After an overnight journey anchored off the harbour at Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island. The highlands of the island have a rich variety of plant life – dense forests including the local lechoso trees, orchids and mistletoe, sugar cane, cacao, coffee and bananas.
The first visit was to the Charles Darwin Research Station opened in the 1960s. This is a giant tortoise breeding centre and is very successful at hatching eggs and after several years reintroducing the Galapagos tortoises to where they have become extinct as a result of the consumption of the animal by whalers and guano collectors of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The recently hatched tortoises are allowed to mature as if they were in the wild. The finches which Darwin studied form much of the basis for his theory of evolution by natural selection, will stand on the table and stare at you.
We took lunch after a visit to a sugar cane (farm?) tourist explanation point in the forest of the highlands. Later we witnessed giant tortoises eating grass and wallowing in the pools of water. The area here was strewn with lumps of lava ejected from the Cerro Crocker volcano. As we reflect on the day a sobering thought was that at the Darwin Centre we saw the preserved remains of the giant tortoise given the name Lonesome George. He was the last surviving member of the Pinta Island species which became extinct in 2012 at well over 100 years of age.