JOIN USThe pink and blue iguana looks at me quizzically as I train my lens inches away from his scaly face. How could I disturb him when he was on his way to a debutantes’ party on the other side of the spur? He has donned his best attire of the season to impress the bevy of beauties gathered under the thorny shrub yonder. He is indeed handsome.
I can’t get enough of his lovely colours, and I keep clicking away. In order to get a better angle, I move back, without taking my eyes off the viewfinder. One moment I am staring into his eyes through my lens, and the next, I am sprawled spread-eagled on the rocky ground. My rib cage takes the brunt of the fall. I hear an ominous thud even as my chest explodes in excruciating agony. But my camera and the heavy 400 mm lens escape damage, having been cradled by my chest. I lay still for the next few minutes waiting for the pain to subside into a throbbing ache, all the while thanking my stars for sparing my lens.
While that may seem like misplaced focus to some, I am comforted by the prospect of going back to the luxury of my cabin on board Letty at the end of the day. Ecoventura, the company that operates Letty, has doctors on call. So I ignore the temporary trauma, pick up my lens and hobble over to the colony of red-footed boobies hunched over their hatchlings. Visitors to the Galapagos explore the islands by day but can only stay on boats at night. Even in the inhabited islands, visitors are not allowed to stay onshore. Galapagos National Park authorities strictly enforce these and other rules, which ensure that the islands remain a paradise for wildlife.
Rich fauna
We are in Espanola, a treasure-chest in the Galapagos archipelago, teeming with iguanas, sea lions and assorted rare birds like Nazca boobies, hawks and the comical frigate bird with its balloon-sized red pouch. The magnificent male frigate bird bobs his head up and down as best as he can, what with his inflated pouch coming in the way. He makes gurgling sounds to woo his reluctant female, who pretends not to notice him. To us, it seemed he was showing off his adornment to us, the visitors.
Unlocking the secrets of Galapagos entails effort — of traipsing through hardened lava and uneven rocks strewn into a dozen or so islands somewhere in the Pacific, nearly a thousand kilometres away from mainland Ecuador in South America. But if you do make the effort, you’d end up with the experience of a lifetime where you’d glimpse animals not found anywhere else on planet earth in their natural habitat, quite unafraid of your presence. Galapagos islands do not have any major predators, which explains why wildlife thrives here.
The islands are unique because millennia of isolation from mainland and the consequent contamination by man has ensured that unique flora and fauna, found nowhere else on planet earth, thrive here. Charles Darwin came upon his explosive discovery only by accident, when he went ashore the archipelago in the Pacific primarily to escape his annoying sea-sickness while on a long voyage on HMS Beagle.
And a humble bird called the finch — not unlike our very own vanishing sparrow — played a major role in this episode. Noticing the variations in the beak sizes and shapes of finches from various islands in the Galapagos, Darwin came to the conclusion that these were deliberate adaptations to available resources, not a product of chance.
Unique kingdom
There are 10 major islands and many minor ones in Galapagos, and your chance of sighting all the species of unique Galapagos fauna depends on the combination of islands. But trust Ecoventura to design a trip that would include the right mix to give you a complete kaleidoscope. While North Seymour and Plazas will introduce you to Galapagos penguins, Floreana will delight you with orange flamingos and nesting sea turtles. But if you’re after massive tortoises that could easily cart a full-grown man at well, tortoise speed, you have to be at Santa Cruz. These gentle giants that once roamed all the islands in the Galapagos have now been reduced to Santa Cruz, the rest having been eaten to extinction. Yes, that’s right. Their meat is said to be so delicious that every passing ship helped itself to hundreds of these creatures to stock up their larder. Now, the Darwin Research Station at Santa Cruz has started an aggressive breeding programme to restore Galapagos to its tortoisian glory.
Meanwhile, it has aslo been raised to iconic status through Lonesome George, the mascot of the island, who was believed to have been more than a couple of hundred years old when he died last year.
While sea lions and marine iguanas are ubiquitous in all the islands, you have to go to Genovesa on the northern side of the equator to see red-footed boobies by the thousands. We watch the delightful dance of the blue-footed boobies engaged in courtship ritual on many of the islands.
We swim and snorkel every single day, sometimes twice a day. The deep blue Pacific opens up its secrets the moment you don the snorkel. Fish of all hues swirl all around you while sea lions and penguins encircle you playfully. Even sharks come to check you out. It is a kaleidoscopic paradise under water, quite different from the paradise above. And when you reluctantly clamber aboard after a long swim, Letty’s chefs are waiting for you with an array of lip-snacking snacks and refreshing naranja, Spanish for freshly-squeezed orange. In Galapagos, you’re truly in paradise, in more than one sense!