Another world – The Tales of Two Travelling Turtles

Another world

The astonishingly varied landscapes of the Galapagos

There aren’t many places on earth where you can drive from sun and desert cacti to fog and rain in 20 minutes flat. But that’s what happens on the Galapagos Islands. It’s an extraordinary experience.

Every island has a number of distinct zones – arid, wet, transitional etc – and the distances between them can be very small. The islands have volcanic hills and the air currents, that up until then have had a clear run of 1000km or more across the Pacific, are forced up and over. So – drum roll…geography lesson time – the moist air condenses into clouds as it rises, and it rains pretty much every day on the side of the mountain that gets the predominant winds and virtually never on the other side. This might sound academic, but experiencing it in action up close is awe-inspiring.

Every island has ecosystems of astonishingly different flora and fauna within a stone’s throw of each other. You start the day with sun cream and sunglasses, and before you know it you’re reaching for the pack-a-mac as you drive into fog with green forests either side of the road. Those geography lessons were not a pack of lies!

Another extraordinary feature of the islands are the lava tunnels. These are a product of the lava flows when the islands were created. On the outside, more viscous lava would solidify while a flow of more liquid lava on the inside drained away. What’s left is a breathtaking network of tunnels.

Add the unique animals to these striking landscapes, and you get something very different from anywhere else. It sometimes feels as if you could be on another planet. Amazing.

by Chris