4. Galápagos Islands

Etymology

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The archipelago has been known by many different names, including the "Enchanted Islands" because of the way in which the strong and swift currents made navigation difficult. The first crude navigation chart of the islands was done by the buccaneer Ambrose Cowley in 1684, and in those charts he named the islands after some of his fellow pirates or after the English noblemen who helped the pirates' cause. The term "Galápagos" refers to the Spanish name given to the Giant Land Tortoises known to inhabit the islands.
The adjective "Galápagan" may be used to describe things from or related to the islands

The measure of a trip is sometimes the number of photos we bring back from it. Other times it's the degree of remove we achieve, or how hard it is to face home at vacation's end. But the one that's most important to me is how often memories from a trip return unbidden, deepening and complicating ordinary life.
By all these measures, the Galápagos Islands are my favorite destination. I first visited in 1984, right out of grad school, with my mother, aunt, uncle, and cousin. We flew to the coast of Ecuador and then chugged out into the wide Pacific for three days in an old boat called the Bucanero (Buccaneer), since retired; the long passage seemed the perfect preamble to an unreal place where giant Seuss-like albatross babies waited for their parents in twig nests on the ground, penguins swam across the equator, and frigate birds with scissor tails swooped scarily overhead. Then last August, nearly 20 years later, I returned, this time flying all the way—a loss—but with my wife, children, mother (again!), and two sisters and their families—a clear gain. And as our plane neared the Galápagos island of Baltra, with its scrubby vegetation and short stretches of sandy beach edged by dark, volcanic rock, one of those memories came back, an experience I hoped now to share with my kids: a rendezvous with sea lions.