The problem with the Galapagos, as it has been marketed for the last thirty years, is that it has been marketed as a wildlife encounter. That is an insufficient description. The Galapagos, rightly experienced, is a reeducation in what it means to share a planet with other animals that have not yet learned to be afraid of you.
I spent eight days last March on a sixteen-passenger catamaran circulating the outer islands—Isabela, Fernandina, Santiago, Bartolomé. The ship was small enough that we knew everyone’s name by the second dinner. Our naturalist, a Quiteno with a PhD in marine biology and an almost comical enthusiasm for boobies, briefed us each evening on the next morning’s landing. The briefings were never about what we would see. They were about how we would move.
The rule in the Galapagos is simple: the animals do not move for you. You move, slowly, around them—and in exchange, they let you, briefly, into the unhurried logic of their lives.
On Fernandina, we stepped off the zodiac onto a beach of black volcanic rock and walked, at a pace I would describe as stately, through a colony of marine iguanas. There were perhaps three hundred of them. None moved. None noticed. A single sea lion pup, maybe two weeks old, wobbled over to investigate the hem of my pants, decided it was not milk, and wobbled back. Ten feet away, a Galápagos hawk watched us from a basalt outcrop with the indifferent confidence of an animal that has no natural predators.
What the Galapagos teaches the older traveler, in particular, is that animals who have never been hunted do not treat time the way we do. They have nowhere to be. They are not, in any hurry they are aware of, heading anywhere. If you slow yourself to their tempo, they will let you stand next to them for half an hour, watching them yawn, scratch, reposition. They will let you be boring. They will let you be still.
Snorkeling here is not the snorkeling of the Caribbean. The water is cold; a three-millimeter wetsuit is sensible. The visibility is good but not perfect. What you trade the Caribbean for is this: a Galapagos penguin, bullet-shaped, flying past you at a speed that makes you laugh underwater. A playful sea lion that will mirror your movements for as long as you can hold your breath. A school of razor surgeonfish that parts around you like water around a stone.
I am, at this point in my life, suspicious of any trip that calls itself life-changing. The Galapagos is not life-changing. It is something better. It is life-returning. You come back to yourself. You remember that you are an animal. You remember that the world has room for you, and for the iguana, and for the sea lion pup, and for the small red crabs clattering across the rocks like applause. Eight days. Sixteen passengers. A small ship, moving carefully through an old, old world.