Galápagos Islands

It was stiflingly hot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was exploring the eastern Galápagos Islands, living cheek-by-jowl on a former casino ship with a cast of characters plucked straight from a murder mystery novel: a former British supermodel, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate, the ex-drummer of a band who once supported the Who and an influencer couple who looked like they had stumbled off the set of Triangle of Sadness. The stars of the show – and boy did they know it –were the sea lions While the trip had all the ingredients to cook up an irresistible whodunit, I was not just there to inspect the wildlife on board but to observe the wildlife off it.

Lonesome George, a Pinta Island giant tortoise, spent the latter half of his hundred years munching on cacti and roaming around the Charles Darwin Research Station on the Galápagos island of Santa Cruz. He borrowed his name from the 1950s American comedian and actor George Gobel and one of the three B-52 Stratofortresses that completed the first non-stop jet circumnavigation of the world in 1957. But the name was ultimately more fitting for the tortoise who was the last of a million-year-old species. In 1959, fishermen introduced three goats to Lonesome George’s home of Pinta Island, one of the smallest islands of the Galápagos archipelago. Just ten years later, they had multiplied to around 40,000.