Ever get the feeling that the world is too much for you—maybe particularly since, I don’t know, last November, or maybe mid-January, or last week, or even today? I’ll say this: No one should need an excuse to visit the Galapagos—it’s been doing rather well for itself for literally millions of years—but if you find yourself having the urge, start making some exit plans. Your sympathetic nervous system will thank you for it.
There are, of course, many ways to experience any number of the 18 major islands that comprise the 3,000 square miles of what we generally consider the Galapagos area, from staying at one or two islands and day-tripping your way around, to joining up with one of the many group tours that traverse various itineraries on larger boats of various sizes. For our particular get-away-from-it-all excursion, though, we hopped the Aqua Mare, an extremely well-appointed 50-meter superyacht, along with Francesco Galli Zugaro, the founder of Aqua Expeditions; his wife Birgit Galli Zugaro, the company’s expeditions director; and a handful of fellow travelers for a four-night trip (Aqua’s trips here are normally either seven or 14 days) that followed Charles Darwin s travels almost 200 years earlier.
First things first, though: I didn’t know it just yet, but virtually from the moment that the plane from mainland Ecuador touches down at Seymour Airport on Baltra Island in the Galapagos, you’re in another place—geographically, mentally... spiritually, if you will. Large (friendly, casual) iguanas meander across the sidewalk as you leave the airport and hop in a car, headed off to lunch at Rancho Il Manzanillo, an open-air restaurant amidst a massive giant tortoise reserve. Next, we passed through a stunning, ghostly forest of palo santo trees in the Highlands region of the island (our car had to take great pains to avoid the enormous animals on the tiny road leading to the restaurant—fines for hitting or hurting them are enormous), and a pre-lunch stroll in a misting rainfall (called a garua) led us past scores and scores of them, variously walking, resting, and, uh... taking great care to ensure their species’ survival for another generation, let’s say.
From there, we piled onto the Aqua Mare to make our true getaway from civilization.
The exquisite 50-meter vessel itself deserves mention—this is the first genuine superyacht experience in the Galapagos, with just seven wood-lined private cabins that feel more boutique hotel than expedition ship and a crew of 16. The culinary program, overseen by Francesco himself, offers Nikkei fusion cuisine that would be at home in a Nobu dining room, but reimagined with local Galapagos and Ecuadorian flavors. The real Aqua Mare luxury, though, isn’t the pan-seared scallops or the exceedingly well-curated Chilean wine list—it’s the intimacy of the experience. With only eight guests to one naturalist guide (half the typical ratio in these parts), we wouldn’t be just observing the islands and their boundless animal life; it felt like we had it all to ourselves.
Our first morning began bright and early with some (entirely un-mandatory but delightful) 6:30 am yoga on the sun deck, followed by breakfast as we sailed toward Santiago Island and Sombrero Chino, one of the archipelago’s best-kept secrets. This semi-protected site sees fewer visitors than most Galapagos destinations, and for good reason: access is restricted to select vessels, with the Aqua Mare among them. The calm waters here attract white-tipped reef sharks, needlefish, and, if you’re lucky, the rare Galapagos penguin. We spent the late morning snorkeling—and sure, I’ve snorkeled before, but my God: picture yourself making your calm way through dozens of schools of thousands upon thousands of insanely colorful fish of all shapes and sizes, none of which seem to care a whit that you’re there. Our on-board naturalists had already prepped us with a highly entertaining slide show about the kinds of fish that would soon surround us—king angelfish, Moorish idols, harlequin wrasse, Mexican hogfish, spotted porcupinefish, trumpetfish—a list that seemed almost comically exhaustive, but we saw them all, along with diamond stingrays and spotted eagle rays gliding not far below us like underwater UFOs.
The afternoon brought more snorkeling—drift snorkeling, where you’re carried by the strong current, bobbing and weaving along a rocky coast in a pleasant kind of way—and then a dry landing at Bartolome Island, named after Sir Bartholomew James Sullivan, Darwin’s friend aboard the HMS Beagle. There’s a gorgeous and striking landmark, Pinnacle Rock, that you can see from miles away rising high above the lunar landscape of the rest of the island, and we steeled ourselves to climb the 374 wooden steps to the summit, where a breathtaking 360-degree panorama justified every step: the iconic rock spire, the surrounding islands, the psychedelic swirls in the barren terrain below. As we departed by Zodiac, a handful of those amazing penguins perched impossibly on the rocks, occasionally diving into the water right in front of us, always utterly unbothered by our presence.
That evening, after dinner (roast chicken with pumpkin-ginger puree), a few of us gathered on the Aqua Mare’s aft deck to watch handfuls of rather large white-tipped reef sharks circle the behind the yacht’s illuminated hull—a hypnotic, slightly unsettling ritual that became nightly entertainment.
If the entirety of the trip so far had unfolded in a kind of serene yet adrenaline-stoking haze—at the risk of overstating the obvious, I’d been gamboling through one of the world’s most pristine and abundant natural wonders, sleeping off the days’ exertions in my private cabin and gathering regularly for sumptuous and convivial meals—well, the following day brought all that to another level. In the waters off Isla Seymour Norte, I swam with sea lions. Not near them, not adjacent to them—I was, briefly (pardon the nuclear-level hubris), one of them as we frolicked together.
The only tricky aspect of all this? Not touching them. (Our naturalist guides also gave us clear instructions before every adventure about what to do or not do, and touching the creatures we swam amidst is definitely not allowed.) With their dog-like faces and balletic underwater grace, the sea lions seemed to be egging us on to stir up some trouble with them as they darted around us, spinning and very occasionally pausing to stare with what seemed like genuine curiosity. I’ve been lucky enough to have had some memorable encounters under the water—diving directly next to enormous humpback whales in Tahiti being one of them—but this experience with the sea lions is another of those almost surreal happenings that will stay with me forever.
Later that day, we landed at Playa las Bachas on Isla Santa Cruz, where thousands of brilliant red-orange Sally Lightfoot crabs—named, improbably, after a Cuban dancer who performed with only strategically placed fans—scuttled across the volcanic rocks while marine iguanas sunned themselves, emanating their odd reptilian indifference. A Zodiac excursion into Black Turtle Cove revealed mangrove forests, mating turtles and, unexpectedly, a solitary pink flamingo standing in the shallows like a piece of misplaced Miami kitsch.
That evening’s dinner featured tuna steaks and beef tenderloin with grilled Andean corn, paired with a Chilean House of Morande red, as the conversation drifted to the famous study of Darwin’s finches by Peter and Rosemary Grant on nearby Daphne Major—decades of meticulous observation later documented in the brilliant book The Beak of the Finch. Francesco told me about developing Aqua Expeditions and outfitting the Aqua Mare—a fascinating and many-tiered story that involves everything from international geopolitics, boatbuilding, and deciding to outfit the yacht with serving plates and espresso cups designed from botanical drawings and crafted by Balinese artisans.
I’ve also neglected to mention a life-changing culinary discovery made on the Aqua Mare: the so-called tree tomato. While I feel compelled to write an entire dissertation about this magical, tiny fruit, I’ll limit myself to saying that we were served tree tomatoes as part of both breakfast and lunch, and in both cases it was the most delicious, most apt, and most memorable part of the (stunning) meals. I found myself wishing to experience the tree tomato as part of a dinner or dessert, but alas, I’ve been limited to searching for it (so far in vain) back in New York—though eating one in my Brooklyn apartment would no doubt pale in comparison to having my mind blown by the experience at a linen-covered table on the aft deck while floating between islands in the Galapagos.
Our final full day brought an afternoon hike on Seymour Norte, where blue-footed boobies performed their awkward mating dance (those electric blue feet somehow making the whole ritual seem both absurd and oddly moving) while magnificent frigate birds—the pirates of the bird world—soared overhead. As we headed back to our Zodiac (which, in turn, headed back to the Aqua Mare) as the sun set out across the water, giant sea lions caught the day’s last rays like massive, whiskered sandbags.
The so-called Captain’s Dinner that night (on the last night of any nautical journey, the ship’s captain traditionally joins the rest of the passengers and crew for a celebratory feast) featured smoked swordfish with tonnato sauce and udon beef stew, accompanied by an Emiliana organic syrah. And, yeah: The conversation became reflective in the way that last nights of extraordinary trips inevitably do. (Another way of putting this: We were all devastated that our time here was about to end.)
The next morning, we returned to Baltra, back through Seymour Airport, where those casual iguanas were still crossing the sidewalk, but I’d like to think we were all a bit different. Maybe all great places change you; the Galapagos sure does. (Perhaps even more so on Aqua Mare’s upcoming December trip, which promises to feature giant tortoise hatchlings breaking through their shells and taking their first steps into the wild!) My days and nights there seemed to erase the accumulated noise of modern life and point the way to the obvious beauty and wonder of the world, which suddenly seemed richer, more fun, and vastly more indifferent to human concerns than we might like to think. Somehow, that’s exactly the trip I needed to take.
