The Galápagos Islands lie a thousand kilometres out in the Pacific from Ecuador, and the animals on them do not move out of your way. They have never had a reason to learn otherwise. Sea lions sleep along the white beaches you walk, the pups barking in the shallows for their mothers. You are the one made to keep two metres back, and they rarely return the favour. Black marine iguanas, the only lizards on Earth that feed in the sea, pile onto the lava to warm up between dives; one hauls out beside you and sneezes the salt from its nose. Off the trail a male blue-footed booby lifts each turquoise foot in turn, tips his bill up and whistles for a female. In the highlands of Santa Cruz, giant tortoises wallow in muddy pools, some past a hundred years, and one draws its head in with a low hiss as your shadow falls across it. Charles Darwin had five weeks of this in 1835, close enough to see that the finches and tortoises were not the same from one island to the next.
Wooden steps climb Bartolomé through raw black lava to the viewpoint beside Pinnacle Rock, the spire in every photograph of these islands, with two crescent bays curving away below in gold and turquoise. The islands are still being built. The chain rides slowly eastward off a volcanic hotspot, so the western islands are the youngest and still erupt while the eastern ones wear back into the sea. Half the visit is underwater. Cold currents well up here and feed everything. Penguins fish on the equator here, the only ones that do. Snorkelling off the rocks puts you among sea lions that twist round you to play, with green turtles and rays over the sand. An animal that belongs to one island only has nowhere else to go. Lonesome George, found alone on Pinta in 1971 and dead in 2012, was the last tortoise of his island's kind, and in forty years at the research station on Santa Cruz no island could give him a mate.