July of 2018 I checked something off my “bucket list” then added it back. I visited the Galapagos Islands, and I want to return, to see my friends, the Blue Footed Boobies and the Sea Lions/Wolves.
The Galapagos Islands are strangely beautiful, like another world, except they are here, in our world.
Before the name of Galapagos (saddle-backed tortoise) became usual, “quite a number of navigators” named them Islas Encantadas (“Enchanted Islands”) because “They seemed to appear and disappear on the surface of the ocean, as if by magic.” Navigational equipment has improved since the 1500s: the islands do not move.
The earliest written mention of Galapagos is dated April 26, 1535, from Fray Tomas de Berlanga Sevilla, Bishop of Panama, to King Charles V of Spain. The King wondered what Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish Conquistadors were up to, so he sent Father Tomas to find out.
Weak winds and strong currents drifted the sailing ship to islands 180 miles off-shore. Desperate for freshwater, they found “seals, turtles, iguanas, tortoises, many birds like those of Spain, but so silly that they do not know how to flee…” They also discovered that the Galapagos Islands have no rivers. “I do not think that there is a place where one might sow a bushel of corn… as though at some time God had showered stones…”
From a boat the Islands are a stark and arid desert, with giant Opuntiavi cactus poking 20 feet above ancient Palo Santo forests, stubbornly prying life from washed-out stones. Above 300 ft. the Islands can be forested and lush, with grassy pastures where farmers now grow crops and raise cattle.
As an international tourist destination, the Galapagos Islands are again “enchanted,” but “exotic” like Walt Disney’s “Enchanted Kingdom”, not “bewitched.” Two Jetports receive people from all over the world, who come to gawk at unusual animals and strangely beautiful landscapes while pondering the mysteries of evolution as Darwin’s Finches pick at fallen food around café tables. Deep highland wells and water pipes now deliver water to the towns of Galapagos, but there isn’t much, so don’t use much.
What if the washed-out arid zones are an ice-age inter-tidal zone? During ice-ages, low-water exposed the ancient land-bridge across the Bering Straits, now called Beringia. People walked across that path from Asia to settle the Americas.
Between ice-ages, high-water tides would wash 300 feet higher, pulling soil to the seafloor, leaving only stones. With no rivers to flood silt across bare stones, the excavated stones slowly splinter, allowing plants to root.
And so the cycle continues.