Before You Die: Galapagos by Isabella Tree

Galapagos Islands - for a spectacular adventure into the geology of the planet, the origins of life, and nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, likened the Galapagos to ‘heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside lot’ - conditions are so inhospitable, and some of the volcanic islands so recent, it’s a miracle anything survives here at all. It’s not beautiful, except in a bleak, black, predatory kind of way, yet the place is teeming with wildlife, and the mutation of species from island to island so clear and dramatic, it feels like you’re being given a ring-side seat at the theatre of evolution. Isabella Tree