Galápagos Dragons + the Saddest Tortoise On Earth

Let Erin and Phil book this same experience for you, personally! We started ABC Trips to offer our bespoke itineraries to those seeking authentic culture, epic landscapes, and uncompromising luxury. 👉🏼 https://abctrips.com If you think you've seen a lizard, the Galápagos would like a word. This place is crawling with iguanas that genuinely look like someone designed dragons and then made them real — and every island has its own flavor. On Santa Fe we tracked down the Santa Fe land iguana — one of the Big 15, and a species that lives on this island and nowhere else on Earth. Romero schooled us on the fact that they're normally a pale, buttery yellow, but these were caked in dust from digging nests and crawling across the dry ground. Then Danny walked us onto South Plaza, where we found the iconic Galapagos Land Iguana — another member of the Big 15 that’s known for its fire-bright yellow colors. We also hit my favorite soap-opera setup of the trip. There's a spot they call the bachelor colony — dominant alpha male sea lions that got dethroned by a younger challenger. Instead of dying on the hill, they scale the cliffs, lick their wounds up top for a few days, then head out to sea for about five days to feed and rebuild before coming back to fight for new turf. A male does this a couple dozen times over his life. Kings getting humbled on a loop. There's a life lesson in there somewhere. We also went hunting for the rarest lizard on the island — a hybrid marine-land iguana. There are only about 41 of them in existence, partly because it's rare for the two species to mix and partly because the hybrids can't reproduce. We came up empty. Chalk it up to nature keeping some secrets. The tortoise day, though — that's the one that stays with you. We hit the Darwin Research Station's breeding center, where they've pulled giant tortoises back from the brink: survival rates jumped from around 5% in the wild to about 90% because of this program. And then there's Lonesome George. Last of his species, the Pinta Island tortoise. They spent decades trying to get him to reproduce — flew in the most genetically compatible females they could find, even tried tortoise aphrodisiacs (papaya, apparently). Nothing worked. When George died in 2012, the entire species went with him. What you see today is George himself, preserved by the Natural History Museum's team in New York. Brutal, beautiful, and a gut-check on how fragile all of this is. Then we bused to the highlands and stood in a field of hundreds of wild giant tortoises — not a zoo, not a sanctuary, just… out there, some of them pushing 100 years and 500 pounds. Watching a creature older than your grandparents lumber past is a whole reset. This is the kind of day HX Expeditions threads together so well — science center, breeding center, wild highlands, all in one. Want in? Get in touch at abctrips.com. Series finale up next: Christmas iguanas, dancing albatross, and me chasing a hammerhead. Follow the channel so you don’t miss it. Browse our unheard of last-minute deals on vacations, resorts, and adventure cruises around the world: https://abctrips.com/