Santa Cruz Island
After the longest navigation of the voyage, 130 nautical miles from one of the largest completely pristine islands in the world, Fernandina of the towering volcano streaked with recent black lava flows, we weighed anchor in the famous Academy Bay, named after the early 20th century visit from the California Academy of Science.
Located on the southern coast of the second largest island in Galápagos, Santa Cruz, this bay is now home to the largest human settlement in the archipelago and is considered the tourism and conservation nerve-centre of the Galápagos. As we awoke and got ready to disembark, a very different scene greeted our eyes: dozens of colourful boats and swaying masts floating on the turquoise waters; green, rolling hills looming in the background and the picturesque town of Puerto Ayora lining the bay.
The visit to this populated centre brought us face to face with the many problems facing Galápagos: we saw introduced vertebrates and plants wherever we looked, including the explosions of brilliant reds and yellows of the royal pointsianas in bloom at this time of year; hundreds of people milling around and construction going on everywhere; traffic of cars and bikes on the roads – truly a diametrically opposite experience to the one we had the previous day, one that shattered the illusion of isolation from the modern world we had developed over the last few days and with all we had previously seen on wildlife documentaries about the islands. Nonetheless, this must be viewed as an extremely important experience to fully understand the complex reality of the Galápagos.
During our visit to the world-famous Charles Darwin Research Station, we were delighted to learn that despite the growing problems related to an ever-increasing population, the incredibly important work done by this institution has ensured that the islands are actually now in a far better state of conservation than they were even 50 years ago! Many of the tortoise and iguana populations have been brought back from the brink of extinction and their home islands are now well on the way to complete ecological restoration, as we learned while visiting these incredibly successful captive breeding programs.
Even a heavily populated island such as Santa Cruz still maintains much of its special nature, as we visited endemic cloud forests and saw such unique birds as the woodpecker finch, one of only a handful of tool-using birds in the world. Further exploration took us to the drier flanks of the old, extinct volcano, where we ventured inland to search for tortoises in the wild, of which this island has a healthy population – not only did we find several of these gentle giants, but we even got to observe how some of them did their best to increase the tortoise populations even without the help of the Research Station and the Galápagos National Park service!
Although our visit to Santa Cruz impressed us once more with the fabulous wildlife of the Galápagos, we also returned to the National Geographic Polaris with impressions of a warm and smiling people, eager to share their budding culture and love for their islands; we could not help but feeling that in the hands of such people, surely the Galápagos must have a bright future. This culture was celebrated this evening on board, as a group of musicians and dancers formed by local students forming part of a cultural group called “Eco Arte” came and shared both their Ecuadorian heritage and Galápagos identity with us.
To see video footage from today's expedition, click here.
