find these totally weird, gargoyle-like little fellows. Up close, they look ferocious and medieval, or like something out of one of those sci-fi-meets-vikings nonsense series. You can see where at least some of the inspiration for Gremlins came.

About 100 years old and still going strong: the Galápagos Giant Turtle.

The next day I went to see the famed Galápagos giant tortoise, which gave the islands their name, again from the Spanish. Darwin noticed small differences between the tortoises on different islands. According to Deigo, on Isabela there are five types of tortoise, each differing slightly from the others in small but not unimportant ways due to each having grown up on the flanks of different volcanoes. The lava flows off each of Isabela’s five main volcanoes cut the tortoises off from each other (they all came originally, millions of years ago, from Peru and Chile), and so they developed — evolved — slightly differently.

At the tortoise sanctuary on Isabela, there are some 900 of the creatures, 800 of them new born (which means, in tortoise span, anything from two years to about seven). The one I looked at most, named No 2 (with stunning lack of imagination), is believed by the sanctuary to be 100 to 120 years old. Despite that, he’s nimble enough on those feet you would think would have evolved better for walking. The tortoises were removed from the south-facing flank of Volcán Sierra Negra in the late 1990s because predators (rants, birds of prey, dogs, cattle) were killing the young or eating eggs. Adult tortoises mate for up to five hours, which sounds like we missed out of that bit of evolution . . . It’s an odd thing but when the female lays eggs and buries them in a 30 to 40 cms deep pit, and defecates and pees on top to put predators off, the young hatch after 160 days and have to get on with life on their own. They never know their parents, who have no interest in them at all after the eggs are laid.

Pretty flamingos snuggling a lake for the food that gives them their colour.

Walking back to my hostel, I find half a dozen flamingos feeding in lake. They are the pinkest pink I have ever seen. They look terribly beautiful and fragile but yet they too seem to thrive here, despite the annual 270,000 or so tourists — retirees and backpackers mainly — who come to look at them and wonder at all the extraordinary creatures in this most unusual place before flying off to the next stop on that bucket list. . .

*An edited version of this post appeared in The Irish Times online on Monday, February 6th 2023

 

Oi! Bog off — this is my rock.