Hotels Carolina Beach NC | "Island-Hopping In The Galápagos"

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Hotels Carolina Beach NC

Later we stand dazed on the dock in Puerto Ayora, having been ferried to Santa Cruz Island and driven here, to its town. Conversation in the group is muted: we do not know quite what to make of things. We have been to see Lonesome George, a famously ancient giant tortoise, the last of his line. Lonesome? He has five females for company (albeit of a separate subspecies) and as many human visitors as he could want. He appeared sunk in a hundred years of apathy, but then that would be hard to tell, on a tortoise, from an expression of sublime content. Puerto Ayora itself is a surprise. Although there are many uninhabited islands, the Galápagos has a human population of about 25,000. We were not expecting bars, restaurants and souvenirs. What were we expecting? Nature as we have never seen it? Contact with the extraordinary, some sort of transcendence? Patience: it is all to come…

The excitement begins on our yacht, the M/Y Galapagos Grand Odyssey (or Domenica, as the crew call her), anchored in rocking swells. The most recent luxury boat licensed for the Galápagos, she is definitely the deluxe option, granting a great deal of space to her 16 clients. We are welcomed by Xavi Cabrera: barman, steward and quite the kindest man who ever mixed a cocktail.

'We begin our navigation at midnight,' announces the guide, Fabricio Carbo. 'When you hear the engines take one pill…' Sleeping pills are a permanent offering, beside the chocolates in the saloon.

'Never!' I resolve. The Galápagos were a pirate hideout (a cache of their gold was discovered under the port's main street): would they have slept through their first navigation? Would the whalers? (Hundreds came here. Herman Melville had The Pequod pass the islands on its hunt for Moby-Dick.) And so I wake to the midnight clanks of the anchor chain. We set sail for Isabela Island. There is a huge penumbra around the full moon, as if its silver disc is the light at the end of a celestial microscope, focusing down on this distant world. Dawn comes with the anchor's rattle.