The Galápagos Islands

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By Teresa Machan

MAY 17, 2024

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Galapagos destination overview

I’ll never forget the first words of our expedition leader at the passenger welcome briefing on board Santa Cruz II.

“You’ve made it. You’re in the Galápagos.” He knew it was bucket list; we knew it was bucket list. Let the show begin.

It did, almost immediately. I was about to unzip my case when an announcement alerted us to a whale on the starboard side. I raced to the deck, where one of the spotters handed me some binoculars. The whale's flip-flopping tail movement suggested it was a male. “We’ve never seen a bull come in,” she said. That’s a pretty good start.”

From the moment I arrived in the Galápagos I never stopped swivelling my neck. Birds, very much alive, fell out of the sky. Sea lions snoozed on benches. And nothing ever ran away. I quickly learned that I needed to document wildlife spots immediately.

We cruised around the western Galápagos islands of Isabela, Fernandina, North Seymour, Floreana, and Santa Cruz until our ship anchored at sea so we could head out on excursions. Almost all our landings at islands were ‘wet landings,’ which meant nudging up to a beach on a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) known in the Galápagos as a panga and sliding our feet over the edge into shallow water.

Strict conservation measures are in place to protect the wildlife and UNESCO-protected marine park. All excursions take place on designated walking paths in groups of around 16, with Galápagos National Park-certified guides. Our first wildlife encounter was with a pile of sun-bathing marine iguanas sneezing salt through their noses. Mohicanned from head to tail and wearing their charcoal skin like chainmail, they lay on top of one another, conserving heat, and ignored us.

On North Seymour, we went ashore to see a vast colony of mating frigate birds (Fregata magnificens), their red gullets puffed up like Valentine’s-day balloons in an effort to lure a mate. How females select from this impressive ‘chest-off’ is anyone’s guess. Further along the designated trail was a flirting pair of blue-footed boobies. Determined to impress, the male shimmied left to right and right to left, flapping his plumage. The female pecked at a grain of sand, turned around to twerk, and looked in every direction but his.

Most visitors can expect to see Galápagos sea lions, blue-footed boobies, marine iguanas, bottlenose dolphins, dive-bombing petrels, and the prehistoric giant tortoises which give the archipelago its name (for specific species, take a look at the cruise-planning section, below). We were also lucky enough to see waved albatrosses, a splendidly ugly ocean sunfish (Mola mola), and the king of the food chain: a Galápagos hawk.

In the water, marine mammals are as tame. I snorkelled with curious sea lions and green sea turtles. Seals got their whiskers close to my mask, and penguins darted like torpedoes.

Visitors would visit the archipelago for its spectacular volcanic landscapes and curious lava formations if the wildlife weren't so unique. Straddling the equator and part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, these brown, rocky islands were forced up by violent volcanic eruptions that have left tubes, cones, barley-sugar twists of rope lava and billowy expanses of pillow lava.

To share the tourism dollar, every cruise ship must visit an inhabited island once per sailing week. Santa Cruz has a coffee plantation, a lively fish market and shops with bicycles for hire. On Charles Darwin Avenue in Puerto Aroya is the Charles Darwin Research Station. Here, you can find all the subspecies of the Galápagos tortoise, including hatchlings that are released into the wild.

The Galápagos changed Darwin’s view of the natural world changed forever. Yours will, too.