Darwin's Legacy

Day 1 · Yacht La Pinta

Into the islands at Baltra

The flight from the mainland lands on Baltra, a flat scrub island that was an American airbase in the 1940s and is now the archipelago's gateway. Park formalities and the transit-card check are done inside the terminal, and the crossing to the ship goes from there: nobody stays on Baltra, which has no town and nothing to see.

North Seymour is flat, low and covered in the two birds people come for. Male magnificent frigatebirds inflate scarlet throat pouches the size of a football and hold them inflated for hours over the trail, while blue-footed boobies perform their courtship dance a few feet away, lifting each foot in turn because the colour is the point. Sea lions and land iguanas hold the ground between them.

Day 2 · Yacht La Pinta

Punta Vicente Roca

The cold Cromwell Current surfaces against the western coast of Isabela and everything here follows the food it pushes up. There is no landing: a panga runs under a sheer volcanic face into a collapsed sea cave with the swell washing through it, past rafting sea turtles, penguins and cormorants on the ledges. It is the most reliable water in the islands for an ocean sunfish, a flat vertical disc of a creature that can weigh a ton.

Fernandina is the youngest island in the archipelago and the one least touched by anything introduced, with no rats, no goats and no cats on it at all. The landing at Punta Espinoza crosses bare lava holding the densest colony of marine iguanas anywhere, piled on each other by the hundred for warmth, with flightless cormorants drying stub wings that have not been used for flight in millions of years beside them.

Day 3 · Yacht La Pinta

Urbina Bay

Urbina Bay is seabed that came out of the water. In 1954 a four-mile stretch of coast lifted more than sixteen feet in a single movement and pushed the shoreline half a mile out, stranding a living coral reef in the open air; the heads are still there, bleached in the brush, grazed around by giant tortoises and some of the largest land iguanas in the islands.

Tagus Cove is the anchorage whaling and naval crews used for two centuries, named for a British warship that called here in 1814, and they carved their ships' names and dates into the rock above the waterline; the oldest still legible from a panga run to the 1830s. A trail climbs from the dry landing past Darwin Crater and its salt lake to a ridge looking back over the lava fields of northern Isabela.

Day 4 · Yacht La Pinta

Rabida

Rabida's beach is rust red, the iron in its lava oxidised straight out of the rock, which happens on no other beach in the archipelago, and a lagoon behind it takes flamingos when the water is right. The snorkeling is off the point at the end of the sand, with sea lions coming out to meet it.

Dragon Hill is a cactus slope on the north side of Santa Cruz named for the land iguanas that patrol it, a population that was down to a few dozen and was rebuilt here from captive stock. A salt lagoon below the trail holds flamingos when the water level suits them, which is not every visit.

Day 5 · Yacht La Pinta

The Charles Darwin Research Station

The station above Puerto Ayora is where the tortoise races that came closest to disappearing were pulled back, one island at a time, and the breeding pens hold hatchlings from the ones still being rebuilt. The rearing enclosures are laid out by island of origin, which is the clearest illustration in the archipelago of how far one species diverged across a few dozen miles of water.

The highlands are the wet side of Santa Cruz, green and misty where the coast is dry, and giant tortoises climb up into them to graze on private farmland that has simply left them to it. The same slope is riddled with lava tunnels, one of them wide enough to walk through upright for several hundred yards.

Day 6 · Yacht La Pinta

Post Office Bay

A wooden barrel above the beach has been forwarding mail by hand since the 1790s, set up by whalers so homebound ships could carry letters south. The system still runs on the same rule and nothing else: you sort through what is in the barrel, take any postcard addressed near where you live, and deliver it yourself when you get home.

Champion is a small cone off the northeast corner of Floreana with no landing on it: the visit is a panga circuit and a snorkel over the drop-off, where sea lions come out to meet swimmers. Fewer than two hundred Floreana mockingbirds are left alive and this islet holds most of them, the species having died out completely on the island it is named after.

The landing beach at Punta Cormorant is green, coloured by olivine crystals weathered out of the lava, and the trail behind it reaches a brackish lagoon where greater flamingos feed with their heads underwater. The beach on the far side is flour-fine white sand where sea turtles haul up to nest, and rays lie in the shallows off it in numbers.

Day 7

Ashore on Santa Cruz, and the flight home

Breakfast aboard, then the last disembarkation of the trip and the road north across Santa Cruz to the channel, the ferry over it and the short run to the airstrip on Baltra for the flight to the mainland.