5-Day Northern & Eastern: Genovesa's Daylight-Hunting Owl

San Cristobal's airport sits at the edge of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, a five-minute drive from the town center, so this is usually your first taste of the islands rather than a standalone excursion. Sea lions and marine iguanas are known to rest right next to the runway here, an unscripted welcome few airports can match. From the terminal, a short transfer takes you down to the pier for a panga ride out to your ship.

A short crossing from Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristobal, Isla Lobos takes its name from the sea lion colony that calls it home, and doubles as a seasonal nesting ground for blue-footed boobies. Frigatebirds have begun nesting here in recent years too, and fur seals turn up now and then. The walk covers roughly 850 meters of mixed rocky and sandy trail.

Formed by geological uplift rather than volcanic activity, Santa Fe is unusually flat for a Galapagos island, and it's the only place on Earth with its own endemic subspecies of land iguana. After landing in clear, turquoise water, a walk through a forest of giant, tree-sized Opuntia cactus leads to iguanas basking beneath them. The Galapagos dove is a reliable sight along the trail, and with some luck you may also spot the Galapagos snake or the Galapagos hawk.

Reachable only by sea, Black Turtle Cove is a mangrove-lined lagoon on Santa Cruz's north shore, protected as a turtle sanctuary. A slow, quiet dinghy ride carries you between four species of mangrove while sea turtles surface for air around the boat, one of the most reliable sightings in the islands. Look down and you'll often see golden and eagle rays moving beneath the hull, and white-tipped reef sharks resting in the shallows.

Darwin Bay sits inside the flooded caldera of Genovesa, and a wet landing on its white coral-sand beach puts you right in the middle of a working seabird colony. Great frigatebirds display along the shore, males inflating scarlet throat pouches to catch a female's eye, and red-footed boobies nest low in the surrounding trees and shrubs, unusual for a booby. Nazca boobies are just as much a fixture here, while blue-footed boobies are a rarer, luckier sighting. Swallow-tailed gulls and red-billed tropicbirds work the cliffs nearby. If you're a confident swimmer, the bay's calm water is a good place to snorkel or kayak afterward, with a chance of white-tipped reef sharks and sea turtles along the rocky shore.

A stone stairway carved into the cliff climbs to a wide plateau holding one of Genovesa's largest seabird colonies. The trail passes through a small Scalesia forest, home to the short-eared owl, one of the few predators on the island, before reaching cliffside colonies where Nazca and red-footed boobies nest side by side, frigatebirds wheel overhead, and thousands of storm petrels dart in and out of cracks in the lava. A small colony of fur seals sometimes gathers near the landing. Red-footed boobies nest in only a handful of places across the archipelago, and this is one of them.

Chinese Hat, or Sombrero Chino, is a small islet of delicate lava and spatter cones just off Santiago's southeastern coast. A narrow channel of turquoise water between the islet and the Santiago shoreline makes for excellent snorkeling, where sharks, sea lions, and rays are regularly reported, and a Galapagos penguin occasionally turns up too.

A panga brings you ashore onto one of the most distinctive beaches in the islands, with sand tinted deep red by its high iron content, with Rabida's rugged cliffs rising behind it. Sea lions are usually stretched out along the shoreline, and it's a good spot to watch for the endemic Galapagos dove working the sand nearby. From the beach, a short trail winds through palo santo forest and cactus scrub, climbing gently to an overlook with sweeping views across the bay, a nice place to pause and take in the color of the landscape before heading back down. If you'd rather stay on the water, snorkeling right off the beach is an easy, relaxed way to spend the visit, with good odds of company from the resident sea lions.

Set on the grounds of the Galapagos National Park Service on Santa Cruz, this station was once home to Lonesome George, the last known tortoise of the Pinta subspecies. A series of interpretive buildings walks you through the conservation science underway across the islands, and the surrounding native vegetation is a good place to look for Darwin's finches going about their business.

The return transfer is straightforward: a panga ride from your ship to the pier, then a short bus ride to Baltra's airport, the world's first fully ecological terminal, run on solar and wind power. Land iguanas, reintroduced here after being wiped out decades ago, are sometimes seen right around the grounds on the way to your flight.