The Good Ship Mary Anne
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE AUSTRALIAN
In the Galapagos take care not to step on the animals.
We are perplexed when our flight lands on Baltra Island. The sparse, scrubby terrain looks more like central Australia than the animal wonderland we anticipated.
Charles Darwin was surprised too when he arrived in the Galapagos Archipelago in 1835, writing in The Voyage of the H.M.S Beagle: ‘Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance … such wretched-looking weeds would have better become an arctic, than an equatorial Flora’.
Then we see them. Stretched out on the seats and concrete floor of the jetty, a dozen sea lions nap, sheltered from the midday sun, occasionally swotting flies with their flippers.
We’re soon snapping photographs, and they’re the perfect prompt for our guide, Luis Die, a Spanish biologist and ecologist, to announce an important Galapagos rule: ‘Don’t step on the animals.’ The sea lions eye us nonchalantly as we tiptoe between them to board our panga, or dinghy, for the short ride to the MaryAnne, a 16-passenger schooner and our home for the next seven days.
Any lingering concern that the Galapagos doesn’t deserve its nickname, Las Encantadas, the enchanted islands, is dispelled that afternoon when we visit North Seymour, another arid volcanic island. We disembark our panga and are surrounded by blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, land iguanas and sea lions.
Like Darwin, we marvel at the animals’ tameness; although we are often within a hand’s reach, they disregard us completely. Touching is also forbidden and the animals know it. Before long we grow accustomed to their abundance and fearlessness and want to see some action.
On cue, they oblige. A blue-footed booby starts a clown-like dance, whistling and spreading his wings in front of a female who honks in response to his overtures. Soon they are tapping beaks. We see frigate birds mating, the male displaying, his red chest sac inflated like a balloon. Sea lions suckle their pups, spread out on the paths, barring our way again. We admire the surfing prowess of a male sea lion, who waddles on shore towards his harem, barking loudly, warning off rivals.
It’s Planet Earth unplugged, and it’s only our first day.
Our voyage on the Mary Anne follows a similar route to that taken by the Beagle more than 170 years ago. Each day we visit a new island and the animals we see are different. Darwin made the same observation, writing that ‘the most remarkable feature’ of the Galapagos, where the islands are only ‘about fifty or sixty miles apart, and some in sight of each other’, was ‘that the different islands … are inhabited by a different set of beings.’
When we hike the highlands of Santa Cruz we see hundreds of giant tortoises, some still as statues, others continuing their treks to and from the water hole. One hisses as she retracts her neck and head inside her carapace. On Espanola, albatrosses perform a mating dance, their choreography surpassing that of the blue-footed boobies, while the offspring from earlier dances nestle in rocks beside us, picking off their baby fluff.
Luis tells us the albatross chicks are preparing to launch themselves from the cliffs and fly to Peru and back, a journey that takes five years.
A 20-year veteran of Galapagos guiding, Luis has co-written two field guides on the region’s terrestrial and marine life; the disciplined members of our group use his books to diligently verify sightings. He is an accomplished teacher, drip-feeding us tit bits of information about the common animals, while his expert eyes scan the surrounds for rarities.
We see a sea lion on Fernandino Island rolling in the shallows. ‘She’s cooling down,’ Luis advisess us, because her body temperature will have risen during the long fishing trip she’s just made.
‘You’ll just have to wait for Mama,’ he tells her pup yelping at our feet.
On Santiago, we see marine iguanas swimming home from a reef feeding expedition; bellies swollen with seaweed, they rest on shore, piled on top of one another, periodically spitting at us. ‘It’s the excess salt they’ve consumed, nothing personal,’ says Luis.
As we stroll around Floreana Island he points out a pair of sea turtles mating in the surf ; on Isabela Island we see flightless cormorants, a Galapagos hawk sitting in red mangrove clutching the remnants of a cat, and, as we paddle around Elizabeth Bay in our panga, Deliverance-like, there are American oystercatchers, golden cowrays and a sea lion resting in the white mangrove. Most days our island excursions are interspersed with snorkeling, and it’s a wonderland under the water too. We swim with green sea turtles, sea lions, and fish such as moorish idol, king angelfish, black-striped salema, yellow-tailed surgeonfish—their colours as exotic as their names. Luis free-dives under the rocks looking for sharks, but is unsuccessful, and, despite his assurances that Galapagos sharks are vegetarian, I’m not disappointed.
The Mary Anne is one of three boats owned by Fiddi Angermeyer that cruise the Galapagos. Sailing is in the Angermeyer blood. In 1935, Fiddi’s father and uncles set sail from Germany, at the insistence of their parents who didn’t want them conscripted.
With no firm destination in mind, they eventually found sanctuary in the Galapagos. In the 1960s Fiddi’s father started taking tourists around the islands on a boat he built.
The Angermeyers’ decades of experience in Galapagos waters is evident throughout our trip. Although most of our navigation is engine-powered, when there is a swell at night, the captain, Max, raises a couple of sails after anchoring to dampen the boat’s rocking and facilitate sleep. The Mary Anne is stylish, with spacious, wood-panelled salons and cabins with ensuite bathrooms. The food is a delicious mix of international cuisine and traditional Ecuadorian dishes served family-style, often on the deck. Inexplicably though, one of our group prefers Oreos with a glass of ice for breakfast, rather than the frittatas, pancakes and fruit smoothies we enjoy. She only has to ask once. On subsequent mornings her packet of biscuits and her ice are presented when she sits down.
We mainly travel between islands at night, but on the long day-time navigation from Floreana to Isabela, Max sets all the Mary Anne’s sails, just for fun, and I chat to Luis while we watch for whales. I ask him how the Galapagos has managed to remain relatively unaffected by humans. ‘Two reasons,’ he replies. ‘First, the dry weather saved the islands from human settlement. In most places there just wasn’t enough water to sustain farming. Second, when tourism started to increase, in the 1970s, the Galapagos National Park Service set trails throughout the park, and made it obligatory to walk only on the trails and with a licensed guide. It was very advanced thinking.’ Despite the success of the stringent controls, with over 100,000 people now visiting the Galapagos each year, Luis is concerned about the risk of introduced species and the pressure by the growing resident population to relax restrictions on tourism and fishing in order to create jobs.
A possible whale sighting interrupts our conversation. Max changes course so we can get a closer look. Then, like Cirque du Soleil acrobats, two devil rays leap from the ocean. There’s a pause, long enough for all aboard to look in the right direction, and they leap again.