Predators and prey, the hunters and the hunted. In most of the world, living creatures fall into these two basic categories, with humans as the most fearsome predators of all.
But there is one place on this planet where those distinctions are not so clear-cut -- and perhaps never will be.
It's a land that has been seemingly unscathed by human development, a magical setting where sea lions come up and nuzzle your feet, birds will fly onto your fingers, and a giant tortoise will poke his head out of his shell at your command.
It's the Galapagos Islands, also known as the "enchanted isles."
The reason people can walk among the animals so freely is that they have no large-mammal predators here, and thus are unafraid of intruders in their midst. They have evolved without the fear of humans that animals have in most of the world.
Because this remote archipelago on the equator has remained so untouched by civilization, it offers a travel destination more captivating than any Hollywood fantasy -- a tropical paradise where wildlife exudes the innocence of the Garden of Eden.
Darwinian experience
Located in the Pacific Ocean, 600 miles off the west coast of South America, the Galapagos Islands are part of the Republic of Ecuador. Both a national park and an international research center, they are perhaps best known as the place that inspired British naturalist Charles Darwin to expound his theory of evolution after a visit in 1835.
While Darwin is indeed a hero here -- his name is on everything from Darwin Bay to the Charles Darwin Research Station to Darwin's Disco -- visitors need not be natural-history scholars to appreciate the beautiful environments and exotic creatures he observed, including fierce-looking iguanas, colorful Sally Lightfoot crabs and comical booby birds. Because the islands have not changed much in the past 160 years, visitors have a chance to play Darwin -- seeing the wildlife in its natural habitat, much as he did.
One of the most profound discoveries visitors can make pertains not to any one species, however, but to the islands themselves. Natural evolution, as Darwin noted, involves the survival of the fittest. Having withstood the near-total industrialization of the globe until now, the Galapagos Islands are currently in a fight for their own survival.
Even more today than in Darwin's time, human visitors are enemies of this fragile ecosystem. To protect these vulnerable islands, Ecuador has imposed strict limits on the number of people who can visit every year as well as where they can go and what they can do. It is these restrictions, ironically, that give today's visitors the ability to see the islands in the unspoiled condition that makes them so vivid and fascinating.
On the mainland
I traveled to the Galapagos last year with 10 others from Maryland, as part of a larger cruise whose passengers spoke English, Spanish and German. We booked our trip with Maupintour, one of just a handful of cruise-ship operators that offer tours of the islands.
Our agenda for a 10-day tour was typical of most Galapagos trips. From Baltimore, we flew to Miami to catch a flight to Quito, Ecuador's capital. After several days of sightseeing on the mainland, we flew to the port city of Guayaquil to catch a smaller plane for our flight to the island of Baltra, our gateway to the Galapagos.
From Baltra we boarded our cruise ship, the M.V. Santa Cruz, for a four-day excursion to six of the 19 islands (and 40 islets) that comprise the Galapagos archipelago. (Some trips give visitors a chance to extend their stays in the Galapagos to seven days to see even more islands.)
At the end of the cruise, we flew back to Guayaquil for a day, and then on to the United States. It was a long distance to cover, but because it was all within the Eastern and Central time zones, jet lag was never a problem.
Getting to the islands
Landing at the tiny airport in Baltra on a Thursday morning, we were met by crew members from the ship, who took us aboard for our first island visit.
The Santa Cruz was designed for 80 passengers and a crew of 40. After we were on board, the crew divided us into five groups named after some of the creatures we'd see -- albatrosses, boobies, cormorants and so on. After lunch and a short sail, we disembarked for our first stop -- Dragon Hill, on the island of Santa Cruz.
Because the main ship couldn't get too close to shore, we boarded smaller motorized dinghys, called pangas, that carry about 16 passengers at a time. From then on we followed the same pattern for each day of the cruise -- a morning departure for one port, then back to the ship for lunch and a quick jaunt to a second port in the afternoon.
The Galapagos Islands are all within 50 miles of one another. Though they are on the equator -- Ecuador means equator in Spanish -- the islands aren't lush like the tropical islands of the Caribbean. Made primarily of volcanic rock, they are nearly barren. But what does grow can be quite magnificent -- including "candelabra" cacti and sunflowers as large as trees. Although the sun is strong, the cold Humboldt current keeps temperatures pleasant year-round.
On Dragon Hill -- named for the land iguanas that look like little dragons -- we got a tantalizing overview of the plants and wildlife we would see throughout our trip. Birds ranged from Darwin finches and mockingbirds to black-necked herons, yellow warblers and flamingos. On subsequent days, we visited islands that gave us a chance to concentrate on a few species at a time.
On our second day, we saw iguanas and crabs on Fernandina Island, and sea birds on the cliffs of Isabela, including penguins, pelicans, cormorants, boobies and lava gulls. Day three was tortoise day, with a visit to the tortoise reserve on the south side of Santa Cruz, followed by shopping at Puerto Ayora, the largest village on the islands. Day four was spent swimming with sea lions and walking among the masked and blue-footed boobies )) on Hood Island. In Gardner Bay, on Hood Island, we also had a chance to go snorkeling and explore the region's rich marine life.
Much of the appeal of the Galapagos is that they are not overrun with tourists. To protect the fragile habitats, the government has decreed that no more than 60,000 foreigners may visit in a given year, and all must be part of a group accompanied by licensed naturalists. Another 10,000 Equadorians may visit from the mainland.
The park has designated 48 stops that provide a glimpse of the wide range of plants and wildlife on the islands, although not all of them are open at all times. Private yachts are not allowed, so tourists must make arrangements through a small number of government-sanctioned tour operators. Fewer than half of the islands receive tourists at all; others are open only to scientific-research groups.
The result of these restrictions is that the islands get about 1,200 visitors a week, and because they are spread over various islands, each tour group feels at any given time as if it has each island to itself -- which, in many cases, it does.
Natural history
The naturalists provide the key to helping visitors understand what sets this archipelago apart. The islands, our guides told us, were created by volcanic action about 6 million years ago, making them relatively young by geological standards. Their present inhabitants are primarily descendants of creatures that either crawled up from the sea, flew there, or floated on driftwood or vessels from the mainland. The islands' isolation from the rest of the world makes them an ideal laboratory in which to observe natural evolution.
The first human visitors arrived in the 1500s. Eventually, the islands became a stopping point for ships sailing the Pacific Ocean. Darwin worked as an assistant to the captain of a British survey ship, HMS Beagle, whose crew had come to create detailed maps of the islands.
Today, the islands are home to about 12,000 people. Most of the year-round residents are concentrated on Santa Cruz, where Darwin Research Station is located. The islands are also temporary homes for scientists from many different countries, conducting research for universities and foundations.
This continuing research is perhaps Darwin's greatest legacy. When Darwin visited, the common belief in Western civilization was that God created fish and animals, and that they never changed in their physiology. Darwin himself was a product of those beliefs.
But during his visit with the Beagle, Darwin made detailed observations about the many finches he saw on the islands and brought specimens back to London for further study. When he analyzed them, he discovered that what he initially thought was one family of birds turned out to be 13 different species, based on disparities in the size and shape of the beaks, the length of the wings and other anatomical differences.
The different species, it turned out, came from different islands and never intermingled; the distance between islands was too great for the tiny finches to fly, and so they never cross-bred.
That led Darwin to conclude that rather than being created by God and never changing, as most people then believed, a single species could evolve into several different species over time. The finches, he reasoned, had changed physically over successive generations to cope with the living conditions on their respective islands -- including the food and nesting materials available.
In his landmark treatise, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," Darwin laid out his contention that living creatures are not forever fixed in their anatomy, but have the ability to adapt from generation to generation to survive in the wild. The finches' beaks may grow harder or more crooked, for example, depending on what berries they eat. And if finches could adapt, he postulated, so could all living creatures.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the story is that Darwin did not come to these conclusions while in the Galapagos, or shortly afterward. "On the Origin of Species" wasn't published until 1859, more than two decades after Darwin's trip to the Galapagos. Despite the long gestation period, it had a revolutionary effect on the way scientists viewed natural history.
More than finches
For contemporary visitors to the Galapagos, the finch is just one of many creatures that exemplify Darwin's theories. The islands are filled with creatures found nowhere else in the world -- including cormorant birds that can't fly and iguanas that can't swim -- because they have evolved in response to their immediate surroundings. There are Galapagos penguins, Galapagos sharks, Galapagos hawks, Galapagos doves and Galapagos butterflies. The islands also have many species of tortoises, which are distinguishable by the shapes of their shells. In fact, Galapagos means "saddles" in Spanish and refers to the saddle-backed tortoises that roam the beaches there.
While many ports have exotic creatures, what makes the Galapagos so unusual is the animals' lack of fear of human visitors. Because the animals have evolved so specifically from island to island, with shells or scales or other protective apparatus such as coloring, most of them have no natural predators and no innate fear of other creatures. As a result, the creatures do not run away when humans appear. Many, such as the sea lions, will come closer out of curiosity.
As part of its long list of restrictions, the park service of Ecuador prohibits visitors from touching or feeding the animals, bringing food onto uninhabited islands or going off the well-marked hiking trails.
Park rangers want visitors to clean their feet when moving from the pangas to the larger ship, so they don't carry specimens from one island to the other. But there are no rules about shying away from animals if they make the first move, which they often do.
Consequently, visitors will have many chances to walk freely among the birds, mammals and reptiles of the Galapagos. On Fernandina, there are so many iguanas, and they are so close in color to the black lava shoreline, that people have to watch where they walk so as not to step right into a nest of them.
On Hood Island, visitors can observe the mating dance of the blue-footed boobies, and walk right through their breeding grounds. The same island also has a nursery of baby sea lions. At the tortoise reserve on Santa Cruz, visitors can coax giant tortoises to stick their heads out of their shells by gently fanning the air near their long necks.
Santa Cruz is also the home of Lonesome George, a century-old tortoise that is perhaps the islands' most famous resident because he is the last of his breed. Scientists have searched the globe for a companion with whom he will mate, to no avail, and they are still trying.
Plants, birds and underwater life are equally exotic. From Hood Island, where we stopped on the last day, it is possible to swim out to a smaller island that, besides being shaped like a tortoise, is surrounded by a dazzling array of sharks, rays and other sea creatures. Using snorkeling equipment from the ship, we were able to observe their underwater ballet.
Barrier-free
The absence of barriers between humans and other living creatures is what separates a visit to the Galapagos from a safari in Africa. In Kenya, for example, animals are bigger and more ferocious, and part of the thrill of a ride through the savanna comes from watching for signs of conflict between one species and another. For the most part, though, lions and elephants seem oblivious to their human observers, who watch from the safety of a Land Rover and rarely get out of it.
In the Galapagos, the animals may be smaller and more sedate, but they are also more plentiful. Visitors can get much closer to them, and many of the creatures will clearly interact with their human observers. Sea lions will approach people the way a puppy does, which is why they are often called water dogs. In short, it is a much more intimate experience than an African safari -- and in many ways more intense.
Photographing the animals is also easier in the Galapagos, because the animals are so accessible and, in many cases, stay quite still.
Because the animals are so engaging, visitors are likely to come away with a new respect for them and the islands where they live. Naturalists can enhance that sense of bonding by pointing out ways tourists can protect and perhaps improve these fragile domains, rather than making them feel guilty about invading them.
During our visit to Floreana, for example, we saw dozens of giant sea turtles in the water heading for shore to lay eggs. But the beach was strewn with driftwood, which would have blocked their path. Our naturalist, Fabricio Valverde, asked each of us to pick up one piece of wood and stack it in a pile to remove the obstacles for the turtles coming ashore. It was a small gesture, but it sent a big message that tourists can tread lightly and leave the islands in better condition for the animals than they found them.
That's ecotourism at its best.
An Ideal Day
Visitation to the Galapagos Islands is strictly controlled to protect the islands. Visitors must travel with licensed guides and follow schedules approved by the National Park Service. If it were possible to compress a multiday excursion into one 24-hour period, it might include these highlights:
6 a.m.: Wake up on board and eat breakfast while watching the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean.
8 a.m.: Swim with the sea lions in Gardner Bay, on Hood Island. Go snorkeling around the smaller islets nearby.
10 a.m.: Take a brisk panga ride around Santa Cruz Island and watch for penguins, pelicans and other sea birds along the shore.
Noon: Greet Lonesome George and other giant tortoises at Charles Darwin Research Station, and inspect the nearby tortoise breeding center.
1 p.m.: Shop for souvenirs and lunch at Puerto Ayora, the largest village on the islands.
3 p.m.: Search for marine iguanas and colorful Sally Lightfoot crabs on Fernandina Island.
5 p.m.: Observe the intricate mating dance of the blue-footed booby birds and visit baby sea lions in their nursery on Hood Island.
7 p.m.: Dine back on board the ship and watch the sun set from the upper deck. The stars are always particularly bright at the equator.
When You Go
Getting there: From BWI, travelers typically fly to Miami International Airport and then on to Quito, the capital of Ecuador. The flight takes about four hours. Tourists then fly or take a train to the port city of Guayaquil for a 600-mile flight on TAME airlines to the Galapagos Islands.
Be prepared: Walking on the rugged terrain can be physically demanding, and a few of the landings from the cruise ship require wading from small boats to the shore.
Tips: A visit to the Galapagos is one of the most controlled trips a tourist can take because of the many rules and restrictions established by Ecuador's National Park Service. People aren't even allowed to bring food onto uninhabited islands, and in most cases they can't stay on land overnight. As a result, the cruise-ship operators take care of just about everything, from meals to entertainment to snorkeling equipment.
Accommodations: Most visitors are housed and travel on ships ranging from six-passenger yachts to cruise ships with a capacity of 90 passengers. On most yachts, the staterooms have private bathrooms. Cabins on yachts can be small. Another option is to stay ashore in a hotel at Puerto Ayora, the main village, and make day cruises to other islands.
Itineraries: Yachts and cruise ships make morning and afternoon shore excursions, each lasting about three hours. Visitors must be accompanied by licensed guides and may not stray from designated areas or trails. Cruises are not recommended for small children.
Packages: Three-, four- and seven-day Galapagos cruises, as well as charters and some cruises of longer duration, are offered by tour operators. Fares start at about $600 per person, double occupancy, for a three-night cruise, but lower prices are available in Quito. Packages that include air transportation to and from the Galapagos, as well as stays in Quito and elsewhere on the South American mainland, are also offered. Our 10-day trip, including four days in the Galapagos and airfare to and from the United States., cost $3,650 per person.
What to pack: Bring waterproof sandals for wet landings, and sturdy shoes with nonslip soles for hiking. Also, take sunscreen and a brimmed hat to protect against sunburn, a jacket, insect repellent, Dramamine or other medicine if needed for seasickness, field glasses and plenty of film. Bottled water -- preferable to local tap water -- is generally available in hotels and on board the cruise.
Medicine: Immunizations are not required for travel to Ecuador's mainland or the Galapagos Islands, but travelers may want to check with a physician or a local clinic. For example, it's a good idea to have malaria medicine.
Taxes: The Galapagos National Park collects an $80 per person entrance fee. When leaving Ecuador, visitors must pay a $25 departure tax.
Information: Ecuador Trade Center, Miami, Fla., 305-716-5252.
Recommended reading: Although you're likely to get a crash course on Charles Darwin when you go to the Galapagos, it helps to have some background about his theory of evolution. One of the most illuminating books on the subject is "The Beak of the Finch," by Jonathan Weiner. For a different perspective, read Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Galapagos."
Pub Date: 6/28/98