I don’t like fish. I don’t like their scales and bones. I don’t like the way they eyeball you from a restaurant plate and I particularly resent the size they grow to if left unfilleted and grilled. Oh, I realise nobody was actually eaten during the making of that film, but I saw Jaws at an impressionable age and the sea and all things under it have profoundly scared me since. Thus, when a trip involving a boat, the Pacific and a scuba-diving course was suggested, I balked. The Pacific Ocean and I have met before and we did not fare well together — but the boat in question was of the swankiest kind and who in their right minds turns down an opportunity to see the Galapagos?
From the air, the islands look like the kind of lonely, barren place that anywhere else in the world might be earmarked for a high-security prison, but the Galapagos, as we all know, are not like anywhere else. Here was poor seasick Darwin’s link to eternal fame. Here, in all creatures great and small, lie the clues to our evolutionary blueprint and, indeed, the minute we disembark we are greeted by a sea lion lolling on a wooden bench and all but wearing a captain’s hat and smoking a pipe — and this is only the beginning.
Wherever you look, penguins plop off rocks, Blue Boobies smile beseechingly up at you, and lizards station battle-weary heads against one epic backdrop after another. Every species knows its best angles and duly presents them for digital capture and for a while it’s all pretty engaging, but it’s hard to escape the suspicion that wildlife here is auditioning for the next series of Planet Earth.
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