It was five years ago that a friend of mine, David, returned to his home in Brooklyn from a week-long tour of the Galápagos Islands. David could not stop gushing about the primeval purity of the place, the otherworldliness of the creatures that live there. These ungodly animals, he told me, have no fear of people because of their utter isolation, the absence of human predators on this cluster of oceanic volcanoes
I listened politely as David described how he had approached a blue-footed booby on a rocky plateau, reached out to feed the ungainly bird a twig, and the thing responded with no hesitation at all, devouring the snack with the eagerness of a calf in a petting zoo. David’s eyes rolled back in his head as he talked of lying with his wife on a spit of sugar-white sand, gazing into the round, wet eyes of a baby sea lion that had cozied up next to them. It was, he said, “a religious experience.”
I was glad he was so moved. But I had no great urge to visit the Galápagos myself. Sure, I’d heard of them. The iguanas. The tortoises. Darwin. All that. But until David mentioned his brief stay at the Hotel Galápagos—the Hotel Galápagos!—I had no idea anyone actually lived in this place. The only humans I had ever encountered in the magazine spreads and books and video documentaries that I’d seen in my lifetime—that we’ve all seen—were biologists, a guide or two, and maybe an on-camera narrator, someone like Richard Attenborough or Alan Alda.
There are the tourists, of course, tens of thousands of them each year, but they don’t count. For these outdoor enthusiasts, the Galápagos are and have always been the ultimate theme park, a place where humans can step ashore from their cruise ships and walk the same lava-encrusted ground that the young Charles Darwin did nearly two centuries ago, which is essentially the same ground that thrust itself up from the ocean floor when these rocky islands first burst through the surface of the sea some five to ten million years ago, a blink of an eye in geologic time. For the ecowanderer, the Galápagos are and always have been a Holy Land.
But not for me. I’ve got nothing against nature. I live in an oak-shaded house on a quiet Virginia river not far from the Chesapeake Bay. I sit on my porch in the morning and read the newspaper while watching a crabber empty his pots in the pink light of dawn. I enjoy an occasional drive up to the Blue Ridge Mountains, especially in autumn when the leaves change. I even allowed a friend to convince me one winter to join him for a three-day hike in subfreezing temperatures along a spur of the Appalachian Trail—a mistake I will never make again. The hiking itself was just fine, but the two nights I spent cursing and praying for the sun to rise as I lay trembling in my pathetically outdated sleeping bag were the longest two nights of my life.
The point is, I take my nature as it comes but make no inordinate effort to reach out for it. As a journalist I’ve been lucky enough to see more than my share of the world. Wherever I’ve traveled, from Arctic Alaska to the swamps of South Florida, the one species of animals that truly excites me is the human. That’s why I perked up when David mentioned the odd little hotel at which he had stayed on these islands.
“You mean there are people who actually live there?” I asked. “Even better,” I added, “they’re…odd?”
Now this indeed seemed like something to sink my teeth into. So I began some cursory research—a little poking around—and quickly discovered there’s been a lot more going on in the Galápagos lately than simply snorkeling and bird-watching. At the time, I wasn’t even sure where the Galápagos are. I knew they were located in the Pacific somewhere. When I learned that they sit directly on the equator, six hundred miles west of Ecuador—the nation that owns them—I imagined that might put them roughly due south of California, maybe even Hawaii. I pulled out a map and found I was off by roughly half a continent: The Galápagos are perched on precisely the same longitudinal line as…New Orleans.
Just as surprising were news briefs I found that told of poachers during the past decade invading the protected waters around these islands in pursuit of shark fins, sea urchins, and—I swear to God—sea lion penises, prized throughout Asia for their aphrodisiac effects. I read of a shoot-out between fishermen and Galápagos Park Service rangers. I read of local protesters seizing the tortoises at a scientific research station on one of the islands and threatening to kill the poor beasts if some demands were not met. Hostage tortoises. Who knew?
Who knew that the indigenous Galápagueños, the first permanent settlers on these islands, were not Ecuadorian, but Norwegian—a colony of expatriate fishermen and farmers who fled their homeland in the mid-1920s to sail to a new life half a planet away?
Who knew that the ensuing half-century would bring to the Galápagos a swirling array of nomads and grifters, dreamers and hermits, a wild stew of men and women from all over the world who shared one thing in common—a desire, for better or worse, to get as far as they could from the lives they’d been living. What better place for such an escape than to an honest-to-god desert island?
That is essentially what the fifty-some islands and islets that compose the Galápagos are—desert. Rocky and barren. Scorchingly hot. With cacti and lizards and no fresh water to speak of, other than the rain that occasionally sweeps down from the highlands. There are forests and farmland among some of those highlands, but that farmland is hacked out of virtual jungles, ridden with brambles and insects and volcanic stones.
It’s easy to see why, when the Galápagos National Park was created in 1959, only a few hundred people lived there. Those scattered souls were allowed to remain, and the soil on which their homes stood—a few seaside villages and some farms in those highlands—a mere total of three percent of the archipelago’s landmass, was set aside from the Park and from the restrictions created to protect and preserve the other ninety-seven percent of the Galápagos.
That unpeopled ninety-seven percent is what most of the world knows of these islands. It’s what is portrayed in the books and magazines and TV documentaries with which we all are familiar. But it was that other three percent that I became eager to explore. I was hungry to learn how the hand of man has come to shape itself here, in Darwin’s garden. And so, in late 1998, I booked my first flight to the islands for a one-week visit, a scouting trip to give me a taste of this place and these people. If things went as planned, this first trip would be followed by subsequent stays.
It isn’t easy getting to the Galápagos by oneself. Flying from the United States to Ecuador is a snap; several major airlines routinely come and go daily from Miami to the capital city of Quito or to the industrial seaport of Guayaquil. But the only planes that fly on to the islands are Ecuadorian-owned, and those owners are intimately aligned with the nation’s tourist industry, which controls almost all seating on the aircraft. Foreigners booking a trip to the Galápagos through a travel agency in their homeland (say, an American in the United States) can do so only by purchasing a package deal, which includes not just airfare but also the cost of joining a tour group on one of the ninety or so boats currently authorized to circle the islands—vessels ranging from six-passenger sailboats to 100-berth cruise ships. These one-or two-week junkets, which include the price of meals, guides, and shipboard lodging, typically cost from two to six thousand dollars per person.
If you’d rather get to the Galápagos on your own, I found out, you must first buy a ticket to Ecuador, then, through a travel agency in Quito or Guayaquil, reserve an individual seat—if it’s available—on one of the two island-bound flights that leave the continent each day. Most of those individual seats are filled by Ecuadorians themselves, mainlanders traveling to visit kin on the islands, businessmen jetting out to close a deal, or Galápagueños themselves, returning home from a trip to the continent.
At the time I made my arrangements that winter of 1998, the Ecuadorian economy was manic. The value of the nation’s currency—the sucre—was plunging every day. A year earlier, the sucre had been worth 2,000 per American dollar. By the time I booked my seats that November of ’98, the figure had ballooned to 5,000. Two months later, as I boarded my flight from Miami to Quito on a bright January afternoon, the value of the sucre had plunged to 7,000 per dollar.
After an overnight stay at a small Quito hotel, where the desk clerk shouldered an automatic rifle and the smell of burning automobile tires hung in the air from an antigovernment demonstration staged downtown earlier that day, I boarded an Ecuadorian TAME Airlines Boeing 727 bound for the islands. TAME is owned by the Ecuadorian military and dominates virtually every route flown within the country. As the sun rose over the Andes behind us, the Pacific coast, glowing apricot in the warm morning light, soon loomed ahead.
We landed briefly at Guayaquil’s grim international airport, where half the passengers deboarded. Those of us heading on to the islands were instructed to stay on the plane because the city was currently under martial law and not even the terminal was considered safe ground.
When we again lifted off forty-five minutes later, we were soon soaring over nothing but azure ocean, the coastline of Ecuador disappearing behind us, and the distant serenity of the Galápagos lying ahead. Even with all I had learned from my months of preparation, it was hard to imagine the turmoil and rot of this decaying nation stretching its tendrils across these hundreds of miles of open sea to invade those ageless islands. From the outside looking in, it seemed impossible. But soon I would be on the inside looking out, through the eyes of the people who live there.
This is their story.