The Englishman, Charles Darwin is arguably the most famous naturalist the world has ever known. When in 1859 Darwin published his theory of evolution in the book, “On the origin of species” he started a change in the way people at the time viewed how life on the planet developed and continues to develop and why such diversity exists in our natural world. Darwin’s underpinning ideas of natural selection were inspired from the discoveries he made during his voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle with Captain Robert Fitzroy and his crew. Although Darwin only spent two weeks on the ground in the Galapagos Islands what he witnessed there was so powerful that it is fair to say that to this day the Galapagos is synonymous with Darwin and the theory of evolution.
For me the Galapagos Islands has always been the source of fascination and to be honest a far off wilderness that I would only ever get to enjoy courtesy of TV documentaries. So to have found myself living and breathing this amazing place for a glorious week is something I will treasure for the rest of my life.
A week in the Galapagos does not come cheap and if you want to experience this environment to the fullest my research showed that taking the most budget boat/tour option is not the way to go. With this in mind we were um-ming and ah-ring as to whether we would somehow manage to afford squeeze in some time here on our year off.
That’s when a stroke of pure luck came into play. One day I happened to be checking my Hotmail account which was not a usual occurance. I keep my Hotmail purely for what I deem junk mail subscriptions and I am lucky if I check it once a month. Furthermore, it is even less common for me to actually open and read the junk. However, on this particular day I opened up an email from Intrepid Travel. I used this travel company eleven years ago in Thailand and had a simply wonderful two weeks in the north of the country with them. So when I saw that they were offering a two for the price of one offer for an 8 day Galapagos Tour I immediately showed it to Damien. Within a couple of days we had booked ourselves into what would be one of the highlights of our year together.
