My luggage is heavy: like many visitors clambering the plane, I've brought a small Darwin library "The Voyage of the Beagle" and "On the Origin of Species."
risk, just below the equator, is sunburn. Another is pretentiousness: I can't be the first to feel the constant to compare the great man's observations with mine.
Here goes anyway.
At first, everything is disappointingly normal: a small airport on flat scrubby land, not a creature to seen, and the massed of mobile phones successfully finding a . Darwin was disappointed for rather different reasons - "nothing could be inviting", he wrote about his first of "stunted, sunburnt brushwood". It's the hot season, which means it's probably to avoid the hottest terrain, the black wastelands of the lava fields. I somehow find myself in amongst them at noon. The sun scorches from and the dark rocks blast heat below. The word "sauna" leaps into my overheated mind.
Darwin's thermometer could record up to 137F (58C) but he was convinced the temperature was . Even in thick boots, he found the black sand was "disagreeable to walk over". I cool down with an iced drink. I hear snoring from a wooden bench : a sea lion is sprawled on it, twitching in its sleep, unfazed. A marine iguana casts a at me but does not leave. You don't view wildlife here, you mingle with it.
And this has not changed since Darwin's . He noted the "extreme tameness" of the birds, not yet "adapted to the stranger's craft or power".
As I put "Origin of Species" on my table, I push the remote control for the air conditioning. I could never five years on a tiny sailing ship, but surely, in a brave spirit of solidarity, I can choose to without chilled air? Not for long. I wake baking, reach for that remote and read how "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved". Until the room cools down.