What I especially love about my Galapagos vacation is being on a small boat with about 14 other tourists and 9 crew members. That all means that you can go to quite places that are a bit out of the beaten track.

Although the boat is small, it beats the massive luxury cruises that brings you to yet another Galapagos tourist attraction.

How to eat a cactus

Every day we saw different Islands: one looks like the moon, the next looks like a volcano, the next is filled with flamingo’s, the next has real trees and the next only has one cactus next to the other…

Galapagos wildlife: iguana eating a cactus

And of course this variety leads to an equal immense variety of Galapagos wildlife animals: try to avoid the spikes when eating a cactus… It’s just amazing and as always: you are sitting next to the animal

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It’s not because Galapagos looks like paradise, that it is paradise. These days Galapagos is quite well respected, but that’s only a recent decision…

Back in the days of Darwin (Charles Darwin and Galapagos finches), the easiest source of food were the famous giant Galapagos turtles. They are so slow that they are easy to capture, and if you turn them on their back, they are said to be able to live for another year…

So it was only a matter of time that Galapagos turtles became endangered. Some have been captured to save the species: zoos that have Galapagos turtles have been breeding them successfully and introduced them back to the Galapagos Islands.

Yet we all know that the gene-pool is limited when your ancestors have been breeding only in zoos. Meaning: only a few parents are at the origin of most modern day Galapagos turtles.

You can say: take a turtle from one island and put them on the other islands…

I agree with that idea, but then some biologists still think that “one shouldn’t interfere”… That I find a discussable stand: first people destroy almost all and then they say: we shouldn’t interfere…

Then the specific Galapagos dilemma: one turtle form 1 island is a bit different than one from another island, and they don’t seem to have a appetite to mix-breed… That’s exactly the reason why you get specific sub species in the first place…: they “don’t breed with just any turtle!”.

Endangered Galapagos Turtles

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