wildlife

Luck of the Draw

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Puerto Ayora, Galápagos Islands. 19.52.

My final Galápagos expedition answered a question that’s been bugging me since I landed in Puerto Ayora two days ago: why is it perpetually cloudy here? San Cristobal had its fair share of cloudy days, but – with the exception of a few hours on Wednesday afternoon – Puerto Ayora has been shrouded in a mantle of grey and white from the moment I arrived. Well, I have my answer: rain shadow.

It’s not that the entire island of Santa Cruz gets more cloud than its eastern neighbour. It’s simply that all the cloud cover gets trapped behind the highlands, forcing it to build up over the south side of the island, like Tenerife in reverse. I was worried when we left Puerto Ayora that today would be a washout, but as soon as we cleared the Gemelas sinkholes, we stepped into a shining world of clear skies and tropical sun.

It’s a good thing I brought my sun lotion today.

One thing I’ve learned in my time in the Galápagos is that all of the tours are something of a lottery. You can pay whatever you like, but ultimately it’s the park rangers who dictate who has access and when. Sometimes you get lucky and get the best light of the day (before 11am) – and sometimes you don’t. Today was the latter. Beach first, hike last. It’s definitely the inferior of the two options, for at least three good reasons:

  • Animals are a lot more active in the earlier hours of the day. As the midday heat approaches, both birds and reptiles become a lot more reclusive to get out of the heat
  • Taking a dip in the Pacific feels a lot nicer (and a lot more earned) after stomping around for an hour or two under the sun
  • The midday lighting with the sun dead overhead isn’t exactly the optimal condition for photography, especially for dark subjects like frigatebirds

In short, I was a bit miffed when we were allocated a visit to Las Bachas first – not least of all because North Seymour is one of the more expensive day trips on offer (at around $260-300 at the cheaper end). In most other parts of the world, when you’re paying that much for a day trip, you usually get some kind of say as to how to work the itinerary.

The Galápagos are different – and I suspect that the tourism explosion of the last ten years or so has had a lot to do with that. The upside is that the system has the animals’ welfare at its heart – or so I’d like to believe anyway. Controlling the daily tourist visits allows the park rangers to set limits on disturbance to the native fauna, which can only be a good thing.

Rant over. Let’s get back to some good old-fashioned awe, wonder and nature writing.

First off, whether you’re visiting in the morning of the afternoon, Playa Las Bachas is a genuine haven. After days of choppy seas, finding a calm white sand beach like El Manglecito was a major treat. Once occupied by US troops to control access to the Panama Canal during WWII, the only patrols you’ll find there now are the ghost crabs that race up and down the beach, forming enormous collections of tiny spitballs as they sift through the sand for microscopic food washed up by the tide.

I’ve only seen Sally Lightfoots since I got here (and one crab that liked a lot more like the ones we have back home), so seeing so many of these beautiful ghost crabs was a major highlight.

One species I was nearly prepared to cough up another $150 to seek out was hanging around a small lagoon behind the sand dunes. The American flamingo is the fourth and final flamingo species in the Americas, meaning the only flamingo in the world that I have yet to see is the lesser flamingo of sub-Saharan Africa and west India. I thought you’d have to go all the way to neighbouring Isabela, the largest of the Galápagos Islands, to be in with a chance of finding one of these colourful creatures, but there’s a small colony here at Las Bachas that regularly puts in an appearance.

Bypassing Isabella means I leave without seeing two iconic Galápagos species: the penguin and the flightless cormorant. However, to even have a chance at seeing the latter, you need to skip the day trips and take a cruise that explores the westernmost islands, where the elusive flightless cormorant can be found – and that can cost upwards of $4,000 before factoring in the enormous financial handicap that applies to all single travellers.

On that note, seriously, what gives? Since touchdown last Saturday I’ve met just two other solo travelers here. The rest are couples, families or groups of retirees. If you get to talking with them, a great many of them are lawyers, bankers, hedge fund managers and businessmen. I feel very out of place as a teacher here. Whatever it might once have been, the Galápagos does seem to have become a rich man’s playground.

Thank goodness the only riches in this world that matter are the ones that were living and breathing on these islands long before people came here.

I saw another two turtles at Las Bachas before we got back on the zodiac and returned to our boat, the Galapagos Shark. The crossing to North Seymour is substantially shorter than, say, the journey to Punta Pitt, but you have to go it slow in these waters, as there are so many turtles about. While the other passengers stretched out on the forecastle, I stayed up on deck watching the shearwaters and storm-petrels dancing across the surface of the water behind us.

North Seymour Island is a strange place. Under the right conditions, I would go so far as to say that it might even be eerie. A forest of dead-looking trees. Golden grass on a slab of sun-scorched rock, where the boulders come to life before your eyes and take the shape of gigantic land iguanas, lumbering across the path like miniature dinosaurs, while pterodactyl-esque frigatebirds cast enormous shadows as they hang in the wind. It’s worth coming to this place if only because it’s so different to everywhere else.

The big draw of North Seymour is its huge colony of frigatebirds. These aerial pirates can be found all over the Galápagos Islands, but they have their primary stronghold here off the coast of Baltra. More than a thousand pairs breed here each year, accompanied by thousands more juveniles, making North Seymour probably the best place in the world to see these magnificent creatures up close.

Both great and magnificent frigatebirds can be found here. The difference between the two is only slight, but easily appreciated in the sunlight: male great frigatebirds have a green sheen on their shoulders, whereas magnificent frigatebirds’ shoulder feathers shine a glossy purple.

This is also a spectacular place to see the males inflating their famous throat sacs to attract the attention of passing females. We’re quite late into the breeding season, so this wasn’t as common a sight today as it was a month ago, but I did hear and see a few males displaying a fair distance from the path.

Frigatebirds are far and away my favourite birds of the Galápagos. They may be one of the easier creatures to spot – they were the first animals I saw as the plane came in to land and I am quite sure they will be the last I see, too – but that does not detract in the slightest from their magnificence.

I caught myself thinking more than once that if I ever got a tattoo (Ed.: I won’t), I would consider the silhouette of one of these beautiful creatures. I seem to be drawn to the vultures of the animal kingdom, even where there are no vultures. Or perhaps it’s the fact that these aerial pirates are effectively feathered bandits – and I have always had a thing for bandits. I very nearly wrote my undergraduate dissertation on bandits.

One of the best things about the Galapagos is that the animals’ lack of fear allows you to witness the kind of behaviour that normally goes unnoticed. This youngster called its mother to it and, after much high-pitched pleading, convinced her to disgorge her catch so that it could eat.

Frigatebirds aside, I finally managed to track down a Galápagos endemic: the Galapagos Dove. These tiny cousins of the Peruvian doves must have been blown onto these islands millions of years ago, adapting into the colourful, rock-patterned creatures you can see today. They avoid towns and cities, so to have a chance of finding them you have to search the more remote corners of the inhabited islands.

So far I’ve managed to neglect the other star of North Seymour: the land iguanas that have made this island their home since they were extirpated from Baltra. Only the males have the distinctive sandy-orange colouration – the females are a more uniform grey in colour.

Before we left, a scuffle in the rocks sent one of the females scurrying across the path and into the shadows of the cliff. Her spook, the alpha male, followed her only as far as the path before stopping to cast a languid and uncaring eye in our direction.

These land iguanas look a lot more like their green cousins back on the mainland than their hyperspecialised marine cousins with whom they share the island. A younger me would have come to the islands purely for the iguanas. I was hugely into reptiles back then. I eventually became more interested in birds, partly because the UK doesn’t exactly have a thriving population of reptiles. So it was nice to embrace my inner child today and binge on some spectacular reptiles.

I spent my last afternoon in Santa Cruz down by the mangrove-lined fisherman’s wharf watching the pelicans. There is always bycatch to be had and so both pelican and frigatebird gather at the right time of day to pick up the scraps left out for them by the fishermen.

Like so many gringos, I’m just a visitor to these islands: here to see one of nature’s greatest marvels before returning to my normal life far across the sea. But these galapagueños spend their entire lives surrounded by these beautiful creatures: pelicans, turtles, frigatebirds, mockingbirds, sea lions, marine iguanas, giant tortoises and Sally Lightfoot crabs are as much a part of their everyday as house sparrows and pigeons are for us. That’s absolutely mind-boggling for me, but it’s only a different reality. No wonder the rangers are so defensive of their greatest treasure.

Tomorrow, I have to make my way back up to Baltra to catch my flight back to Guayaquil, then on to Santiago via a layover in Lima. It’s a fairly long-winded flight, but the real question is how to get to the airport as a single traveler. I might end up taking a taxi to the Itabaca channel, as it’s set at $25 and I did just find a secret stash of dollars that I forgot I had (I’m very good at hiding my cash in different places for safety’s sake and then forgetting where I put it).

My adventures are nearly over. It’s been a long summer. It’s going to sound odd, but I could use a holiday. Traveling solo means being switched on all the time, even when you’re laid out on a tropical beach. The Galápagos is neutral territory, but there is no place like home. I’m looking forward to a little peace of mind – but that is still some ten days away. The journey continues! BB x

Jötunheim

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Puerto Ayora, Galápagos Islands. 18.55.

Coming all the way to the Galápagos Islands and leaving without seeing the giant tortoises would be like going to Jordan and skipping out on Petra, or bypassing any kind of safari whatsoever on a visit to Kenya or Tanzania. You could do it, but you’d be missing out on something truly special.

As luck would have it, you don’t have to go too far to find them. Though they may not be as numerous as they once were long ago (an astonishing 350,000 were carried off the islands by sailors and scientists as a source of food and oil), there are still thousands of them to be found even on the populated islands of San Cristóbal and Santa Cruz. The ranches in the interior will give you your best chance at seeing them, but don’t get it confused: they’re not open-air zoos built to accommodate the surviving giant tortoises. They’re functioning orchards and pastoral plots that happen to sit right on the tortoises’ migration route to and from the clouded highlands. The fact that they provide a ready supply of fruit is simply one of the reasons they can often be found lurching around the ranches.

I was picked up from my hostal at about 8.42 by a slightly irascible taxi driver. On the way out of town, I couldn’t help noticing a dollar store selling all sorts of cheap plastic tat: brainrot bracelets, a K-Pop Demon Hunters make-up kit, imitation night goggles from Lilo and Stitch and a plastic figurine of Haaland. For an island that makes such a big deal about not importing single-use plastics, there’s a lot of single-use plastic junk on sale here for locals and tourists alike. I hope one day we learn to stop mass-producing stuff like this and give capitalism one almighty sock in the jaw, though I doubt that will happen in my lifetime.

My destination today was Galápagos Frontier, the closest accessible ranch to Puerto Ayora. I was going to walk there, but when the heavens opened shortly after seven o’clock, I decided to take up the ranch owner’s offer of a taxi shuttle and save myself the hour and a half’s hike. By the looks of things, it would have been a pretty straightforward route, as a separate cycle lane follows the highway right into the interior, but it did allow me to slow down and enjoy my breakfast, so I guess I was grateful.

The taxi driver dawdled a bit, so he made up for lost time by hurtling along the highway, narrowly missing a couple of chickens and a very fleeting glimpse of a pachay – the Galápagos crake, a rare and endemic cousin of the moorhen that came to these islands over a million years ago. It was some relief when he finally slowed down near the ranch gates, because I don’t like to think what would have happened if we’d met a giant tortoise around the bend.

Speaking of which, I counted at least three of the lumbering giants before we’d even arrived. At four feet tall by five feet across, they’re pretty hard to miss.

Our guide, Julio César (ave!), had a lot to tell us about the ranch and its flora and fauna, so he brought along a Canadian volunteer to translate for him, as the American mother and son on our trip didn’t speak any Spanish. We butted heads a bit over travel advice for Peru as the young American fella was headed there next. She recommended Paracas and Huacachina as her highlight. I told him I’d managed Paracas in a day and she said I was “fucking insane”, which seemed an odd sort of way to talk to a client, but… that’s North Americans for you. No filter. I gave them a wide berth for the rest of the tour and stuck close to Julio, bypassing the need to speak in English for the rest of the morning.

It’s only a small boundary of mine, but I don’t take kindly to being sworn at without uttermost provocation. Priggish, perhaps, but it’s a principle I try to stick to.

Anyway. I wasn’t here to hang out with tourists. I came up here to see the giant tortoises. And see them I did.

I’ve always known they’re incredibly long-lived creatures, but just how long has never really dawned on me. Some of these tortoises were well over a hundred years old, with at least one or two individuals over the one-hundred-and-fifty mark. Julio showed us the sun-bleached shell of a male he had found dead on the ranch at the start of the tour, adding that it was the only such cadaver he’d found in forty years working this corner of the island. That statistic alone hints at the ridiculous surviving power of these creatures, whose metabolism is so slow that they can go for as long as a year without food or drink.

Turtles may have been around since the Triassic in one form or another, but these giants really are reminiscent of the age of the dinosaurs in their almost miraculous longevity.

You can age a giant tortoise by their shells. Younger tortoises have more clearly defined grooves in their shells, which wear away with age. Ironically, the fewer the lines, the older they are. So it stands to reason that some of these tortoises individuals we saw – like the one below – were incredibly old. Old enough to have seen two world wars come and go. Old enough to remember a time before tourism on the islands. And with the record age in captivity pushing 174 years, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that one or more tortoises on the islands remember a young Charles Darwin who came here in 1835.

I don’t know about you, but I found that absolutely mind-boggling.

Many of the tours on the ranches include a visit to the lava tunnels, a labyrinthine network of caves hollowed out of the mountain by ancient rivers of molten rock, long since cooled and emptied. Near the coast, these are the preferred burrows of the Galápagos penguin, but up here in the highlands, they’re more commonly used as roosts for barn owls and the three endemic bat species that call the islands home.

The most amazing thing about the lava tunnels – apart from the fact that they seem to go on forever – is the way their ceilings sparkle and gleam in the torchlight. Thousands of water droplets and bacteria scintillate in silver and gold, making the long dark of the tunnels alive with light.

Back up and out in the light, we were tailed for a short distance by a flock of anis. These cuckoo/crow-like birds aren’t native to the Galapagos but were brought here from the mainland in the 70s to deal with the horsefly problem blighting the highland ranches. Now they’re everywhere, attacking much of the native wildlife, so every few years the local community organises a major cull of the species to keep their numbers in line.

It doesn’t help that they’re actually a very endearing kind of bird. This sort of job is much easier when the culprit is small, faceless and preferably creepy-crawly.

Living and working in Santiago this summer has, at times, felt decidedly European. You’re never under any allusion that you’re in an entirely different hemisphere, but all the same, the roads and the streets are very western, very cosmopolitan. Up in the highlands of the Galápagos, there’s something very… equatorial about the place. One-storey houses at the roadside with chalkboards selling fruit. Red earth roads leading into the distance with thick green vegetation on either side. Tarmac roads without pavements or bollards. It almost feels like being back in Uganda.

With the vegetation so high at this time of year (following the daily rains), it can be hard to encounter a giant tortoise that isn’t buried up to its neck in greenery. So I was glad to find at least one by the roadside that was wandering out in the open. It can be hard to gauge their size when they’re on their own, but if I told you that their shells can reach a man’s waist or even abdomen in the very largest specimens, that may give you an idea.

It’s been quite a wild ride, this summer, and spending the last few days with the giant tortoises of the Galápagos seems like a nice way to wind down what has been a total blur of events since I left the UK to burn under the unforgiving summer sun of July 2026. It’s still burning now. In South America we’ve had rain almost every day here since I arrived. If only I could send some of it back to Europe ahead of my return. Folk might welcome it there.

A week from today, I will be in Athens, on what really will be the last of my labours for the summer. I had originally planned to make my own way home across Europe after that, but then the Galapagos happened, so I’m going to save both money and time and come back to the UK when the wedding festivities are over to edit my photos and rest. Lord knows I could do with the comfort of my own bed and books again.

But before that, I have one final Galápagos adventure upon which I must embark: the frigatebird colony of North Seymour Island. I hope the weather is kind on this last expedition. BB x

Mangrove Junkie

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Puerto Ayora, Galápagos Islands. 21.00.

This morning I said farewell to San Cristóbal. The easternmost island of the Galápagos chain has been a blissful retreat from the world, shrouded in stormclouds and sunshine. Having a cabin all to myself on the edge of town made a change from the usual hostel circuit. After several years of bunk beds of varying stages of comfort, I think I earned it.

I arrived a full forty-five minutes early at the harbour, as instructed, to be last in the queue. I should have known: the majority of the tourists on these islands at the moment are Dutch, Germans and Americans, who aren’t known for being slack when it comes to appointments. As such, when I finally did get onto the ferry, I was given a seat at the very front of the boat.

The Israeli sitting next to me was incensed. “Shit, man. This fucking sucks. These are the worst seats in the whole boat.” I smiled and shrugged it off – windowless or not, it was only a two hour boat trip across the open ocean – but he was seriously ticked off about what he saw as the rank injustice of the affair.

Fortunately, due to a mix-up involving the unexpected arrival of a family of four, the captain asked if we’d be so kind as to move up on deck so the family could sit together – so I effectively got an upgrade for free. So did the Israeli, whose response was a lot more vainglorious than mine, but I guess it takes all sorts to make a world. Up top, I had the refreshing breeze of the ocean wind, the occasional spray of saltwater and views all around – and, unlike a number of passengers, I wasn’t sick once. For somebody who isn’t exactly a sailor, I have always been surprised at my resistance to seasickness. Surprised – and very grateful!

The ferry between San Cristóbal and Santa Cruz takes about two hours, passing the uninhabited island of Santa Fé shortly before docking in Puerto Ayora, the largest town in the Galápagos. It was only shortly after nine, so I had a quick breakfast and then thought I might at least check in my luggage, but the lovely ladies at my hostal, the Flightless Cormorant, let me into my room right away. With my rucksack unpacked, I set out to explore and get my bearings of Puerto Ayora.

As they always are in the Americas, the fisherman’s wharf is a hive of activity. In Valparaiso, it draws gulls, terns, pelicans and the local sea lion population right up to the harbour. Here in the Galapagos, the frigatebirds add some local colour. They almost never seem to land, and the reason for that became clear when I saw one resting on the roof of a boat: their feet are tiny, almost vestigial in appearance. It seems that this was the sacrifice they made millions of years ago in order to become masters of the air, just like our swifts back home in Europe, only more than five times the size.

Here, as on San Cristóbal, you can find lava herons, with the added touch that the mangrove trees make for a slightly more interesting backdrop. The mangroves are easily my favourite thing about Santa Cruz – I’ve only ever seen them in books and documentaries, and they are every bit as spectacular as I always thought – even here, where they start right in the heart of Puerto Ayora itself.

Obviously my turtle encounter yesterday wasn’t enough, because a short burst of breath near the boats alerted my attention to a youngster drifting near the surface, less than a stone’s throw from the harbour. It was feeding on the algae growing on the bottom of the boats, particularly on the propellers raised just inches above the surface. The Galápagos Islands are famous for the close encounters you can have with the local wildlife, but I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting to see both sharks and turtles without even having to leave the larger towns.

One of the big draws in Puerto Ayora is the Charles Darwin Research Centre to the east of the city. Free to visit – except for the Fausto Llerena Giant Tortoise breeding centre, which is perilously easy to stumble into (and be politely removed from) as it has no fencing! – it is worth a look-around even if just for the passport stamp you can acquire here, the only legitimate way to obtain such a stamp (as they do not issue any stamps at the airport).

The walk there takes you into the wilder country around Puerto Ayora, and you have to watch your feet: there are reptiles everywhere. I lost count of the lava lizards and marine iguanas, and I’m almost certain I saw the looped body of a Galápagos snake disappear into the bushes as I turned a corner.

Follow the trail that leads east of the Charles Darwin Research Centre and you’ll reach Playa Ratonera, a wild and wave-battered volcanic shoreline. It has a few sandy stretches, but it’s hardly a pleasure beach, as it gets the full force of the Pacific. It’s mostly mangroves, carpet weed and black volcanic boulders, with the shattered white remnants of millions of years of coral taking the place of pebbles.

One huge draw is the local population of marine iguanas. There were always a few around the harbour on San Cristóbal, but Santa Cruz has hundreds of them.

The collective noun for marine iguanas is a mess, which is about right. They are absolutely everywhere, sprawling all over each other on the path, off the path, among the weeds and atop the rocks. You really do have to watch where you step, because they’re a lot more sluggish than the lava lizards and don’t tend to move even when they’re only inches away.

They were attended by a massive great blue heron, the American cousin of our grey herons. Herons of this size have a Catholic diet, so I imagine the smaller iguanas form a part of that, before they become too large for even the most ambitious herons. I’ve seen these birds swallow fish that are far too large for their long necks, but they probably do go down the hatch a lot more easily than a spiky, scaly adult iguana.

Time and again here I am bowled over by how unafraid the local wildlife is of us. Herons, iguanas, mockingbirds, finches, boobies and oystercatchers… none of them seem to mind one jot that they share their world with us. Only the whimbrels seem to have retained their wariness, though given their status as migrants in these islands, perhaps their behaviour may be excused.

The other beach worth visiting in Puerto Ayora’s immediate area is Playa Tortuga, a stretch of exposed white sand to the southwest. Getting there requires registering with a park ranger and a half hour’s trek through the opuntia cactus forest, but when you see the final destination, you’ll understand why so many people both local and foreign make this trek every day. It’s a paved route, so it’s not exactly arduous, and it does have the benefit of sending you through bird country. I finally saw the largest of the ground finches, with its impressively large nutcracker bill, as well as the local species of mockingbird, noticeably different in voice and appearance to the birds on San Cristóbal.

I believe Playa Tortuga is so named because it plays host to a breeding colony of green turtles at the right time of year, but to get there, you first have to cross Playa Brava, beaten savagely by the force of the ocean. When I got there the afternoon’s daytrippers were all heading back to town in a slow and sandy procession. The rangers close the beach at five, so as I arrived at twenty past four, I didn’t have an awful lot of time.

Time enough, though, to appreciate the strange beauty of the mangroves. On the far side of the red flag beach (where the waves are far too strong to allow for bathing) you’ll find the not-so-secret mangrove-lined bay of Playa Tortuga. It’s no hyperbole to say that it is by far the most beautiful beach in the Galapagos that I’ve seen so far: quiet, secluded and with views to die for all around.

I didn’t bring my swimming gear, and it would have been too late to pop in for a swim even if I had, but it was a hard-fought temptation not to dive right in. I confess I usually have more than a little contempt for those who travel the world just to lounge around on a beach without a care for the local wildlife or culture, but when the beaches are this good, I can begin to understand why somebody might be mad enough to empty their bank account to be in a place like this.

If you walk just a little bit further, you can see the entire bay with the mountains behind from a rocky peninsula, where the opuntia cactus grows. Tomorrow I’ll head up into those highlands in search of giant tortoises, but for now, it’s just me, the sea and the pufferfish swimming among the rocks below me.

I’ll close this post here – I had a lot more to report than I thought today. Maybe tomorrow will be a quieter one! BB x

Flow State

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, Galápagos Islands. 18.55.

I could have sworn that it crossed my mind when I was packing for Chile that I might want to take my GoPro. It would have very easily fit inside my suitcase. It’s not as though I overpacked, by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, I almost certainly underpacked. Well, it can’t be helped – how was I to know that my last South American adventure of the summer would take me snorkelling, when Chile was (and still is) in the grip of winter?

Long story short, I really, really, really wish I’d had it on me today. But I didn’t. So I’ve done my best to make up for it with the trusty Nikon. I hope you enjoy!

Today’s expedition took me out to León Dormido, more commonly known as Kicker Rock. I’ll be honest, of all the Galápagos day tours available, this one was not on my list. It probably should have been, as it’s one of the most spectacular places in the world to go snorkeling, or so they say. Knowing what I know now – which is that the discount I had from my guide was considerable, compared to the other guests – I’m glad I signed on for a last minute slot.

I rocked up early to the marina, as instructed, but sometimes I forget that this is South America. A 7.45am meet turned into a 9.15am departure, so I had plenty of time to photograph the sea lions, which never fail to disappoint, no matter how accustomed one becomes to their presence here.

We had an afternoon slot for León Dormido, so Samuel took us to a sanctuary beach within eyesight of the rock known as Playa El Manglecito. When we arrived, there was hardly any wind at all – just the waves lapping upon a white sand beach. The surface of the water was only broken once in the distance by a mobula ray leaping into the air and disappearing into the endless blue. With the possible exception of Finisterre, this is probably the first true white sand beach I’ve ever seen, and boy did it live up to the hype!

I considered snorkelling with the others, but it only took a few seconds in the water to realise that something was wrong. My mask filled with seawater almost immediately, stinging my eyes and forcing me to my feet early. A small tear where the straps met the rubber seal of the mask was the culprit – something I confess I hadn’t spotted when I checked the mask last night. So I shrugged, got back out and went for a walk along the beach.

There was plenty to keep me occupied. The molten scrub beyond the shore was alive with little things: finches, warblers and colourful lava lizards. Of course, there’s always a sea lion about too, and since it was so curious about us, I couldn’t help but indulge it as well.

Indigo and her mother, a couple of experienced divers from the UK, told me I had to go back in the water: they had seen as many as fourteen turtles in the bay. I told them about my mask and Indigo lent me hers. I’m past the stage of my life where I’d awkwardly turn such an offer down out of affected politeness – and I really did want to see a turtle.

It took me a little while to find them. I swam across half the bay at first, thinking they might be sheltering on the far side, only to nearly collide with one of the giants as I returned to the shore.

Oh, if only I’d had the GoPro – the things I could have shown you! Green turtles are simply enormous. So much bigger than I expected. I think I assumed all turtles but the giant leatherbacks were around the size of an Olive Ridley, but these green turtles can grow to five feet in length. The largest of the turtles in the bay must have been that size or close to: he was busy gnawing algae from the rocks and paid me no attention whatsoever, though I can only have been a metre or so away when the waves hurled me in his direction.

I didn’t linger as I didn’t want to cause them any undue stress. They didn’t seem at all bothered by my presence, but turtles are endangered enough as it is, so I spent a few minutes in total awe, watching them feed and fly through the water on those evolutionarily perfect flippers, before pushing off back toward the shore.

Our divemaster Jesús called the three divers back to the boat, but the rest of us – me, a Brazilian-American and a mother and son from Austria – had another half hour to enjoy the beach. Naturally, I’d surrendered the working snorkel back to Indigo, but I figured I could at least have a go at capturing the turtles on camera, albeit from above.

The trouble with turtles is that they are perfectly adapted to life underwater, and do not need to come up for air as readily as other animals. When inactive, such as when they need to sleep, they can submerge for an astonishing seven hours without needing to breathe. Even when they’re awake, they can still hold their breath for thirty minutes or more if they need to – and when they do pop up for a breath, it only lasts a couple of seconds until they dive back down again.

All this is to say that photographing a turtle out of the water is a very difficult challenge. But I had half an hour and nothing better to do, so I took a stakeout. It was almost impossible at first, but when a couple of them decided to cross the bay and swim out of the dark reef and over the white sand, the job was suddenly made a lot easier. All I had to do was to track the shadows.

The calm sea that carried us gently into the bay had been whipped up into a fierce swell by the wind, which made the job even harder, but I managed a few half decent photos as the first one made its way across the bay.

Looking at a turtle is beholding one of the greatest survivors on Earth. These incredible reptiles have been around since the time of the earliest dinosaurs in the early Triassic, some 230 million years ago, and two mass extinctions, as well as a host of other destructive factors – including our depraved taste for their meat and shells – have not been able to rid the planet of these mighty success stories. It was a real privilege to see them so close.

I’ll be honest. After that incredible encounter, the snorkelling at León Dormido was… a bit of a letdown. Kicker Rock is a world-famous diving location, where entire schools of hammerhead sharks, eagle rays and even mantas can be seen. Naturally, snorkelling is a bit more restrictive, doubling your time but limiting your exploration to the surface. I was lucky that they had a spare mask, so I could see underwater without any difficulty this time.

We saw parrotfish, triggerfish and rainbow wrasse and a few impressive sea stars clinging to the wall of the rock, but beyond that, the most memorable encounter was the enormous salp swarm we found ourselves in. Every single movement of my hands was surrounded by a swirling cloud of reddish gelatinous organisms that looked like drawings of cells from my old biology textbooks. The sun must have drawn them all up to the surface from deeper, darker waters below, beyond the deep blue beneath my feet where the blades of sunlight fail to penetrate.

I’ve never snorkelled in open water before, so I think I was much more accustomed to being able to stop and breathe normally more often than I feasibly could with the seafloor more than 130 feet below. It took me a while to master breathing through the snorkel, and even once I’d lost my nerves about breathing through a tube, seawater still managed to get into my nose and up and into my oesophagus. After about twenty minutes it felt as though my throat was on fire with all the ingested salt, which probably didn’t help with my state of mind. It was only when I was distracted by the playful antics of the attendant sea lions or a particularly interesting fish that I didn’t think of the discomfort I was in.

The divers said they’d seen it all: reef sharks, hammerheads, eagle rays and barracuda and all the rest. They were all much, much lower down. I didn’t begrudge them for it – that’s what they trained for, after all. It was a good reminder, however, that my gut was right all along: snorkeling isn’t really my cup of tea, compared to, say, a two-hour hike. In that sense, I haven’t changed much since my school years: I know what I’m good at and I do it often enough to consider it mastered. I’m open to new experiences, but given the choice between snorkeling and hiking some other time, I might think again next time.

Unless, of course, I’ve got my GoPro on me. Or I’ve shaved (which may or may not have had an impact on the water getting into my nose).

Fortunately, there was one resident of León Dormido which had eluded me so far, and it was a creature I’d been hoping to see since I got here: a tropicbird. These angelic creatures are shy seabirds, nesting deep within the cliffs in hard-to-reach places, and – at least here – usually fly in pairs. Bloody hell, but they’re hard to catch, moving tremendously fast in wide circles against a bright blue sky, but after much trial and effort I finally caught one.

The return journey was a very bumpy ride. We’d been sheltered from the wind and waves on the east side of Kicker Rock, but had to cross a raging sea to get back to port. In spite of myself, I caught myself dozing off, which you’d think would be hard in a boat that keeps landing with a jolt and a hard splash after cresting every wave, but there’s something about afternoon journeys after a long day’s expedition that renders you terribly susceptible to fatigue, whatever the circumstances. I wrapped the strap of my camera as tightly around my arms as it would allow, just in case.

Samuel’s contact did finally offer me a trip to Española, the Impossible Island, but for tomorrow. Sadly, I neither have the budget nor the time: Punta Pitt and Kicker Rock between them cost what Española would have been, and besides, I have an early departure tomorrow for Santa Cruz, the second of the two islands on my Galápagos adventure.

I’ve been on the islands for four days and I still haven’t seen the giant tortoises that they were named for. That will change on Santa Cruz. It’s time to bring this adventure to a close in style – and, hopefully, add a couple more species to the roster in the process. Santa Cruz, here we come! BB x

Flippers, Fins and Feathers

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, Galápagos Islands. 20.40.

The days here on the islands are falling into a sort of rhythm. Morning brings a slow and dark sunrise through the garúa, followed by spells of gentle rain falling on the roof over my head. The clouds hug the island for most of the morning, until the sun burns through them all shortly after one o’clock, which allows for a spell of humid sunshine until the clouds swallow up the sun once again before sunset.

August is – it should be said – definitely not the sunniest time of the year here in the Galapagos. Come to think of it, nowhere in South America seems to be, whenever I’m passing through. In fact, of the fifty-six days I’ve spent in South America this year, just under half have been washed out with rain. That could just be bad luck – I have been to each destination in its “off season”, which does usually coincide with the rainy season – but it could equally be an anomaly. Chile, for one, does not usually get as much rain as it did this winter.

It’s not so bad here, though. It doesn’t come down in buckets like it did in Chile and the Peruvian Amazon, and it does have the added perk of keeping the beaches and trails free of day-trippers, most of whom hole up in their hotels during the rain.

After a fake-out from the sun this morning (which was only briefly with us before the rain clouds returned) I set out up the Tijeretas trail to the cove I’d seen the other day. It was, predictably, almost deserted: just one other swimmer was there, the same one I saw when I scouted out the trail a few days ago, doing lengths of the bay.

I didn’t have a rental GoPro on me this time. Not that it really matters – some things are best remembered by memory alone. All the advice online had said the water would be much too cold to go in without a wetsuit. I suppose that advice was targeted at Americans, specifically the ones from Florida, where the daily temperature is a lot warmer. As an Englishman who has swum in the shores of the English Channel more than once, I found the water around San Cristóbal to be blissfully warm. I could have been in there for hours.

Here, as everywhere, I was joined in both land and sea by the sea lions. They really are everywhere on these islands, but they properly come into their own underwater, where their powerful flippers help them to fly through the water like birds in the air. At least twice during my swim I was nearly clipped by one that appeared out of nowhere, shimmering like gold in the grey water.

As for the rest of the world beneath the waves… where do I even begin? Butterflyfish and parrotfish, sergeant majors and surgeonfish, hogfish and hawkfish… all as wildly named and widely colourful as a Dr Seuss book. Like so many who come to the Galápagos, no doubt, I was especially captivated by the impressive king angelfish, one of the larger species you can find close to the shore, its dark body lined with an almost iridescent electric blue, complete with a smart shoulder stripe and a tail as yellow as a flame. What must Darwin and his men have thought when they saw these oceans full of living jewels on their voyage here, nearly two hundred years ago?

Speaking of Darwin, after I’d done a full length of the bay and dried off, I took my time heading back to my cabin so that I could linger in the forest. Mangrove warblers are just about everywhere, but it’s Darwin’s finches that are the real celebrities. Both species of ground finch are fairly easy to spot: small and medium. About as creatively named as a Starbucks order, they are at least easy to tell apart by the size of their bills.

Small ground finch (male), Cerro Tijeretas.
Medium ground finch (female), Cerro Tijeretas.

I had lunch for $6 at a really lovely local joint in town, el Rincón de Sebas. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday, so the bowl of steaming hot shrimp soup and the breaded fish were nothing short of heavenly. I’m not really the dieting type, but there is something to be said for delayed gratification.

I waited out the hottest part of the day in the cabin, wrestling unsuccessfully with the dry weeds that festooned one of my tops which gel from the balcony where it was drying into the rocks below. Whatever plant it was, it’s like no weed I’ve ever encountered before. Short of a professional roller, that burdock-like debris isn’t coming off easily, so I’ve had to admit defeat for the time being. Fortunately, it’s not exactly long-sleeved weather up here.

After negotiating tomorrow’s plan with Samuel, my guide from the other day, I opted for his discounted trip to León Dormido, also known as Kicker Rock. There was still a chance I could hold out for a possible opening on Española’s Punta Suárez, but that particular adventure has become synonymous with frustration on this trip, to the point where I have christened the place “Impossible Island”. Even if it were to appear now, I would be faced with paying double the price of the alternative – which, when you consider it would cost more than a one way flight to Peru from London, massively puts it into perspective.

Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll diversify my options and spend a day with the fish.

There’s always something to see in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno’s harbour, so I took my camera with me on my way into town to collect my snorkelling gear. Sure enough, the manglar and its connecting channel near the Ecuadorean naval base was a wildlife magnet, so there was much to see here. The local noddies were pestering a young pelican that was fishing in the bay. One of them continually tried to land on its head, doubtless hoping to snatch anything the giant caught before it went straight down the bird’s gullet.

A couple of boobies were drawing a small crowd – not the American family watching them (/their smartphones) but the flies around their heads. I’ve noticed that these gnats seem to pester the iguanas quite a bit, so naturally a larger and more warm-blooded creature such as a booby would make for a better target.

The oldest of the pelicans was avoiding the problem by simply burying its face between its wings. It kept one eye open, languidly watching the world go by. I didn’t get to see this particularly impressive specimen in full breeding plumage, because it took off and left while I was distracted by something else.

That something else was just a glimpse, but enough to be sure of what I was seeing: the tip of the dorsal fin of a shark. They don’t usually come this far into the shallows, so I was surprised to see the familiar Jaws-esque fin break the surface, putting the local sea lions on edge.

The channel that runs alongside the road is a heron magnet. All three species of San Cristóbal’s small herons can be found here: yellow-crowned night heron, striated heron and lava heron. The sunbathing night heron from the other day was here, but I was more intrigued by the scruffy-looking youngsters hanging around the rocks. Head-on, they are remarkably frog-like in their appearance.

The striated heron – the same one that can be found across the Americas – is a lot like the endemic lava heron, only a lot more patterned. I tested out the camera’s dynamic range options with this one as it hunted in the shallows. I’m still learning as a photographer, but if I can get to the stage where my photos aren’t so blurry anymore, I’ll be a happy man.

One photo I am particularly happy with is this one. The lava herons are really hard to shoot as they are fundamentally dark birds that haunt a dark and rocky background, making conditions difficult. Fortunately, they’re a lot less active than the finches or shearwaters who have been giving me the run-around, so I had time to frame this one nicely.

Tomorrow is a day in the water. I hope the weather is kinder. Who knows what we will find in the legendary depths of Kicker Rock? Another shark would be nice, but I’d settle for a turtle or ray. BB x

In Darwin’s Footsteps

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, Galápagos Islands. 04.57.

I woke up to the sound of the waves this morning. Well, I suppose morning is a stretch, since the clock on my bedside table said ten past four. I must have passed out around eight last night, beaten down by the lack of sleep on the plane and lulled into a Pacific lullaby by the sea. I can think of worse ways to spend a summer.

The garúa rolled in off the mainland last night, bringing with it relieving cloud and gentle rain. A passing shower came and went a few minutes back, but now it’s just the tap-tap sound of the lingering raindrops falling onto the roof of my cabin from the giant daisy tree.

There’s no point going back to sleep now, so I’ll spend some time writing up yesterday’s account of my first day on San Cristóbal.

The magic begins as soon as you’ve left the airport. Technically before, I suppose, since I could see the sharp-angled silhouettes of the island’s frigatebirds well before we landed. Outside the terminal, it’s a ten minute walk to the centre of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, the largest settlement on San Cristóbal.

Three of Darwin’s keys can be found right next to the terminal building: small and medium ground finches, of evolutionary fame, and one of the island’s endemic species, the San Cristóbal mockingbird. It’s this last that’s especially important, as Darwin didn’t realise the significance of the finches until after he’d departed from the islands, but he did notice that the mockingbirds on each island were different in some way.

Like so many creatures on these islands, they are completely unfazed by the presence of man. They have a funny way of walking, with their cocked tail wagging from side to side. If I were a scientist, I might have called them metronomebirds for this singularly odd gait.

Most of the other travellers piled into taxis outside the terminal, which seemed a bit ridiculous, given just how close the town is to the airport, but I guess some habits die hard. I was quite happy pottering about with the ground finches. It’s not often you get to spend time with a species that literally changed the way we think about our place in the world.

The first thing you notice is the sea lions. They are absolutely everywhere. If you can’t see them, you can certainly hear them: that cartoonist arf arf arf you associate with children’s TV carries for quite some distance.

They don’t stick to the beach, either. A large number of them seek out shadier spots on the seafront parade, dozing quite carelessly on roads, park benches and boardwalks. It’s pupping season, so there’s no shortage of pups in varying stages of development sticking close to their mothers. I’d suggest giving them a wide berth – you never know where the bull might be.

In this case, I did know where the bull was – because he was announcing his presence every minute or so with that barking call, as though to remind everyone in the vicinity that the harem on the beach was his and his alone. Which, I suppose, is close to the truth.

You can tell the bulls apart from their size – nearly a third larger than the females – and the significant boss on their heads. I also hadn’t noticed before the claws in their flippers, but you can get so close to the great sea beasts here on the islands that there’s hardly a detail that will pass you by.

I had to wait a little while before checking in to my cabin on the edge of town, just a stone’s throw from Playa Mann. At a glance, there seem to be a lot of people who come to these islands for the beaches. To a dyed-in-the-wool naturalist like me, that does somewhat feel like going to the Serengeti for a tan, but I’m far too happy to judge. Who could possibly turn away from a chance to see these spectacular islands, given the chance?

I took myself straight back down to the sea once I’d checked in and found two more Galápagos specialities almost immediately. I’ve been mad about Sally Lightfoot crabs since they turned up in a wildlife spotting book I won as a prize for a sunflower growing competition when I was a kid. We have crabs in the British isles, of course, but none nearly so colourful as the Sally Lightfoot. They’re everywhere here, ranging from dark green to sunset red, hugging the molten rocks along the surf line and leaping between boulders with surprising agility.

The other specialty is a real treasure of the Galápagos, arguably as iconic as the giant tortoises that gave the islands their name. Marine iguanas, a short-faced ocean-going variant of the green giants found on the mainland, are often described as “ugly”, perhaps on account of Darwin’s first description of the creatures. Certainly, their patchy salt-washed skin and snub faces make them strange-looking beasts, and they’re not nearly as active as the sea lions as they soak up the sun on the beachfront, but they are tremendously interesting creatures.

Around midday, it gets rather hot here on San Cristóbal. Not unbearably so, but the humidity doesn’t help. I found a night heron sheltering from the heat in the shadow of the rocks earlier, and when I returned, it was sunning itself in a posture I haven’t seen in herons before.

A smaller heron was lurking among the boulders nearby: a lava heron, an island variant of the striated heron that can be found all the way up and down the coasts of the Americas. It was mesmerised by the dragonflies hawking over the beach, tilting its sharp beak and golden eyes every time one came close. I didn’t stick around long enough to see if it caught one.

After sorting out my snorkel gear for tomorrow’s expedition to Punta Pitt, I made for Cerro Tijeretas, a promontory to the north of town known as Frigatebird Hill. I passed a large Dutch contingent and a couple of Germans looking for a mockingbird, but other than that, I had the trail pretty much to myself. The Galápagos aren’t like Manu – you aren’t going to be tripping over a new species every few steps – but the encounters you do have with the island natives are more than a match in their total lack of fear. I found a Galápagos flycatcher hunting by the boardwalk and spent most of the afternoon followed by warblers.

From the top of the hill, you get a spectacular view out across the island to the east, all the way to the cliffs of Punta Pitt. The bay beneath Cerro Tijeretas seems to be a popular snorkelling spot, and I can see why. One shape drifting in the water seemed to the naked eye to be too compact to be human, but too mobile to be a rock, so I turned my lens on it to confirm my suspicions: a green turtle, one of a number that can be found around these islands. I’ve brought my own snorkelling mask so I’ll have to check this place out sometime, when it’s quieter, maybe.

I didn’t make it as far as Playa Baquerizo, which really is a proper hike from town, across several kilometres of molten rock and daisy trees, so I’ll have to check it out later. Instead, I perched myself on a boulder and watched the sunset in a beach I had to myself. Noddies dancing across the surface of the water. Boobies hunting offshore. Frigatebirds wheeling above the bay on those vast black wings. This really is a paradise like few others. I hope for the islands’ sake it remains that way.

It’s nearly seven o’clock. It’s light now, and the island is covered by a merciful blanket of cloud. There are birds called outside but Merlin is struggling to identify them. That may have something to do with the generator that keeps clicking and whirring noisily outside. I’d better have a quick shower and then head out. I’ve rented a GoPro for today’s snorkelling adventures, but there’s also likely to be a heck of a lot to see at Punta Pitt itself, so watch this space! BB x

Sea Cats and Sea Lions

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Casa Volante, Valparaíso. 16.37.

Santiago de Chile may be cursed to be a smog-bound citadel for the rest of its days, but in one particular sense, it is exceptionally well-placed: it is about an hour’s drive up into the mountains to the east for skiing during the winter months, while a hour and a half’s drive to the west will take you to the Pacific coast. Santiago’s summer sisters, Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, may only be a hundred kilometres out as the condor flies, but they are a world away from the Chilean capital. In some ways, they are decidedly European: winding streets with towering Parisian buildings, complete with tramlines and traffic lights. In others, they are absolutely Latin American: a fiercely compact cultural melting pot, with Peruvian outposts everywhere.

With my timetable still very much up to me (consisting entirely of lesson observations at the moment), I struck out early for Valparaíso today, very much in the mindset that the part of town where the bus station is – or so the books all tell me – is no place to be after dark. It took me about three hours to get here, all in all, so had I waited until I had got home, it would be around half past nine here – which is definitely pushing it, even by my standards.

So here we are, in Valparaíso, Chile’s second city. With a population of around 300,000, it’s a little larger than the hamlet of 47 in La Mancha for which it was named.

Let’s be real. I’ve come here for two things: sea lions and Pablo Neruda. I’ve been juggling my choice of poet for the Language A course for a while, between Neruda – arguably Latin America’s greatest poet – and Lorca, who I hold in especially high regard. In the end, it is Lorca who has won the day, if only because I have studied him so much over the years (and, no doubt, because I have skin in the game by being part Andalusian myself). All the same, it would be a crime not to include Neruda in the course, so I plan to use his poems to prepare my students for the unseen.

Neruda, for now, must wait. I’ll have time for that tomorrow, after the pelagic expedition. I arrived too soon to check in, so I turned my feet east and followed the coastline as far as the twin piers of Caleta Portales.

I didn’t have to go far to get my sea lion fix. The main pier of Muelle Barón may be out while the city pours time and money into what looks to be a seafront shopping mall in the making, but the real show is a few hundred metres to the east, where the skeletal ruins of an old gas company dock has become one of the favoured haul-out sites for the city’s sea lions.

Alongside the sea lions, the structure is the perch of choice for a surprising number of seabirds, given its safe distance from the shore but proximity to the fisheries. I picked out kelp gulls, Inca terns, a couple of turkey vultures, Peruvian boobies, three species of cormorant and, of course, the Peruvian pelicans that I was hoping to see again.

I thought there might be something loose in my rucksack, as I kept hearing some kind of fabric shuffling sound, but to my astonishment a man in dirty overalls clambered out from among the boulders, seemingly from some crevice beneath the very rocks upon which I had been sitting for the better part of half an hour. He acknowledged me with a gravelly “wenodía”, set down his tatty red baseball cap to mark where he had slept and then picked his way across the rocks, crouching every so often to inspect something between the crevasses of the sea wall.

Valparaíso is a lot poorer than Santiago’s uptown districts like Las Condes. That much is plain.

Moving east, I had my eyes trained on the water, on the off chance that a wandering penguin might show up. I did spot one, a fair distance from the shore, but something else entirely caught my attention – something entirely unexpected.

A marine otter.

Marine otters – known in Chile as chungungos or gatos marinos (sea cats) are not sea otters, like the fluffballs found from Baja California up along the North American coast, but they do live almost exclusively in the sea, rarely venturing into freshwater like other otters. Like sea otters, marine otters were once hunted for their pelts and are thus an endangered species, and quite a rare sight along South America’s Pacific coast. So I really wasn’t expecting to see one here, in the very heart of Valparaíso.

Apparently, marine otters are specialist feeders according to their location, with southern populations preferring fish and northern populations opting for shellfish. This must be one of the northern otters, because in the fifteen minutes or so I spent watching it before it disappeared, it must have caught and eaten at least four small lobsters.

That makes two species of rare otter I have managed to find this year: giant otters in the Amazon and marine otters in the Pacific. And I still haven’t tracked down the otters that live in the Tone, just a stone’s throw from my flat! I’m sure they’ll show up eventually. Maybe I should make that my mission, before the year is out: to see a third and final species of otter, preferably before Christmas!

Not to be outdone, the pelicans put in a good show, sailing in low over the water in that spectacular flight pattern of theirs. I have wanted to see pelicans do this since my mother told me about it after her trip to Peru back in 2015, when I wanted to be just about anywhere but Amman, and I have had the incredibly good fortune to see that sight several times this year.

It’s not the stuff Attenborough documentaries are made of, for sure, and the good people of Valparaíso must see it all the time, but it is something I will never tire of seeing.

Eventually, I reached the busy fishing port of Caleta Portales. I reached it at absolutely the right time of day, too: around noon, the fishermen throw their bycatch back into the sea, loading the scraps into repurposed shopping trolleys and dumping them over the pier into the water below. The local wildlife is well aware of this daily bounty – and, thanks to a quick Google, so was I.

If you needed a clue that the drop was imminent, you only needed to count the pelicans. They had gathered in numbers so great I struggled to put a number to them – and pelicans are not small birds by any measure. They seemed to be perched upon every surface they could find: the sea wall, car roofs, billboards, shipping crates, stalls, bridges, lampposts and on the concrete among the fishermen themselves. After seeing them at a distance in Paracas, they were now far too close for my lens!

One small perk of being here now in midwinter is that some of the adults have started to put on their smarter summer plumage, with a smart yellow tinge to their more defined white faces.

I was already aware of the immense dark shapes in the shadow of the pier, but the appearance of the fisherman with his trolley worked like a magnet, drawing the dark mass along after him, following the overpowering stench of fish – or the sudden vortex of feathers and screeching gulls that followed in his wake.

With the seafood sloshed overboard, the shoreline turned into a frenzy of activity. It didn’t take me long to pick out the bull among the sea lions massing around the shoreline: he completely dwarfed all the others, and that’s saying something.

Forget the roly-poly dumplings that you find off the coast of Britain. Sea lions are an entirely different beast. Adult males can reach a whopping three metres in length and weigh in at around 325kg. They’re also fiercely territorial, as was plain enough from the deep scars on some of the males, including the old bull.

At that size – and at this distance – they were simply too big to get on camera. The 300mm would have been useful here, I think, but it’s sitting on top of my chest of drawers back home in Somerset. As such, I had to make do with portraits of the beasts that had hauled out onto the rocks to wait their turn while the bull ate the sea lion’s share of the bycatch.

At this range, of course, you can make out a lot of detail. The thickness of their whiskers. The sharpness of their teeth. The minuscule ears at the back of their heads, and the scars on their torsos.

One male was so close you could see the whites of his eyes twice over. His eyes seemed to have misted over. He must be very old for a sea lion to have contracted such an infection. I wonder how old? They can live to be around twenty years old in the wild, I think, so this one can’t be far off that mark.

Arguably prettier than the titans hogging the spotlight was a small family of Inca terns, waiting patiently for their chance to swoop in and seize some of the scraps for themselves. This is another species I travelled all the way out to the Islas Ballestas to see, only to find them so close here in Valparaíso that they might have been eating out of my hand.

Here, at least, the lens really did put in the yards.

I hung around the port for well over an hour before deciding it was probably time to head on back to Valparaíso, have a decent lunch and check in to my hostel. The skipper advised against having a large supper ahead of tomorrow’s ocean voyage, so I made a mental note to have a decent lunch instead, and acquire some snacks for the journey home.

It’s not the most scenic route back to Valparaíso from Caleta Portales. In places, the city seems to be collapsing into the sea, and where there isn’t the salty tang of the sea, there is the sweet stench of sweat, marijuana and human faeces. There’s a lot of homelessness here. All the carriages of a derelict train seemed very much lived-in, with signs of recent occupation all over the place: a bouquet of flowers tied to the grille, a washing line strung out in the gloom behind a window, and a dog waiting patiently on the step of the driver’s car. It’s probably more homely than the crevasses among the boulders below the sea wall, though I imagine it’s not much warmer.

The city never seems to catch a break. The Spanish blew the city to pieces in 1866 during the Chincha Islands War. Forty years later, in 1906, Valparaíso was ripped apart by an extremely violent earthquake – a fairly common occurrence in this part of the world, with the city sitting squarely upon the Nazca plate boundary. Apparently, there was a small one just a few days ago off Quintero, where I am headed tomorrow. It’s quite something, seeing the tsunami warning signs all over the place.

The captain has just told me that the boat needs a service tomorrow morning, so we have rescheduled. Weather permitting, we are going ahead on Sunday. That should make my journey home a bit easier. Even so, it is likely to be my most out-of-pocket adventure yet.

Tomorrow, then, is wide open. A whole day to explore Valparaíso! I’ll make sure it starts with a good sleep and a decent breakfast. Those sea lions had a proper feast today – I might as well do the same. BB x

South Sea Safari

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Coastal B&B, Puerto Natales. 18.42.

I had to improvise a bit today, after my original plan of jumping on a full-day tour of the Torres del Paine National Park and the Cueva del Milodón fell through. Fortunately, you don’t even have to leave Puerto Natales to enjoy some spectacular wildlife, even in the heart of winter. I was also lucky with the weather today, which was largely sunny for most of the day, making photography that much easier.

Many of Natales’ resident birds look deceptively like domesticated waterfowl, which could not be further from the truth. There are crested ducks absolutely everywhere, greatly outnumbering the smaller and daintier yellow-billed teals that are one of the few birds that remain wary of humans around here. The black-necked swans that live out in the fjord are probably the most iconic residents of Puerto Natales, but they were joined today by a few pairs of Coscoroba swans, a swan-like goose that can be found from the Antarctic waters of southern Chile all the way up to Brazil.

It’s clear who holds the reins of power, though. Not five minutes after the coscorobas came in to land, a pair of black-necked swans moved in, and one of them charged the coscorobas, putting them to flight. About the only bird I haven’t seen them attack yet are the tiny white-eared grebes – I wonder if that’s because they can’t see them?

Some of the birds here look familiar, even at a head-spinning distance of just over thirteen thousand kilometres from home. A small colony of house sparrows and feral pigeons have made the town their own, as they have in most towns and cities around the planet, and at first glance the oystercatchers look similar – but these are Magellanic oystercatchers, limited to the southern tip of South America. You can tell them apart by the yellow ring around their eyes. If other human species had survived, would we have been able to tell each other apart by similar signs?

There was one creature in particular that I was hoping to see – and I was not disappointed. After a half hour’s careful observation – having been almost certain I’d seen the silhouette I was looking for across the bay when I set out – I was very nearly scalped by an absolute giant that came soaring in from behind my post on the dock: a southern giant petrel, a genuine monster of the South Sea with a two-metre wingspan and a violent disposition.

The giant petrel will eat just about anything and has a reputation for bludgeoning and drowning birds much larger than itself, including penguins, gannets and albatrosses. It will even squabble with its kin over human waste left behind by passing ships. For this reason, it’s known as the vulture of the Southern ocean – which is probably why I was so keen to see one. Besides the simple fact that they really are incredibly impressive birds to behold.

A more friendly resident of Puerto Natales is the chimango caracara. You couldn’t miss these happy little hawks if you had even the least know-how about birds – they’re all over the place, perched on lampposts, drifting over the streets in the centre of town, wandering the dockyards in gangs of five or six and hopping along the beach in search of scraps. One of them had found the remains of a coscoroba and wasn’t about to share it with any one, flapping at any other caracaras that came its way.

The occasional passing clouds across the sun made for a tricky job adjusting the shutter speed on the new camera, but when the sun did come out, I could not have been happier with the results. It helps, of course, that so many of Patagonia’s animals aren’t that shy at all.

The old jetty is one of Puerto Natales’ most famous sights, and it hosts a large colony of Imperial cormorants in the winter months. Many of them had gone by mid-morning, seeking richer waters further down the fjord, but I must have counted nearly a hundred here the other night.

I went out for another walk after lunch, following the same circuit in the hope that the giant petrel would return. After about twenty minutes, it caught me by surprise once again, rushing so low over my head that I could hear the wind whistle in its giant wings. I hoped it might return the way it had come, but when it did not show itself again after about half an hour, I wandered back across town. I would have gone back to the hostal for a bit, but something made me press on to the other side, further south. That was where the petrel went, after all.

I didn’t quite make it as far as the fishing wharf, because there was a lovely view from the Edificio Cultural Costanera. I had only just packed away my camera when I found myself having to rush to get it back out again as a flamingo came in to land, right next to one just off the shore that I had not even noticed.

At such a close range, I could see just how heavily feathered the Chilean flamingo’s face is. It must be an adaptation to the cold, as these particular flamingos make their home here in Antarctic Chile and up in the frigid lakes of the Patagonian mountains. A far cry from the languid heat of Fuente de Piedra and Lake Turkana, for sure.

They were just the first. Soon, as the sun was beginning to set, a whole herd of flamingos came in to join them, their feathers glowing a blood-red scarlet in the evening light as they came down into the bay.

They made for quite a sight: a great herd of flamingos set against the backdrop of the snowy peaks of the Kawésqar Mountains. I certainly didn’t expect to see them again, having spotted earlier in the day that they had decamped to the other side of the bay since the day I arrived, and until recently, they had shown no signs of moving.

They were pretty quick to move, however, for one thing: a dark, powerful thing on two-metre wings, speeding towards them just above the surface of the water like a fighter plane. The petrel was back – and the mere sight of it put the fear of God into the flamingos. With much honking and splashing, they took off in a mad hurry, even when it was clear that the petrel was simply passing by.

What a spectacle they made as they flew up the fjord! It was like something out of a dream – and they kept turning this way and that, giving me every chance to snap them against the mighty mountains beyond.

It felt like the perfect ending to the trip, even though I have most of the day tomorrow as well, since my flight doesn’t leave until half four. But I come away with so many incredible memories, some of which I have written about and many of which I can print and put up on my wall. That’s how a good holiday should be, right? BB x

Wild and Free

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Café Artimaña, Puerto Natales. 20.30.

The weather is fickle. It’s still pretty cold out, but it’s warmed up enough not to need more than two layers on when leaving the house. The snow has largely melted away in Puerto Natales and the surrounding countryside, revealing for the first time the vast golden fields of Patagonia. It’s always a bit sad when snow melts, like coming to the end of a very special story, but if the forecast is to be believed, it will be back tonight.

I still can’t believe my ridiculous lucky streak in timing this adventure to coincide with the very first snowfall of winter – and all the magic that followed, right up until the last throw of my expedition today. Right up to the wire.

Fabián picked me up just after seven thirty as usual and we set out into the darkness. Beaming his thermal camera to his phone, we spent much of the twilight hour searching for life in the snow. It was eerily quiet this morning. A single caracara was our only find, shivering in the cold at the side of the road.

And not without reason: the temperature had dropped to a biting -10°C, worsened by the all consuming oblivion of a snowborn fog and an icy wind coming up off the lake. Even the lights of oncoming cars didn’t become visible until long after their engines were heard rumbling down the road.

We had quite a scare while looking for Escarcha and her cubs. The thermal camera picked up two glowing dots on the hillside not far from where we’d left them yesterday: one large, one small. One of the trackers went up into the fogbound hills to get a closer look and radioed in to confirm it was Escarcha and one cub. For a painful half hour, there was no sign of the second cub at all – until it came out from behind a rock where it had been hiding, much to everyone’s relief.

Winter may be beautiful, but it is terribly hard on the animals that live here – especially the young. Hopefully, Escarcha’s cubs make it through the winter so they can find territories of their own in this desolate idyll.

Escarcha took her cubs higher up into the gloom, which showed no signs of lifting anytime soon. Fabián suggested an alternative itinerary up at Laguna Azul, on the eastern edge of the national park, so we left the fog and set back out into the brilliant light.

Laguna Azul offers a tremendous view of the world famous spires of Torres del Paine across the surface of its crystal waters, though they were more often shrouded in cloud than not.

The towers themselves are every bit as breathtaking as you have heard. Unlike Petra (which I was arguably less exposed to before I saw it) the Torres del Paine lose nothing in reality, despite the fact you’ve probably seen them a thousand times over on the covers of photography magazines, NatGeo special editions and South American travel guides. Glowing red and white in the morning light, they might be the exposed teeth of some ancient titan, or the thrones of South America’s lord of the skies, the condor.

Fanciful imaginings on my part. Paine is a Tehuelche word meaning “blue”, in honour of the colour of the peaks in the grey morning, or the icy glaciers that lay at its feet.

Fabián’s mission was to find a tucúquere, a Magellanic horned owl, or the more well-known Patagonian speciality, a Magellanic woodpecker. But the forests around Laguna Azul were silent – completely silent. We found another chunchito (pygmy owl) watching us from the top of a dead tree, along with a couple of colourful rayaditos, but the snowy forest showed no other signs of life.

Perhaps they were all hiding from the creature that left these tracks in the woods: an enormous male puma, whose trail we followed for about an hour as it weaved through the woods, occasionally doubling back to investigate the older trails of a couple of younger female pumas.

Out on the lake, I finally tracked down a creature I missed in Peru. We have grebes in Europe, but the huala or great grebe – the largest of its kind in the world – is a truly magnificent bird, reaching the size of a cormorant. Curiously, as I descended to the lake’s shore to get a closer look, it actually came closer to the shoreline rather than diving and emerging much further away, as grebes are inclined to do.

Back in the car, Fabián checked in with his fellow trackers over the radio. Nobody, it seemed, had had any luck with pumas since Escarcha and her cubs went up into the hills. So we stopped for a snack lunch next to the thundering falls of the Cascada del Río Paine, where the meltwaters of the park’s mightiest river came hurtling down a series of cliffs amidst menacing curtains of sheet ice.

We picked a lucky spot. Two handsome condors sat up on the hilltop, sunning themselves in a posture that must have convinced the ancient Inca that the condor truly was a messenger (and worshipper) of the Sun.

The waterfall must be a reference point for the condors in their navigation, because no fewer than sixteen came flying right overhead on their way up the valley, some of them soaring so close you could hear the rush of wind in their enormous wings. They were mostly youngsters, yet to don the full black robes and smart white collars of their elders.

For me, that would have been the perfect ending to a wonderful three days: a close encounter with one of my favourite creatures in the world – again – but Patagonia was not done with us. Not yet.

The radio crackled to life as we were driving back to the south road: ‘La Petaca está en la carretera’. Fabián stepped on the gas, overtaking two trucks in the snow like a rally car and forking right back up the road to Lago Sarmiento.

The fog had finally cleared, having hung over the lake almost all day, and one of the trackers had located Petaca, the dominant female and the park’s most famous puma, following the scent trail of Escarcha and her cubs: her progeny. By the time we got there, she had slipped off the road and into the scrub, but we were still able to spot her without too much difficulty.

Not for the first time, I was disappointed with the behaviour of some of the tourists and their tracker, who came down from the road to move in as close to Petaca as possible. If she had wanted to come back up the hill, she was cut off constantly by this group that kept cutting ahead of her to get more and more photos of the big cat approaching head-on. Fabián was just as ticked off as I was (I really do appreciate a guide who puts the animal first, and not the client). Surprise surprise, the tracker was one of the ones we’d sparred with a few days prior, telling us to back off as they were there first. Go figure!

I believe that the key to magical wild encounters is patience, understanding and a healthy dose of luck. If that had been that, I would have been perfectly happy – we had already seen so much of the pumas over the last two days. I was ready to hit the road and maybe find some ñandúes on the way home.

And then Petaca reappeared.

With the shimmering waters of Lago Sarmiento behind her, she hardly cast a glance in our direction as she padded her way along the hillside toward the road, following Escarcha’s trail.

With no further obstructions to her path, she came right up to the road, mere metres away. At such a distance, you could really appreciate the power in those mighty paws. Here is an animal that didn’t struggle once in the snow like the fox and the geese from yesterday: she almost seemed to glide across the surface of the frozen hill.

I thought the fence between the road and the hill might prove a barrier, but not for this apex predator. In a single move she leapt nimbly up onto the wire and then launched herself onto the other side, just a few feet away.

Having cleared the road, Petaca climbed up into the hills toward the setting sun and disappeared among the frozen scrub. What an incredible encounter! And what a way to finish a superb three days’ tracking in Patagonia!

On the way back, we found the unnamed young male in the same spot he had been when we first saw him on Monday. It felt fitting that the last puma of the trip should also be the first. We might very nearly have witnessed a hunt, as a lone guanaco was headed right his way, until a passing truck spooked it into heading in a different direction.

The tour I had booked for tomorrow into the heart of the park itself and the Cueva del Milodón was sadly cancelled due to low numbers by the time I got back, so this will be my last time in Torres del Paine. Magical, then, that it should end with a view of the mountains at their most impressive, with ominous yellow and grey clouds rolling across its summit, turning the blue mountains of the Tehuelche all kinds of magical colours. Who could not lose their heart to such a sight?

I’ll take it easy tomorrow and explore Puerto Natales properly. There’s so much human history here that I could so easily overlook, and it will need more than a morning, I think. BB x

Diamond Dust

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Coastal B&B, Puerto Natales. 19.20.

Patagonia is transformed in the sunlight. From the moment I arrived, the whole territory has been shrouded in a dense fog ushered in by the snow, concealing much of the land behind a mysterious grey curtain. Today, at dawn, everything changed. Shadows into silhouettes. Mystery into majesty. I have never been more in love with this place than I was today.

And to think there were people online who advised against coming here in winter… I can only imagine they wanted to keep something this precious to themselves. Because I think I can say without a hint of hyperbole that Patagonia in the heart of winter is one of the most beautiful sights you will ever see.

This morning’s quest began where we left off yesterday, at the frozen field where Escarcha and her cubs had gone to ground. Tracks in the snow indicated that they had moved on during the night, but there was at least one puma still in the area: an adult female, one of the offspring of the legendary Rupestre, the former matriarch of Torres del Paine. It was still dark, but following the lurching silhouette of a sight that was becoming quite familiar still set my heart racing.

She seemed to be following the scent trail left behind on the cliff – either Escarcha and her cubs or another puma entirely – as she kept pausing at each overhang and doing the Flehmen response, a technique which allows cats to analyse the scents they detect in extreme detail, ascertaining information such as the age, health and sex of the scent-bearer. Cats are remarkably intelligent creatures and the puma – arguably the most successful of all the cats of the Americas, with more names than any other species of felid and a range spanning from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego – is no exception to the rule.

The female took her leave and wandered off toward Lago Sarmiento, and we turned back in search of the new arrival from yesterday, NN, just as the sun began to crest the hills to the east, bathing everything in a golden halo. NN was where we left him yesterday, and while he popped out of his hiding place for a gnaw at his hidden kill, he promptly returned to the scrub and disappeared again.

Forging a new path, Fabián took us down a new route, past the frozen lake where we had found Lenga and Ñire yesterday and up into the foothills of Torres del Paine. We saw no pumas en route, but they had clearly been here during the night, with fresh prints along the road and across the fields beyond.

The guanacos, on the other hand, were everywhere. Apparently, in this corner of the world, only 4% of guanacos survive infancy, with the other 96% falling prey to the pumas. That figure alone goes a long way to explaining the concentration of pumas here in Tierra del Fuego – and also, the fecundity of the guanacos, since they still outnumber the pumas by at least ten to one. We didn’t get that classic “guanacos against the backdrop of the Torres” shot that Fabián was angling for, but the winter sunlight made for some breathtaking views of the guanacos on the eastern slopes.

Skittish beneath the mist, the guanacos seemed to lose a lot of their nervousness in the sunlight – perhaps because the increased visibility made them less anxious about being ripped apart by an unseen puma at any given moment. We were able to pass by so close that you could see the frost crystals on their ears.

The park’s meadowlarks were just as abundant today as they were yesterday, only this time they played second-fiddle to a natural phenomenon I have only ever heard about but never seen until now: diamond dust. A true polar experience, it is a kind of sub-zero “precipitation” that only forms under a cloudless sky: effectively, a ground-level cloud of ice crystals that seem to sparkle in the sunlight. I really should have filmed it, in retrospect, but some things never look as good on camera (though you can just about see it in the picture below). This was definitely one of those things. It was magical enough to behold, and something I’d recommend traveling all the way here to see in its own right.

Fabián drove on toward a small frozen forest of lenga trees in search of a chuncho – an Austral Pygmy Owl – that he knew to inhabit the area. I spotted it, but I think it’s safe to say he knew which tree it would be likely to be in, as any guide worth their salt would. After all, it happens to grow in a very iconic spot: right in front of the world-famous peaks of Torres del Paine.

Remarkably, the tiny little owl paid us no mind whatsoever, so I could get in so close I could see the yellow of its eyes without the help of my lens – which, of course, did a phenomenal job at close-range.

Back at Lago Sarmiento, a tip-off over the walkie-talkies alerted us to the return of Escarcha and her cubs, patrolling the edge of the lake. One guide and his group – the pike-square of supertelephoto users from yesterday – had jumped the fence and gone down to the lake and enjoyed ridiculously close views as the family passed them by, but at least Fabián and the other guides had the restraint not to insist we all go down to the shore and crowd the pumas. Instead we waited patiently and watched from a distance as Escarcha left her cubs in a safe spot and set out to go hunting.

That is not to say that we were not also treated to a close encounter. Escarcha’s route up into the hills took her right past us, passing mere feet away. Unfazed, she climbed up the snowy slope and disappeared into the descending clouds.

We waited for a while, suspecting from the approaching guanaco herd and the descending mist that she might have been hunting the herd, but Escarcha eventually appeared as if out of nowhere and went back down to hunt among the scrub by the lakeside, presumably for some smaller prey like hare. Fabián offered the choice to stay and pursue more pumas or to search for the other animal denizens of the park, and after some thought, I opted for the latter. After all, I did really want to see a ñandú. So we bade farewell to the others, who all remained with Escarcha and her cubs, and left the heart of puma country for Cerro Guido.

Like many of the places we have visited, Cerro Guido is a private ranch or estancia, but one of many that has realised that wildlife tourism can be tremendously more profitable than regular ranching. As such, a large part of the Cerro Guido ranch is given over to the local wildlife, giving the prairie-dwelling guanacos and rheas – and the puma that hunt them – a perfect haven of their own.

The ñandúes were very visible, albeit always in the middle distance, but the guanacos continued to make for good subjects against the afternoon light.

Another Patagonian mainstay was very much in evidence today: the South American Gray or Patagonian fox, a canid that is actually more closely related to coyotes and jackals than it is to the true foxes we know and love from back home. Just like they do in winter back in England, they were out looking for partners ahead of the mating season in spring, so we saw more than a dozen in all, sometimes alone, sometimes scampering about the fields in pairs. This one seemed to be limping, until we realised it was not walking with an odd gait but rather struggling with the depth of the snow, plunging up to its elbow every few steps.

The caiquén or upland goose was by far the most numerous resident of Cerro Guido, outnumbering even the ubiquitous guanacos. Caiquenes pair for life, though their fidelity is curiously one-sided: if the female dies, the heartbroken male will never pair off again, joining a bachelor group for the rest of his days, whereas if the male dies, the female will usually find a new mate within a few weeks. It’s a neat trick to ensure evolutionary stability in the long term, and – if you choose to look at it that way – a funny reflection of how men and women react to breakups.

I joked about the bus station-looking shelters, only to be told that yes, they really are paraderos – and to rub salt in the wound, a bus rounded the corner and passed us merely moments later. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the warmer months, when ranches like this one are more active, many ranch-hands travel to and from their posts this way. I caught myself wondering (and not for the first time since arriving) how amazing it would be to sack everything off and live here, way out here in the Chilean Antarctic wilderness. I’ve had madder dreams, trust me, and a little more careful thought would surely shake me out of my reverie. But I haven’t given it that much thought yet. It’s just a hunch I had – and a bottomless love for the wildest and most magnificent natural wonders of the world (and, coincidentally, places that style themselves as “the End of the World”).

We didn’t find any nearby ñandúes, and the two that had been relatively close but obscured by a bush on the way in had wandered far off by the time we turned about to make our way out. Not to be disappointed, though, Fabián spotted one near the road after we had left Cerro Guido and I jumped out to track it down.

I’ve not seen ostriches in the wild, or emus, or cassowaries, or any ratite for that matter. So I have no yardstick for truly bizarre appearance of this relatively huge flightless creature, which looks almost entirely out of place in the snowy scrubland of Patagonia. But, like the moa of New Zealand, ratites like the rhea are just as capable of adapting to cold conditions as their cousins in Africa are to the searing heat of the Namib and Sahara Deserts.

The ñandú or Lesser Rhea was brought to the attention of the world by the second voyage of the HMS Beagle, though it Charles Darwin and not the French naturalist Alcide d’Orbigny who is more often associated with the bird. I could reel off more facts about rheas, but really I’d just like to see another and another. They’re remarkable creatures, even in a country full of healthy specimens of the incomparably beautiful puma.

But we still weren’t done. The road back to Puerto Natales passes by a great wall of stone, jutting out of the slope like the outer walls of some fortress. In Spain, a cliff face this vertical would be alive with griffons and known as a buitrera. Here in Puerto Natales, they’re known as condoreras. I don’t think I need to tell you what mighty creatures makes its home here.

I am, of course, talking about the largest bird of prey of all: the Andean condor. Unlike Colca Canyon in Peru, Patagonia (especially in winter) offers the chance to see these magnificent vultures at rest, where the whites of their wings can be much more easily appreciated. As the fog began to clear, we counted well over thirty of them. Fortunately, they’re scavengers to a fault, so there was nothing ominous at all about the fact that their numbers seem to grow exponentially every time we tried to count them.

Fabián joked about looking for a condor feather at the base of the cliff, which would almost certainly have turned up at least one. However, condor feathers are almost as sacred now as they were in the time of the Inca, albeit for less divine reasons: taking one out of the country is illegal, punishable by fines of up to an eye-watering $100,000. I adore vultures and have a collection of feathers I have found in my travels at home, but I’m not mad enough to chance that one.

The sun was beginning to set as we neared Puerto Natales, casting a final golden light over the slopes and the descending mist and turning the rest of the world a gentle shade of blue. There is a huge cave known as the Cueva del Milodón near here. I will try to book a trip out there for Thursday, as it is one of a handful of things to do in Puerto Natales that doesn’t require any high-grade trekking and expensive national park permits. I’ll give it some thought.

I had another serious urge to move here as I crossed town on the way back from the bank to my B&B. Forget the fact that it’s on the other side of the planet, in a place literally named the End of the World. There’s just something magical about this place. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen: like a frontier from the Old West frozen in time, surrounded by an array of animals so spectacular that you could live several lifetimes here and never get bored.

I wonder if they have a school that needs a languages teacher?

Enough musing. Another marathon read today. Sorry. Things will calm down a bit when I start my work placement in Santiago, I’m sure, but for now, every second is diamond dust and needs recording. I already miss this place and I haven’t even left yet. I’m only just halfway through my trip, for Pete’s sake.

One more day’s tracking awaits. Hopefully the weather (and our singularly good luck) holds out. BB x