and the hermetically-sealed wildlife exist on these islands like quite no other place on the planet. Truth told, the Galapagos were not high on my “bucket list.” As a professional traveler, I visit many interesting, remote, and wild places on the globe, so I’ve generally avoided those bucket-list destinations, often mistakenly believing they are overrated, overcrowded, and underwhelming.Being in Ecuador on business already, it seemed a kind of arrogant insanity to miss the Galapagos. So I booked a trip with Klein Tours and landed on Baltra, one of the two islands that has an airstrip and brings in curious travelers from around the world. Twenty minutes after going through the immigration line, I was on a boat headed for a scuba dive.
And then it was crystal-blue-clear why people come to the Galapagos. You can fly over and into a destination and feel like it is fairly unremarkable from on high. Until you take time to dig deeper and get under the surface (literally, in this case), you can’t actually understand such a remarkable place.
I stared at the nine-foot hammerhead shark swimming softly by, looming and circling, eyes somehow both cat-like and stony. My heart hammered at the sight of white-tip sharks and a shimmering school of barracuda. A Pacific Green Sea Turtle calmly slid under me with a sidelong glance like a wise old sage. Scores of needlefish, puffers, and a thousand other colorful specimens caused a stir. One of the oddities of being an amateur diver is that I’m only used to such scenes accompanied by music — frightening, lovely, ominous — or a deep, bass narrative voice from National Geographic. Seeing it with the background noise of muted popping, pinging, and swooshing brought me deeper into the experience
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