Ecuador day 5: Welcome to Galapagos

I’m pretty sure we could have stopped on day 4 and it would have been a fantastic trip by all accounts already.  but you only get to do a honeymoon once in a lifetime (one hopes) and so we decided to exercise the nuclear option.  going to the Galapagos is simply something you can’t prepare your mind for.  no amount of watching Master and Commander will make you realize how truly stunning the landscape is, or how incredibly immediate the wildlife is. 

getting there was definitely one of those planes-trains-and-automobiles days, what with a van ride to the airport, flight, bus ride, ferry ride, another bus ride, and finally a dinghy ride to get to our boat.  and what a boat it was.  if Jay-Z or the Queen of England were to visit the Galapagos, I’m pretty sure they’d have to do it aboard the Queen Beatriz, a.k.a. the G6 (which gave a whole new meaning to that horrendous musical malady by the Far East Movement).  this ship was p-i-m-p.  and better yet, out of a passenger complement of 16, we discovered there would only be 5 for our tour (Tina and I included)… which basically translates to less waiting around, more having an awesome time.

since we got in a little late there was little to do the first afternoon except check out the Darwin Research Station to get some education from our guide Edgar about the basics of the Galapagos.  these islands are famous pretty much because of Darwin, but Darwin came here because he heard about how the Galapagos archipelago was a hotspot of volcano and animal activity barely touched by man.  nowadays, this is still one of the best-protected and least-touched places on the planet, due to the Ecuadorian government’s foresight in placing all manner of special protections on the islands.

but that’s only half the story.  despite remaining “relatively untouched”, a mere 200 years of human interaction has managed to completely wipe out at least half a dozen species, vastly alter the plant types of entire islands in the archipelago, and decimate most of the larger animals to 10% of their original populations.  that’s how we define untouched and “well-protected” in our modern age.

many of the changes that humans have made will likely be impossible to undo.  for one, the unleashing of black rats onto many of the larger islands, from ships passing through.  the rats grow large enough that they are able to attack and eat two-year-old land tortoises by clawing and eating through their shells.  so the Darwin Research Center also functions as a Starship Troopers-like breeding facility, where the little armored fellows are raised in platoons for three years before they are sent out to make their way on their own in the wild.

I was happy to find that most policy in the Galapagos matches our standard of “leave no trace” … which of course includes no touching animals.  which you almost forget sometimes because the animals here are comfortable being so much closer to humans than anywhere else in the world.  inevitably, someone crosses that line and almost gets a pelican bill squeezed around his face … but that wasn’t me.