That bird is a Blue Footed Booby. Its feet aren’t blue because it’s a female and I worked bloody hard to get that shot so zip it, zip it good.
The Galápagos Islands are surely right at the top of the list of most beautiful places on the planet. It also rates amongst the very best travel experiences I have ever had.
When it came time to leave, I felt a tug, had a tear in my eye. I didn’t want to go.
I don’t know how to go about describing the Galápagos, so I’m opting for a simple phenomenological account of my experience. Plus photos and video.
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I swam with sea lions on the most stunning of beaches.
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I snorkelled with marine turtles, eels and colourful tropical fish in numbers and species beyond my reckoning. And at this stage of my life I can reckon quite a lot. Underwater visibility was up around the 20m mark.
I got up close to giant tortoises, including babies about the size of a matchbox and old timers around a metre long.
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I watched iguanas walking along beaches, gripping rocks while taking in the surf and swimming offshore.
In an information centre largely devoted to the work of Charles Darwin, I was tickled by a young American woman wearing a Jesus Loves You singlet.
Darwin spent 5 weeks in the Galápagos in 1835 documenting the unique wildlife and species variations of tortoises, mockingbirds and finches between the islands. Deeply aware his ideas challenged religious beliefs he spent 20 years amassing a vast collection of evidence before publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859.
I read that and The Descent of Man (1871) when studying biology in high school and can remember feeling a deep sense of liberation.
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It is miraculous that these islands have remained part of Ecuador given their strategic location to the Panama Canal. That is a great thing as it has assured their preservation.
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