Before I get on to telling you about our final couple of days in the Galapagos, I'll start this entry telling you a bit about life aboard the Beagle and some bits of the cruise I forgot in earlier entries (or whose chronology has [already!] escaped my memory).
We were a total of eleven passengers a naturalist-guide (mandatory for visits to Galapagos National Park) and five crew. Given that the normal contingent was around fourteen passengers and eight crew the ship was very comfortable and roomy. It had been fitted with a desalination plant sometime in the past thirty years, so you could have long, hot showers whenever you liked.
Adding to the sense of luxury were the meals. Simply having three meals a day was more than Sarah and I were used to, but the chef prepared huge quantities of delicious food, plus snacks every time we returned to the ship from ashore. I know for sure I gained back much of the weight I'd lost since the Amazon boat trips had finished fattening me up a couple months earlier.
While sailing between anchorages I'd spend time playing games with my nephew Dante or just scanning the waters around the ship for excitement. At one point Sarah and Melanie spotted a marine iguana out swimming maybe 10km from the nearest land. This is much farther out than the they'd usually be found, so this hardy fellow was christened Adventure Guani. On another occasion we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by a pod of maybe fifty dolphins. They'd swim alongside, racing faster than the ship could move, leaping out of the water seemingly just for the fun of it (or maybe they were showing off?) Sitting with Dante in the netting that connected the tip of the bowsprit to the hull, looking straight down into the dolphin-filled water beneath reminded me of doing almost exactly the same thing when I was his age.
Both of our last two days in the islands were spent in the inhabited areas. The first, in Puerto Villamil at the south end of Isabella. It actually felt like just about any little seaside vacation town. Except if you took a bus about five minutes outside of town along the coast you'd find yourself on a trail where you could meet marine iguanas and a giant tortoise and go swimming off a little beach in a mangrove forest through the canopy of trees out to the ocean where the waves started to break and where sea turtles cruised in close to shore for a visit.
It gave you a good feeling of what it would be like to visit the islands by taking ferries between their few settlements and taking short trips in and around them: pretty amazing, but still not a patch on the experience you got on a sleep-aboard ship that could transport you to the really wild parts of the archipelago.
If you headed inland from Puerto Villamil, meanwhile, you'd reach the giant tortoise breeding centre. Adult tortoises are big and sturdy enough that none of the introduced animals bother them, but eggs and young ones are subject to all manner of threats, both direct (e.g. being eaten by rats) or indirect (e.g. being trampled by cattle). There were hundreds of tortoises at the centre, ranging from tiny newborns just 10cm long through tea kettle sized young ones a year or two old, and on up to full sized adults weighing up to 600kg. A quick bit of mental arithmetic suggests that getting your foot stepped on by one of these guys would be worse than having it run over by a car!
In its twenty or so years of operation, the centre has released over two thousand adult tortoises into the wild. But believe it or not, they still face threats while they're in the centre. In 2017, 123 baby tortoises (weighing up to about 5kg each) were stolen from the centre one night, packed aboard a private yacht and spirited out of the Galapagos for sale to animal collectors. They supposedly fetch $7000 apiece. Who on earth wants a giant tortoise in their house? Especially when it's going to outlive you by probably no less than a hundred years!?
We had a couple of celebrations in the Islands as well. On New Year's Eve, Melanie and her husband Ka-hung and I went into town in Puerto Ayora, the Galapagos largest town, with a population of about 27,000. It was amazing how much it had changed in the previous three decades. In 1989 it was a sleepy fishing village with maybe a couple of shops that had one or two racks of postcards or t-shirts. Now it was focused almost 100% on the tourist industry. The lively waterfront was packed with souvenir shops, restaurants and hotels. There were half a dozen ATMs in town. There was even a brewpub for heaven's sake! (One of two breweries in the islands. I'm sad to report that both of them produce pretty poor beers :-( )
All of the locals were out on the main streets dressed up in their finest, joined by hundreds of tourists from the boats out in the harbour, some of which were 50m super yachts, while others were small cruise ships which probably accommodated a couple of hundred passengers.
The annual fireworks display had been cancelled (probably permanently) due to its (predictable) negative effects on wildlife. But there was still plenty of colour around. A local New Year's tradition has people burning a papier mache effigy representing all of the negatives from the previous year as they head into the next one. I think historically these were pretty nondescript, but in 2018 superheroes were popular forms, so we saw such wonders as an almost life-sized Spider Man strapped on to the back of a motorbike driving down the street.
But really the best celebration of all was the one that was the main reason for our all being in the islands together: my dad's seventieth birthday. We had cake and champagne and so forth, but the best part was just being in such a wondrous place with the whole family, something I don't get to do often enough.
All good things must come to an end of course. On New Year's Day, we took the panga ashore one last time into Puerto Ayora. From there we took a bus back to the north end of Santa Cruz Island, then a short ferry trip back to Baltra Island, where the airport is located and where we'd started our trip (incidentally, this whole process seems to be run with an almost deliberate inefficiency, s seemingly to ensure that as many of the island's residents as possible get some kind of work out of it).
We said a fond farewell to the crew and our guide Tommy, had our bags thoroughly checked to make sure we weren't trying to take any of the islands home with us (they're pretty fussy… not even rocks are permitted, but one guy a few years back was caught with three land iguanas in his suitcase!) And then it was back to the mainland with us.
I feel so lucky to have visited such an amazing and beautiful place as the Galapagos not once but twice. I was a little worried before this trip that things would have changed too much, that “you can never go back again”. But I'm happy to say that the Galapagos Islands are just as wondrous as ever, and (outside of Puerto Ayora I guess) the only major difference was that this time I got to share it with an even bigger, happier family.
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