And a male, judging by the length of his tail. Fortunately, this is the Galapagos, famous home of the animals that know no fear, and the old gentleman is supremely indifferent to my shipmates' shenanigans. He stares for rather a long time at an Englishman in a lime-green Hawaiian shirt, then moves away at a stately pace. In the wider world these days, all news of the Galapagos is bad news. Darwin's marvelous archipelago, we're told, has succumbed to the litany of modern ills now numbingly familiar to all of us.
Tourists besiege it.
Introduced species overrun it. El Nino has irrevocably altered it. Immigrants from the mainland overpopulate it. The government of Ecuador, of which it is a province, milks it for cash. And long-standing tensions between conservationists and fishermen have been running murderously high.