Galapagos Islands, Day 4

The boat had been travelling overnight so we awoke in the busy harbour of Puerto Ayora. Our guide hurried to get our things off the boat as some people were leaving the islands that afternoon. The night before, our guide apologised for having a problem with alcohol. On our time on the boat, we had found him pretty good and knowledgeable, but before we arrived, he had failed to meet some other passengers at the airport, been drunk and unintelligible and told Thomas to f*ck off. He informed us this was his last day at work as he was taking some time off to go into rehab. We had been happy with his service however and gave him a tip (unlike Thomas) but our guide this morning seemed impatient and rude as he herded us to see the lava tubes and wild giant tortoises on the island. We got in a taxi and drove into the centre of the island. The stop at the lava tubes was brief and not very interesting. Our next stop was a private farm that has wild tortoises in its grounds. We hunted around for a while and saw one in a dirty pond. It was a female and it was about 70 years old. The tortoises eat fruit and are able to drink the stagnant water in this area. We said goodbye to our guide and some of the passengers who were getting the plane back and carried on the tour with another guide. He showed us the fruit trees and fed us guavas and passion fruits and showed us a pineapple tree/bush (it grows without roots and gets all its nutrients from the air) and coffee. There was a total of 4 tortoises in this area, ranging from 15 to 140 years old. The oldest male was HUGE. It weighed 200kg and could barely move. At the end of the tour we were shown a couple of old tortoise shells and, just as I was thinking 'I wonder if I could fit in that?', the guide asked me if I wanted to try it on. He didn't need to ask me twice as I was already half in it. The shell was unbelievably heavy and I needed help to be able to stand up. There is currently a lot of random American tourists that have a photo of me and Thomas posing in an embarrassing tortoise mating position.

Our taxi took us back to our hotel which was really nice and, more importantly, had air conditioning which went down to 17 degrees. We had 2 nights in this hotel before we had to leave. Puerto Ayora is small but there are plenty of nice restaurants and touristy shops, and not as expensive as we were lead to believe. The Darwin Centre is walking distance from the hotel so we left in the midday sun to see the tortoise rehabilitation programme at work. On the way, we watched a fisherman selling fish on the side of the road as the massive, cheeky pelicans were trying to sneak up and steal some scraps. There was also a sea lion trying the 'puppy dog eyes' technique to get some food. Unsuccessfully, of course.

The Darwin Centre is a working research centre for the wellbeing of indigenous Galapagos flora and fauna. There was a display of pictures of how the Galapagos islands were just 40 years ago compared to now, and the difference is amazing. Foreign plants have almost completely taken over and the once sparse bush land is now nearly jungle. The unique thing about these islands is that they rose from the sea from underwater volcanoes and have never been part of the mainland. All the indigenous life was somehow able to travel across water in one of these ways:

• a waterproof seed that floats from the mainland
  
• flight
  
• on a natural raft such as a fallen branch (in the case of lizards)
  
• float for a long period of time, like a tortoise that accidentally falls into the sea on the mainland and washes up days later on the shores of the Galapagos.
  

The wildlife then adapted to its new environment over tens of thousands of years and that's how Darwin was able to come up with the theory of evolution; by comparing the mainland species to the island's.

We walked through the tortoise breeding area where the eggs are hatched and the young caged tortoises are protected for 2 years from rats (a species which has travelled to the islands aboard ships from the mainland). The tortoises then get upgraded and live in a pen that is similar to the island's habitat for 5 years, before being released back onto the island that the species originated from. Each island has a slightly different species of giant tortoise, each with a different shell shape. There is one tortoise that is the last surviving member of its species and he is called 'Lonely George'. He lives in a pen with loads of females which are of a similar species from a nearby island, but he has never been able to reproduce. He is 120 years old and looks pretty sad and lonely (so would you).

We saw some large land iguanas but the heat was stifling, so we headed back to the relief of the air con. Dee was still walking and swaying like she was on the boat, she had a bad case of land sickness.

That night, we met up with a couple of guys from our boat and ate at a nice restaurant called The Rock. Thomas paid with his credit card and a couple of days later had a call from his bank saying that his card had been cloned. This isn't the first time we had heard of this happening in South America, but we were surprised that it happened in a popular tourist restaurant.