A Galápagos Expedition Cruise That Connects You Even More Closely With the Islands’ Rare Wildlife

Months later, I still find myself thinking about the languid movement of the sea turtle as it banked and swam through the filtered cathedral light, away from the rocky shore and into the mysterious green depths. It was the Platonic ideal of a creature I only thought I knew: Freed from the strictures of gravity, it became pure, primeval, almost mythological. In that moment, there were no other animals or humans. There was only me and this ancient creature making our way through the silent vastness of the underwater amphitheater.

Veteran snorkelers will know this feeling. I, however, was not a veteran snorkeler. In fact, since an unpleasant experience in Playa Del Carmen years earlier, in murky, choppy water, with cheap ill-fitting gear, I'd never given it another go. In the weeks before I visited the Galápagos aboard Silversea Cruises' brand-new Silver Origin, it had occurred to me that I'd probably be missing a lot if I didn't snorkel. So I figured I'd learn. But it was not without some trepidation that I found myself standing steps away from a group of beached sea lions on Genovesa Island, absorbing the brisk instructions of Xavier Cando, our expedition guide, on proper breathing, mask-wearing, and lens-defogging technique. Afterward I waded in, and once I'd convinced myself I wasn't going to drown, I felt comfortable enough to paddle out toward the break to gape at the psychedelic, pixelated patterns of the iridescent triggerfish and parrotfish. By the time the session ended, I was already wondering how I could have gone an entire lifetime without ever having taken another shot at this.

The feeling intensified the next few mornings as I rode out on the Zodiacs, squinting in the equatorial light, to explore deeper waters. I found myself remembering the first time I skied or rode a horse and how I'd gotten hooked in an instant. It wasn't just the creatures: It was also the sensation of contemplating this vast foreign topography of gullies and fissures and reef formations, and the unexpected tranquility of being at one with the water. But, oh, the creatures! On my first deep-water day, I was gliding along in a fugue state when I saw two whitetip reef sharks. “Look,” I shouted into my mask, gesticulating wildly to no one. The next morning, as soon as my group got into the water, a pair of sea lions skimmed past like missiles, soon to be joined by friends who frolicked with us for the next hour, coming up to us underwater as if for a kiss before darting away at the last second to go wrestle one another.

There were penguins too, and adorable baby Galápagos sharks, and three enormous diamond stingrays sloughing up puffs of sand at the bottom of a deep trench. Later came massive schools of silvery anchovies that moved in sync, like Rockettes, and yellow-tailed razor surgeonfish; Jeffo Marquez, our guide, dove down into their midst and stood with his arms raised, like Moses of the Galápagos, as the fish parted around him. We climbed back up the ladder to the Zodiac reluctantly, full of tales of all we'd seen below.

In a sense, the entire story of the Galápagos is about what lies beneath the surface. Its aesthetic strangeness is, as Darwin came to understand, a hidden door through which you can access the mysteries of life on Earth. The enormous Seussian seabirds; the giant tortoises; the cold-blooded marine iguanas that sunbathe beside playful warm-blooded Galápagos penguins—all are products of the natural laboratory that has transfixed evolutionary biologists for generations. Of course, the stories inscribed in this landscape concern more than just the origin of species—they also reveal the various ways humankind has reordered the archipelago over the last several centuries. The giant tortoise breeding centers exist in part to protect the animals' eggs from rats, introduced by pirates and whalers in the 18th century. The Galápagos land iguanas of North Seymour Island, who smile knowingly from within burnt sienna skins that hang from their bodies in loose folds like oversized ugly sweaters, were brought by American scientists from nearby Baltra Island in the 1930s as part of a Darwinian experiment.

Today, though, the Galápagos is one of the most protected places on the planet. Only four of the archipelago's 21 islands are inhabited, with human settlements occupying 3 percent of the land; the rest is a national park established in 1959. In 1998, in response to environmental problems, the Ecuadorian government passed the Special Law, which essentially halted immigration to the Galápagos by limiting permanent residence to those already living on the islands. The same law created the Galápagos Marine Reserve, one of the largest in the world, which earlier this year Ecuador expanded by more than 40 percent. Tourism is heavily regulated, with only small groups allowed to visit sites within Galápagos National Park for limited blocks of time in the company of a licensed guide. Cruise ships, which can carry only 100 passengers, follow itineraries prescribed by the Ecuadorian government and are spaced apart so only one at a time can visit a site of interest. What all of these rules accomplish, besides protecting the ecosystem, is preserving a genuine and blissful sense of remoteness; outside the population centers, we saw only a few private boats the whole week.

The Silver Origin, a replacement for a 30-year-old vessel that Silversea had operated since 2013 as the Silver Galápagos, is attuned to the realities of cruising in this region like no ship before it. Some of its most important features are ones no passenger will ever see: A dynamic positioning system, one of only two currently in use in the Galápagos, eliminates the need to cast an anchor down into the fragile seabed; an advanced freshwater-purification system significantly reduces the ship's plastic usage. Leandro Vaca, who led me on several kayaking trips, said his favorite thing about the new ship is the stern loading system, which supports larger Zodiacs and makes it vastly smoother to get guests out on an adventure. When I was on board, I came to feel that, for all the luxury of the taupe-and-cream appointments, the greatest amenity was the connection to nature facilitated by the floor-to-ceiling windows, generous deck space, and a stargazing platform where one night all the ship's guests gathered to observe distant lava flows from Wolf Volcano, on Isabela Island, which had been erupting for several months.

Of course, you can have all the cutting-edge tech and slick design in the world, but without great people you'll still have nothing. Besides folks like Juan Altamirano, the ship's preternaturally cheerful hotel director, and Billy Chero, its obliging piano player, the crew members I spent the most time with were expedition guides, like Leandro, many of whom had worked together on the Silver Galapagos and whose fondness for one another was as strong as their fondness for this place. As I returned with Leandro from a mangrove lagoon on Isabela Island, where we'd spied baby sharks and bedraggled brown pelicans guarding nests with downy heads peering over the sides, he told me that the crew sometimes have impromptu competitions during their off-hours—kayaking, singing. “We are a family,” he said.

My favorite was Juan Carlos “J.C.” Sosa, a Quito native who has been guiding since 1980. He wore a pencil beard, gold-framed aviators, and a cowboy hat, and spoke in a courtly manner, always addressing his groups as “ladies and gentlemen.” I first spent time with him on Bartolomé Island, overlooking Sullivan Bay, a parched, fantastical landscape believed to have been created by lava flows in the late 19th century. J.C. showed us all the different formations, some shaped like drapery, others like pasta, others like intestines. There were little lava eggs and an intaglio of an ironwood tree. We came to a smooth, concave expanse that was breathtaking in its austere grandeur. It could have been an earthwork by Michael Heizer. “I love this place so much because it's the beginning of everything.” J.C. said. “Life on Earth. It's amazing that this barren place will one day break down to soil and make a place that is appealing to some plant species.” I knew he'd made similar speeches to similar groups in this same spot, but I was moved by his depth of feeling.

A few days later, I was following J.C. along a trail in the cloudy, verdant highlands of Santa Cruz Island. We were at Montemar, a coffee farm that grows several very tasty varieties of arabica, the proceeds of which go to conserving the Galápagos giant tortoises whose migration path runs straight through the property. As we paused to watch a quarter-ton saddleback consider whether to descend into a large mud puddle, J.C. recounted the challenges of giant-tortoise reproduction. “Normally, copulation among reptiles is not the most funny or wonderful thing,” he explained, almost mournfully. “The males crush the females, and the females run away. So the male tortoises produce a sound that disorients the females and leads to sex.”

We heard that sound on our second encounter with giant tortoises, at the Cerro Colorado tortoise reserve on San Cristóbal Island. This time I was with Paulina Aguirre, who reminisced fondly about the domesticated giant tortoise at her school in Quito as we watched a gaggle of the creatures clank shells, crane their necks, and hiss while jockeying for prime leaf-munching position. Farther along the trail we passed J.C., who was smiling broadly. “Las tortugas están copulando en el bosque,” he told Paulina. We entered a stand of hunched poison apple trees, beyond which four tortoises were gathered around a pond in a clearing. They weren't the ones doing the deed, but every half minute or so this strange, fairy-tale-like scene echoed with the lowing and grunting of giant tortoises in the throes of passion.

Here is the part of this journey I've left out until now: My companion aboard the Silver Origin was my mom, Alice. We live on different continents, more than 4,000 miles apart, and this was our first time together since before the pandemic, nearly three years earlier. But I knew it had been much longer than that since we'd had any true one-on-one time. How long? I asked her.

“Oh, since before you had kids,” she replied.

That would make it nearly a decade. But, lo and behold, it was just the two of us out on the stargazing deck on our first morning at a quarter to six. The Silver Origin was anchored in Darwin Bay, which fills a caldera scooped out of Genovesa Island, a shield volcano in the north of the archipelago. If you look at Genovesa on a map, it resembles the head of a bird of prey, with the bay formed by its beak, but the guides call it the Bird Island because of its diverse representation of the Galápagos' famous avian population: blue-footed boobies, red-footed boobies, Nazca boobies, great frigate birds, storm petrels, short-eared owls, and so many more. As the indigo sky lightened, with Venus and a lopsided, nearly full moon hanging above us, these prehistoric creatures massed like pinwheeling confetti in great black funnels above the basalt sickle of the island, peach-colored clouds in sculptural formations behind them. The only sounds were the birds' distant squabbling, the rustle of the wind, the slap of the waves, the light hum of the ship. There was a slightly fecund scent to the air, cut by the salt of the sea. We'd both traveled so far to come here—she from Budapest, I from Brooklyn—and yet finally we were together in this wild, remote place.

Later that day we ventured onto the island with a group, accessing its trails via Prince Philip's Steps, a natural staircase in the rock named for the late Duke of Edinburgh, who visited on his yacht in the 1960s. Bright red Sally Lightfoot crabs scuttled along the black volcanic rock, a welcoming committee that would be on hand for every shore landing during the voyage. Our guide was Jeffo, who grew up on the islands and, charmingly, shared their secrets as if he were the announcer at a fútbol match. As he recounted the mating rituals of the red-footed booby in his sportscaster cadences—“The male mostly sings and points his beak to the sky”—a great frigate bird unloaded its cargo onto a fellow guest named Tami. “That's good luck,” Jeffo informed her. “The last time this happened here, we saw dolphins. I wouldn't take a shower for a week.”

Tami and her friend Nicolette, who were visiting from Seattle, would become some of our best buds for the week. So would Maria and Richard, fun and friendly newlyweds from Caracas who accompanied my mom on hikes when I was deep-water snorkeling. In the evenings, a regular group found one another in the lounge and sang along with Billy. When we tired of “Dancing Queen” and “Rocket Man” and “Macarena,” he would report for duty the next night having taught himself the songs we requested, like “Someone Like You” or “Faith” or “Sweet Child o' Mine.” Seeing my mom belt out that last number with Tami and Maria rivaled snorkeling as the best experience I had all week.

So even as my time aboard the Silver Origin took me deeper in understanding the Galápagos, it also deepened my relationship with her. I got to introduce her to ceviche, which the ship had in abundant, varied, and consistently delicious supply; to watch her paint watercolors on Cerro Brujo, a long parenthesis of exquisite white sand and volcanic rock formations on San Cristóbal Island, where she was distracted by a sea lion at her feet; to hear her melt over the cuteness of the diminutive Galápagos penguins we watched stride bravely down a long, slick expanse of rock and plunge one by one into choppy waters.

Midway through our voyage, we were alone on the observation deck again a little before dinner, hoping to catch another great sunset because the previous night's had been top-notch. A steep cloud bank blocked the show, but we were enjoying the wind on our faces. Then, suddenly, heavenly light began seeping around the edges of the clouds, and the water took on a white-gold cast. And then, at ten o'clock, dolphins, in fulfillment of Jeffo's prophecy. There were three of them, their leaps and plunges tracing sine waves as they swam diagonally across the ship's path. My mom's face was radiant with sunlight and joy.  We watched the dolphins until they disappeared onto the horizon, bound for whatever future awaited them.

This article appeared in the July/August 2022 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.