It’s a warm Ecuadorian morning and my kayak is rapidly hurtling towards a pair of penguins sitting on some rocks. Only the length of my paddle stops me from crashing into the seabirds and as I worry that the scraping of plastic on the rocks might startle them – but they barely flinch. Welcome to the Galapagos Islands.
Such a close encounter would usually frighten an animal at home in Britain, but a four-night Galapagos Islands cruise with National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions quickly made me understand what naturalist Charles Darwin meant when he described this beautiful part of the globe as “a little world within itself.”
