Northern Islands of Fire

Day 1 · Yacht Isabela II

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.

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 2 · Yacht Isabela II

Puerto Egas

The shoreline at Puerto Egas, at the south end of James Bay, is black lava eroded into tide pools and grottoes, and at low water the whole thing fills with animals: marine iguanas grazing algae off the rock, sally lightfoot crabs over the top of them, and Galapagos fur seals resting in collapsed lava tubes where the roof has fallen in and let the sea through.

Chinese Hat is a small cone off the coast of Santiago, named for its shape seen from the water, and the channel between the two islands is the reason to come. Galapagos penguins fish it, the snorkeling runs over reef sharks and eagle rays, and the crescent of white sand on the near side is backed by lava with marine iguanas holding it between swims.

Day 3 · Yacht Isabela II

Darwin Bay

Darwin Bay is a drowned caldera with its seaward wall breached, so the ship anchors inside the crater itself and the seabirds have the water to themselves. The landing is coral sand backed by low salt bush holding nesting frigatebirds and red-footed boobies close enough to watch without a lens, and the cliff wall that rings the anchorage drops straight into clear water for snorkeling and kayaking below it.

A cleft in the crater wall, called El Barranco in Spanish for exactly that, climbs a steep natural staircase to a plain of bare lava on the rim. The ground is a nesting colony of Nazca and red-footed boobies, and storm petrels swarm over it in the thousands; the short-eared owls that hunt them do it in broad daylight here, which happens nowhere else on earth because there are no hawks on this island to compete.

Day 4 · Yacht Isabela II

Santa Fe

Santa Fe's bay is white sand over turquoise shallows with a sea lion colony along it, and the trail above runs through a forest of prickly pear grown tree sized, trunks and all. The land iguana under them is paler and larger than the ones on the other islands and lives on this one alone, which is what happens when a population is left by itself long enough.

South Plaza is a quarter of a mile wide and tilted, so the whole island is one slope: prickly pear at the low edge, cliffs at the high one, and a ground cover that turns scarlet in the dry season. Land iguanas sit under almost every cactus waiting for a pad to fall, and this is the one place where they overlap with the marine iguanas enough to cross, so the hybrids walk the same trail as both parents.

Day 5

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.