The Galápagos is always told the same way: turquoise water, fins, a sea lion passing half a metre from your mask. It is a legitimate image and it is not badly told, but it leaves quite a few people out. Those who do not swim, those who get seasick, those who do not want to spend a week sleeping in a cabin, those who simply prefer to walk.
The good news is that the archipelago has an enormous dry side that is rarely told. The national park, declared in 1959, covers 7,995 square kilometres, 97 % of all the land; the remaining 3 % is everything the towns occupy. That is an amount of territory a week does not come close to exhausting.
01 A destination sold wet
It is worth being honest with you from the start: if you do not go in the water, you miss things. The marine reserve covers 133,000 square kilometres of ocean and much of what makes this place unique happens below the surface. That is not made up for.
What does happen is that another trip opens up, and it is not a consolation prize. It is a trip of volcanoes, cloud forests, underground tunnels and very large animals moving very slowly on land. It has its own logic and asks for its own calendar.
The structure is simple: you base yourself on two inhabited islands, Santa Cruz and Isabela, and set out from them. There is no need for a cruise itinerary or for changing beds every night.
02 The other island starts at four hundred metres
The first thing to understand is that these islands are not uniform: they read by altitude bands. The low zone is arid, made of lava, thorny scrub and cactus. The high zone, by contrast, supports a dense, humid forest. You can move from one to the other in half an hour by car.
On Santa Cruz that high ground reaches 854 metres and it is where nearly everything you are after lies. The forest is made of Scalesia, a genus of daisies that here became trees up to twenty metres tall; it grows mainly above seven hundred metres and produces a landscape that looks nothing like the archipelago's postcard.
Inside that forest are Los Gemelos, two enormous pits almost everyone calls craters and which are not: they formed when the roof of already-emptied magma chambers collapsed. They sit beside the road linking Puerto Ayora with Baltra and have a path running around the rim of both.
Nearby are the lava tunnels, some more than a kilometre long. They are the empty mould of a river of molten rock: the surface of the flow cooled and solidified, the lava inside kept advancing and, when it stopped flowing, the hollow remained. You walk through them, with a light and over uneven ground.
03 A walk to a nine-kilometre hole
The big day of this trip is on Isabela. Sierra Negra, in the south-east of the island, tops out at 1,124 metres, a height that does not impress on paper. What impresses is on top: a caldera 7.2 by 9.3 kilometres across, running south-west to north-east, the largest of all the archipelago's volcanoes.
Precisely because it is shallow — about a hundred metres, the least deep of Isabela's calderas — it produces a disorienting effect. You expect to look into a funnel and what appears is a black plain fading into the distance, with the far wall kilometres away.
Outings leave from Puerto Villamil, follow the eastern rim of the caldera and continue afterwards towards the recent lava fields to the north-east. This is not old ground: the volcano erupted between 26 June and 23 August 2018, and before that in 2005, 1979 and 1963.
You expect to look into a funnel, and what is there is a lava plain running to the horizon.
04 Going where the tortoises are
The El Chato reserve, on the high ground of Santa Cruz, is the place where giant tortoises are seen in the wild rather than inside an enclosure. Access starts at Santa Rosa, about an hour by car from Puerto Ayora, and the ground is wet pasture and pools.
The detail that changes your planning is that tortoises move, and far more than their reputation suggests. One study fitted GPS loggers to 17 adult tortoises and recorded journeys of up to ten kilometres between the coast and the high ground. Not all of them migrate: almost all adult males do, only some of the females, and none of the young.
The calendar of that movement is what concerns you. They climb to the high ground during the cool season, when the persistent mist keeps the vegetation green even though it barely rains. When real rain starts in December and the low zone greens up, they come down. In other words: if you want to see them up there, you have to go when the sky is closed.
05 Your season is the one everyone else avoids
Here is this profile's advantage. Whoever comes to swim picks the warm season, from December to May, because the water warms, the sea calms and visibility below the surface is high. You need none of that.
What you need is in the opposite season. From June to November highs drop to between 25.6 and 27.6 degrees — against March's 30.5 — which is an enormous difference when you have been walking for six hours. The high ground is green and the adult tortoises are up there.
The price is the light. August has 148 hours of sunshine, the year's minimum, and fourteen rainy days, though that rain adds up to only 9.8 millimetres: it is drizzle, not downpour. If a grey sky does not spoil your day, the equation works in your favour.
06 How the trip is put together
Seven to nine days divide up well. Three or four on Santa Cruz for the high ground — Los Gemelos, the Scalesia forest, the lava tunnels and El Chato — and three or four on Isabela with Sierra Negra as the central day. You sleep in Puerto Ayora and in Puerto Villamil and set out from there each morning.
Set aside as well a couple of half-days for what can be done on foot from the town itself. On Santa Cruz, the path to Tortuga Bay is 2,490 metres long, open from six in the morning to six in the evening, and you have to sign in and out. It is a walk through the arid zone, with cactus and scrub, which also serves to see the island's low band up close.
In the end the trip rests on a simple idea: in the Galápagos, the part almost nobody tells is the part you walk on. Volcanoes that are still active, a forest of twenty-metre daisies, kilometre-long tunnels and two-hundred-kilo animals that climb a mountain on foot. None of it requires you to get wet.
