Floreana Island
"Post Office Bay has held messages in a wooden barrel since 1793. I left a postcard. Someone from Ohio took it and mailed it from home. It arrived."
The postal barrel at Post Office Bay is not impressive as an object. It is a wooden cask on a post above a pebble beach, weathered and stickered with the names and dates of previous visitors, and it has been there in some form since 1793 when whalers established it as a message system for ships passing through. The practice was simple: leave a letter addressed to wherever you were going, and take any letters addressed to places you would pass through, and post them yourself. It still works on exactly the same principle. I left a postcard addressed to my sister in Lyon, and a couple from Ohio took it and mailed it when they got home. It arrived in three weeks, hand-delivered by a stranger on another continent.
Floreana is the fourth largest island in the Galápagos and one of the oldest inhabited — pirates and whalers used it for centuries before the first settlers arrived in the early twentieth century. The history of those settlers is the kind of story that belongs in a novel, and indeed has been the subject of several: German intellectuals seeking utopia in the 1930s, a self-declared countess arriving with two lovers and disappearing under circumstances that have never been fully explained, bodies found in unusual positions on other islands. The current population of about a hundred people lives in Puerto Velasco Ibarra, a village so quiet that the arrival of a supply boat constitutes a significant event.
Punta Cormorant, on the north coast, is where Floreana’s natural beauty concentrates itself most vividly. The landing beach has sand of a distinctive pale green colour — olivine crystals from volcanic deposits — and the short walk across the headland reaches a second beach, this one white and fine, where green sea turtles nest from December through March and the tracks they leave in the sand at dawn look like the marks of something very old writing a message in a language nobody has translated yet. Behind the green-sand beach, a lagoon holds flamingos year-round — sometimes forty, sometimes a handful, depending on the season and the feeding conditions. They stand in the brackish water filtering brine shrimp, their reflections doubling them in the still surface.
The snorkeling at Champion Islet, a small rocky outcrop just offshore, is some of the best accessible marine wildlife in the entire archipelago. A colony of sea lions treats the site as a playground, and they interact with snorkelers with a directness that is startling until you adjust to it — coming within centimetres of your face mask, exhaling bubbles at you, spiraling around your body and then shooting off into the blue without explanation. Below them, the coral is in reasonable health and the fish life includes large parrotfish, midnight blue surgeonfish, and the occasional hammerhead working the outer edge.
The village of Puerto Velasco Ibarra has one guesthouse, one restaurant, one bar, and a small museum dedicated to the bizarre history of the early settlers. I ate dinner there — grilled fish, rice, the ubiquitous Galápagos hot sauce that comes in an unmarked bottle and has no label because everybody already knows what it is — and talked with the owner for two hours about the countess, about sea cucumber quotas, about what happens to the island when the supply boat is late. The population here has a relationship to remoteness that I found both completely foreign and, by the end of the conversation, deeply enviable.
When to go: Floreana is accessible from Santa Cruz by day ferry and most liveaboard cruises include it. Sea turtle nesting at the white sand beach runs December through March. Flamingos are present at Punta Cormorant year-round but numbers vary — peak feeding activity tends to be in the early morning. The snorkeling at Champion Islet is excellent in both seasons, with calmer conditions from January through May.