Western 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.

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.

Day 2 · Yacht Isabela II

Bartolome

A boardwalk of 372 steps climbs the cinder cone to the view the islands are known for: Pinnacle Rock standing between two facing half-moon bays, with spatter cones and lava fields running off behind it. The snorkeling off the beach below can put a Galapagos penguin in the water beside you, at the northern edge of where the species lives.

Sullivan Bay is a walk over bare pahoehoe lava that poured across this coast in 1897 and has been left almost exactly as it set: ropes, coils and swirls underfoot, cracked into plates, with the older cones it flowed around standing up through it. Almost nothing grows on it yet, which is what makes it readable as a single event rather than a landscape.

Day 3 · Yacht Isabela II

Dragon Hill

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.

Buccaneer Cove is a stretch of red cliffs and rock stacks where pirate and whaling crews careened their ships for repair, out of sight of the shipping lanes and beside fresh water and tortoises they could take aboard. It is seen from the water rather than on foot: fur seals hold the rock faces, boobies work the cliffs above, and the stacks off the point have been eroded into the shapes the crews named them for.

Day 4 · Yacht Isabela II

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 5

Santa Cruz to Baltra, 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.