86 and Still Chasing My Dream: My Galapagos Story

There’s a half-finished oil pastel painting of a turtle that’s been hanging on my way for longer than I care to admit. Somewhere in the middle of painting it, I made a decision. I was going to see the real thing, giant turtles, on the Galapagos Islands, in the flesh. Not in a magazine, and not in my imagination.

So that’s exactly what I did. I celebrated my 86th birthday there, twenty hours of travel from the UK, and it turned out to be one of the most extraordinary trips of my life.

A dream I’d been carrying for years

I’ve always been told what a dreamer I am. But this trip is what I mean when I talk about turning a dream into reality. An ability to project yourself into the future, hold a picture of what you want, and simply go towards it, even if it takes years to get there.

The Galapagos Islands go back to Darwin, of course, though he didn’t discover them. By the time he dropped anchor in 1835, the archipelago had already been on European maps for centuries. What Darwin did do was spend five extraordinary weeks moving between four islands, observing, collecting, and noting the quirks of species found nowhere else on Earth. Those notes and specimens, especially the finches and tortoises, became the seed of his theory of evolution by natural selection, once he and fellow scientists unpicked the patterns back in the UK. The Galapagos weren’t the whole story, but they were the spark that helped turn a young naturalist’s curiosity into one of the most influential ideas in science.

Standing where he may have once stood, among the same tortoises his notebooks describe, was rather humbling.

Where the wild things aren’t afraid of you

I went on what they call an expedition cruise, which is designed for people who want to hike for hours or scuba dive at a fairly serious level. That wasn’t quite my pace, of course, so while everyone else went off exploring, a guide very kindly stayed with me on the beach. I had her undivided attention while she told me about the island, the wildlife, and what it meant to share this place with visitors. Every member of staff was local, and every one of them was proud of where they came from. It was an honour to them.

The first thing I saw when I sat down was an enormous male sea lion, fast asleep and rolled in sand to keep the flies off him. He couldn’t have cared less that I was there. Two pups came wobbling over to pester him, and I simply sat there, completely at peace, watching a world that had absolutely no interest in me whatsoever.

That’s the thing about the Galapagos. With no native land predators for millions of years, many animals never evolved a reason to run. You’re the visitor. They’re the ones who belong. And there, beside the sea lion, was a relaxed yellow warbler, quietly going about its day.

The turtles, at last

I never did get in the water myself. Others went off in wetsuits with proper scuba gear, but one of the chaps very kindly filmed the turtles underwater for me instead. Watching that footage back, seeing them glide past so effortlessly, I understood immediately why people describe this place as magical. It isn’t an exaggeration.

And the giant tortoises. Nothing prepares you for the scale of them. I’ve got a photo where I look tiny beside one, he was utterly unbothered, lumbering along only when he felt like it. Some of these tortoises live well over a century, with exceptional ones reaching 150 and beyond, and the islands are literally named after them: galapago is old Spanish for tortoise (the saddleback shells of some subspecies later inspired the “saddle” story). Standing six feet from a creature that old gives you an odd, quiet kind of perspective.

A few small things that made it magical

The little penguin I spotted on the rocks turned out to be rather special too. The Galapagos penguin is the only penguin species on earth that lives north of the equator, which felt like exactly the sort of detail this island chain would produce. And the striking grey and white bird with the bright red ring around its eye is a swallow-tailed gull, found almost nowhere else in the world, and the only fully nocturnal gull on the planet, hunting squid by starlight.

Bringing it home

I’ll always remember it: sitting on that beach with the sun on my face, sea lions on either side of me and nothing but blue ocean stretching for miles. It felt like a precious moment, watching a penguin dive from the rocks, then spotting a blue-footed booby nearby, its impossibly bright feet standing out against the black volcanic shore. I later learned that those famous feet play a starring role in its courtship display, as the bird lifts and presents them one at a time.