Lars-Eric Lindblad was a visionary man, full of dreams that slowly but surely became reality. He opened the world to travelers, and those exotic and isolated places they had once heard of only through National Geographic, finally became accessible. Lars-Eric took people to Africa, Mongolia, South America, but in 1966 he felt it was time to visit the white south. He chartered an Argentinian vessel, the MS Lapataia, and landed, fifty years ago, on the continent of superlatives—strongest winds, lowest temperatures, fewest species. We have committed the current week to the commemoration of the beginning of this new era of expedition travel. We blew out candles on a cake on the 23rd, to remember the day when 56 Lindblad guests, landed on Antarctica for the first time. We organized a kayaking competition as part of our celebration program, to celebrate adventure, and yesterday we had a BBQ under the moon, with music from our resident artist, Christian Saa, to honor dreaming—the first step towards any accomplishment.
Today we landed on Santa Cruz, one of the first islands to be visited by a Lindblad group, in 1967. Guests come aboard the Navarino, a Chilean ship that had also taken some of the first Lindblad explorers to Antarctica. Lars-Eric knew that the largest concentration of reachable giant tortoises was at Santa Cruz Island. In his book, A Passport to Anywhere, Mr. Lindblad writes: “Tortoises were in the highlands and could best be reached by horseback”. He arranged horses for the journey, but they were scarce, not in the best shape, and saddles were “unkindly wooden”. Although it was tough, our adventurous travelers made the journey, and delighted in the company of a healthy population of giant creatures in the wild.
Today our trip was much easier than that trek in 1967. We boarded buses and visited perhaps the same individual tortoises that Mr. Lindblad saw 49 years ago. Although some of the tortoises might be different, I am sure that the feelings we all experienced, then and now, were definitely the same. As Lars-Eric wrote: “One of the most charming characteristic of the Galapagos fauna is their fearlessness. Unmolested by predators, they have never had to flee for their lives. They accept humans as equals”. And so, as equals, we walked through giants in an archipelago of naiveté, celebrating human curiosity by evoking the first Lindblad adventures.
