Four days in the Galápagos: the islands without the cruise ship

The crossing from the airport eats most of the morning, so give the afternoon to the two things at the eastern end of town, both an easy walk from the harbour.

The Charles Darwin Research Station is about a kilometre and a half past the last hotels, at the end of a path through the cactus. It is the working end of the conservation programme rather than a museum: pens of young tortoises being raised until they are big enough to survive rats, an explanation of which island each subspecies belongs to, and the preserved body of Lonesome George, who was found on Pinta in 1971, was the last of his kind, and died in 2012 without leaving offspring. Entry is free.

Walk back through town at dusk to the Laguna Las Ninfas, a brackish lagoon with a boardwalk around it in the middle of the residential streets. It is a ten-minute loop and it is full of small fish, herons and, if you are lucky, a marine iguana asleep on the rail. Then eat on Charles Binford, where the street closes to traffic in the evening and the kitchens put tables out.

Tortuga Bay first, and early. A paved path runs two and a half kilometres out of town through opuntia cactus and scrub, taking about forty minutes, and you sign in at the gate at the start. The first beach it delivers you to is long, white, empty and dangerous to swim: the undertow is serious and the surf is for surfers. Walk another kilometre along the sand to the end and around into Playa Mansa, a shallow mangrove-fringed lagoon where the water is flat, white-tipped sharks cruise the edge, turtles come in and marine iguanas pile on the rocks. Kayaks are rented at that end by the hour.

Come back for lunch, then take a yellow water taxi across the bay for a dollar. From the far dock a marked path runs past a beach, a set of old salt pans and a stretch of raw lava to Las Grietas, a flooded fissure between two vertical walls of rock where rainwater sits on top of seawater and the whole thing glows green. There is a ladder and a platform, and people jump in from the rocks. Take a snorkel: the interest is the tunnels under the fallen boulders rather than the fish.

The path passes Punta Estrada, the small beach locals call German beach, which is the calmest snorkelling within walking distance of town and worth an hour before you turn round.

Book a day boat the day before, from any of the agencies along Avenida Charles Darwin, and be at the pier early. South Plaza is a sliver of an island off the eastern end of Santa Cruz, barely more than a kilometre long, and it is the best value day trip from Puerto Ayora because so much is packed into so little.

You land dry on a concrete pontoon among sea lions, marine iguanas and sally lightfoot crabs. A short path climbs through a forest of prickly pear cactus where the land iguanas sit and wait for pads to fall, past ground cover that turns red in the dry season, to a cliff on the far side. That cliff is the reason to come: swallow-tailed gulls nesting on the ledges, tropicbirds and frigatebirds riding the updraught, and a bachelor colony of male sea lions on the rocks below.

Most trips add a snorkel stop on the way back, in the channel or off Punta Carrión, where you swim with turtles and white-tipped reef sharks. The boat is usually back at the pier by mid afternoon.

The road to the airport climbs through the highlands, which means the last morning does not have to be wasted. Hire a pickup for the run, load the bags and stop twice.

El Chato is a private reserve a few kilometres off the road near Santa Rosa where wild giant tortoises come up from the coast to graze in the wet season. You walk out into a damp pasture and find them, twenty or thirty of them, feeding and wallowing in pools, entirely unmoved by anybody looking. There are lava tunnels on the same land you can walk through, and the entrance fee is a few dollars.

Then Los Gemelos, the twins, seven kilometres further up the road: two enormous pit craters formed where lava chambers collapsed, sunk into scalesia cloud forest either side of the tarmac. A short circuit walk connects them, the vermilion flycatcher lives here and short-eared owls hunt in daylight. From there it is twenty minutes down to the channel, a ferry and the airport.