Extraordinary Galapagos

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GALAPAGOS ISLANDS, Ecuador -- As my cameralens zooms in on the head of a long-necked giant tortoise that is in the wild yet less than 10 feet from me, I think the face of this bizarre creature really does make it look like E.T.

That's no surprise because that famous movie character was modeled after a close-up image of the head of a giant Galapagos tortoise.

There is no other living thing in the world quite like a giant tortoise -- the correct name for a land-dwelling turtle -- and there is no other place in the world quite like Ecuador's Galapagos Islands. The islands are one of only two places on the planet that giant tortoises call home. The other is South Aldabra atoll in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, where, unlike in the Galapagos, their numbers are negligible.

Giant tortoises (picture a normal turtle and then try to imagine it suddenly expanding to 20 to 40 times its height and a few hundred times its weight) with faces that look like E.T.'s; iguanas that look like mini-Godzillas; albatrosses that look like the result of crossing a penguin and a goose -- these are just part of what makes it so fascinating to visit this archipelago 600 miles out in the Pacific Ocean off the mainland of Ecuador.

Seeing a giant tortoise in the wild is a Galapagos must, and this odd creature is, after all, the namesake of the islands -- "galapago" is the Spanish word for "saddle," a reference to the saddlelike shell of these elephantine reptiles.

What makes going to the Galapagos Islands such an incredible experience is that there are few other places in the world where wildlife is so easy to view and photograph close-up as it is here.

The creatures of the Galapagos are so unafraid of humans, and so unthreatening, that visiting one of the islands is like taking a walk through an open-air zoo of peculiar creatures:

• Sea lions.

• Fur seals.

• The world's second-smallest, northernmost and only tropical-dwelling penguin.