Page 33 - ELITE PLUS MAGAZINE Vol 3

hours to Quito, the capital of Ecuador. After an overnight stay in Quito, I flew for two hours on a domestic flight to the Galapagos. The adventure continued as I boarded the Odyssey and spent 11 days and 10 nights on board, visiting 10 out of the 19 islands of the Galapagos – Santa Cruz, Isabela, Fernandina, Santiago, San Cristóbal, Española, Floreana, Santa Fe, South Plaza and North Seymour.An article on the Galapagos would be incomplete if I did not mention Charles Darwin, the British naturalist who made the Galapagos known to the modern world. He visited the islands in 1835 at the age of 26 and spent five weeks on different islands exploring the wildlife. His discoveries promulgated the now widely accepted theory of “the origin of the species”, which emphasizes natural selection, adaptation to the environment and genetic mutation of wildlife.Besides its unique and spectacular volcanic landscape, another main attraction of the Galapagos is the wildlife, many species of which are endemic to the archipelago, meaning they are found nowhere else, and several are listed by the International Union on the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as threatened species, those that stand a high risk of extinction. Among the well known species inhabiting the Galapagos are sea birds, reptiles featuring giant tortoises, marine and land iguanas and, to a lesser extent, mammals, the most famous of which are the sea lions. Because there are so many wildlife species and many details of each species, I’ll divide the article on photographing the Galapagos wildlife into two parts. The first part will be about the sea birds and the second will cover the reptiles and mammals.Nowhere else in the world can you find as many species of sea birds as in the Galapagos. I’ll begin with theMap of the Galapagos Islands A Galapagos penguin, Isabela Island‚Elite+ 31