Island Life

This is a public information announcement. Some of the previous blogs, namely Quito and Costa Rica, which did not include pictures due to slow internet upload speeds at the time, have now been updated with the images and normal service has been resumed (for the moment).

I was within a reptile’s scaly skin thickness of planting my foot on the bloomin’ thing! Black rock, black iguana – big, black iguana – it’s about a metre long and it’s a good job it flinched or I might have dropped over the edge of a basalt cliff!

Marine iguana panorama

This is the first time I’ve spent more than two nights in one place on the entire trip so far. It feels quite civilised to be able to unpack my bag and sort my increasingly ragged clothes onto shelves and hangers. I occupy my time, when I’m not with colleagues and new friends, by writing the blog or my journal or going on a mini-expedition. And that is what I’m doing now. I’m exploring the coastline east of the Charles Darwin Research Station where I am staying. There’s no-one else around and I’ll spend the next couple of hours alone. Still no chance of getting lost for once as the sea is to the right of me, so it should be on the left to find my way home.

Marine iguanas' meeting

The remarkable marine iguana is unique to the Galapagos and is recognizable from its close relation the land iguana by its typically black colouration, although older, bigger specimens tend to show some faded colour, with longer toes and a generally more robust appearance. The marine versions are almost invisible on the black lava rocks, but highly visible when sunbathing on the white sand beaches. As well as sitting on rocks and sand they also lie, for hours, comatose on paths and roads, forcing you to walk/ cycle/ drive around (or over!) them. As you get close, they shoot salt water from their nostrils, like two miniature water pistols, sometimes hitting your lower leg! They also occur in large groups, huddled together on the rocks in an almost intimidating manner, making it difficult to pick a way through, all snorting in unison, like miniature Las Vegas fountains.

The basalt rock on which they live, and against which waves hurl them when they are in the sea, was once incandescent, liquid lava streaming from a fiery mountain. On cooling, the young rock contracted and cracked creating irregular, polygonal joints - weak spots the wearing actions of weather and sea. Often, through the cracks, dark, eerie, hollow voids – lava tubes – are visible, creating a subterranean honeycomb through the island’s mass. As the lava solidified gas bubbles became trapped, which now shatter as the rock weathers to produce tiny, razor-sharp, serrated teeth to shred your flip-flops and anything else less tough than a marine iguanas skin. Together these features produce the geological mayhem we see today. Crabs supply the only splashes of colour. I am used to the drab crabs of Scarborough rock pools, I guess they are dressed in camouflage, but here they are patterned with orange, red and yellow and sitting on black rocks exposed to whoever, or whatever, cares to be looking. I guess they are not readily predated by anything around here.

Crabs!

The other famous reptilian inhabitants of these islands are those meat pies on legs, the giant tortoises. Galapagos is the only place in the world, apart from the Seychelles – another tropical archipelago, where giant tortoises exist. There are several versions of the standard model in the Galapagos and Lonesome George at the tortoise and iguana breeding centre in Puerto Ayora, is the last of his kind. He was non-plussed with his celebrity status the morning I popped by; I guess he was too shy to come out of his shell! On one rainy occasion in the highlands when Mark, the research station’s restoration ecology expert, was taking me to some forest restoration field sites near the Rancho Promicias, we tip-toed past several of these giants as they sat in the track. They went into self-preservation mode, retracting their heads and limbs and in so-doing expelling air from their lungs and simultaneously emitting a wheezy, screeching noise that, if it were several decibels louder, could be confused for the terrifying noises made by Raquel Welch’s dinosaur friends. The Ranchos Promicias promotes itself to tourists as a tortoise farm, but they don’t actually farm tortoises. What they have done is adapt some low grade farmland by removing hedges and fences allowing wild tortoises to wander in to feed on the succulent grass and wallow in the pond. Gradually, natural vegetation is returning to this once farmed area, while tourists flock here to see the tortoises creating more income than the original farm created.

Wild giant tortoise (the one on the left!)

SBS-style eco-tourism

In terms of animals, few places can compete with North Seymour Island, famed for its bird life. To the north of Baltra, which is to the north of Santa Cruz, this island was created by ocean floor uplift rather than directly by volcanism. I am visiting the island as part of an organised tour – the only way to get there as part of a multi-national group (USA, Argentina, China, Netherlands, Ecuador, England/ Yorkshire (me), France and Korea). We are disgorged from our mother ship into a smaller rigid-inflatable to ferry us to the intimidating, rocky shore. There is no formal boat landing area, instead the driver steers the boat onto the rocks and tries to keep it there with the motor pushing as we scramble over the rising and falling nose onto land. Quite precarious, but no-one dies! Our expert guide has his work cut out herding cats and ensuring we don’t stray from the narrow marked path.

The wildlife is spectacular and very tame. I watch the people watching the wildlife as they clamber around, top-heavy with camera lenses that cost more than my car. I had not realized that the human body was capable of contorting into such shapes as photographers attempt to capture an image of the inside of a blue-footed booby’s eye. It is the frigate bird breeding season – they’re the ones where the male has the inflatable orange throat sack to attract a mate. Apparently frigate birds do not have water-proof feathers, so they specialise in picking fish from the surface of the sea with their bills, or bothering boobies until they give up their catch. The swell on the east coast of the small island creates nicely formed waves crashing onto jagged basalt rocks. It is here where the sea lions, including impossibly cute youngsters, are playing. Our guide gets upset when someone calls them seals.  If you know the difference, then answers on a postcard please, because I'm afraid I switched off at this stage. Just as we are leaving, a sea lion decides it hasn’t had enough attention and heads straight for us. When it is within easy clicking range for those of us without a metre-long lense, it stops, lies down and works hard at photogenic cuteness.

Frigate bird

Poseur!

On leaving North Seymour we head for a picturesque, white sand beach to snorkel. The back of the beach is out of bounds as this is a turtle nesting area. I don my swimming goggles and swim out (snorkeling gear is too heavy to cart around for two months!). The choppy water is murky with sediment. I’m aware of the potential for sharks hiding in the gloom, when I spot a large, dark shadow ahead of me. For a split second – well you can imagine – it came closer and assumed the shape of a large turtle – at least a metre long, which I follow until it gets bored of me.


Animal life is spectacular in the Galapagos, but not all of it. An invasion of pigs, goats, rats, cats and donkeys over the centuries has severely-altered and depleted the unique, natural ecology of many islands. On one of my gut-busting cycle rides through the humid zone’s farming area, instead of watching the scenery I spend most of my time manouvering through the remnants of giant rats, flattened on the road like contemporary fossils. These introduced mammals have been the focus for sustained and expensive control measures on many islands (see Galapagos National Park website). One particular success story is Project Isabella, on Isabella Island, where the removal of these animals, largely by hunting and poisoning, has allowed the natural vegetation to recover and bird populations to increase. This is part of an ongoing effort to restore the natural ecology of parts of the Galapagos.

Increasingly, during my stay in the Galapagos, I am intrigued by the role of people here - the good, the bad and the ugly. And, to paraphrase David Attenborough, that will be the subject of my next blog.