The night-walkers of Uganda

parts of the world do not exist on the islands. 
There are no rats, for example. But now a rat has 
been found on the island of Santa Fe and the 
conservationists who are working to stop foreign 
wildlife reaching the islands are very worried. 
No-one knows how the rat arrived on Santa 
Fe but many people believe it arrived on the 
MV Discovery, a giant British cruise liner that 
visited the islands in April. The ship is returning 
to the Galápagos today. There are 460 paying 
passengers on the ship. Many people on the 
islands are not happy that the ship is visiting 
the islands and want to stop large numbers of 
tourists visiting the Galápagos. 
The company that owns the ship, Voyages of 
Discovery, promises visitors to the islands that 
they will see a beautiful and rich landscape and 
that their visit will be an adventure. But the ship’s 
arrival is bad news for the conservationists. Now 
they say they have also found swarms of foreign 
insects on the islands since the ship’s last visit. 
They are worried that when the ship returns 
it could bring more foreign species that might 
damage nature on the islands even more. 
The Discovery was the first cruise ship to visit 
the islands. It is scheduled to return again 
in April and then twice a year after that. The 
islands belong to Ecuador and the Ecuadorian 
government has given special licences that could 
mean that one cruise ship will stop there every 
month. 
Leonor Stjepic, director of the Galápagos 
Conservation Trust, has said that a large 
increase in visitor numbers will make it very 
difficult for conservationists to keep out pests 
and diseases. “If more people come, the risk of 
foreign species coming with them will increase. It 
is almost impossible to search such a large ship 
properly. These large numbers mean it’s much 
easier for foreign species to get past our controls. 
And if we can’t protect the Galápagos, how can 
we protect the other natural areas of the world? 
“The Galápagos are not suitable for this kind of 
mass tourism. The islands simply do not have the 
infrastructure for that number of people. We’re 
not against tourism, but it’s got to be expensive 
tourism for small numbers of people.” Before the 
visit of the Discovery, almost all visitors to the 
islands flew direct from Ecuador. “This cruise 
ship has travelled all the way down the coast of 
South America and could have all kinds of things 
with it,” Ms Stjepic said. 
As well as the rat, and the insects, the 
Discovery’s last visit also left a lot of litter on the 
islands. The rich tourists who dropped the litter 
“have no idea where they are or the effect their 
visit could have”. Someone even wrote graffiti 
at the visitor centre and one passenger asked 
where the local Starbucks was. 
The Charles Darwin Foundation and the 
Galápagos National Park Service studied the 
effect of the Discovery’s first visit. As well as the 
foreign wildlife, they found that sales for local 
businesses increased by only 5%. There were 
too many visitors for the local infrastructure, they 
said, and the large boats that took the cruise 
passengers around the islands damaged some 
of the beaches. 
But the managing director of Voyages 
of Discovery, David Yellow, said the 
conservationists were wrong. He said his 
company operated under strict rules and had 
studied the effect on the environment before it 
received its licence to operate in the Galápagos. 
“We know what to do in environmentally 
sensitive areas. We give our passengers 
special instructions before they go ashore and 
they follow those instructions.” The Discovery