"I really feel we are letting the side down as British citizens," says Amy (pseudonym), one of the English travellers in our group, "by not having found anything to complain about. We should by now have complained at least four times about it being too cold or too windy or too hot or too salty."
She's quite right. We are all bouncing happily about in our little slice of Galapagos paradise, and are really finding it rather hard to keep up our fair share of complaining.
And in fact it has at alternate fifteen minutes (or so) intervals, been too cold, too windy, too hot or too salty. But put together it's wonderful. And can we really find the time to notice it anyway, when there are turtles swimming beneath us, huge frigate birds wheeling gracefully above us and marine iguanas sunning themselves in between?
We are standing on a boat, braced against the prow with the warm wind on our skin and salt in our hair. We have spent all day on the boat, or snorkelling off it, or joining the iguanas to sun ourselves looking back at it from the golden sands of the beach. There has not been a lot to complain about.
We have seen blue footed boobies, white birds with grey markings and bright blue feet, and their compatriots, the red footed boobies, who I suspect you can imagine from the title.
We have watched a pelican swoop down to land on a rock, and frigate birds drop like pointed stones into the water to catch their lunch.
We have jumped somewhat nervously off the boat into the bracing water and snorkelled in the alleyway between two huge rocks which, together, look like a huge sleeping lion in the otherwise uninterrupted blue water. We have seen enormous turtles, electric blue fish, brightly coloured plants clinging to the underground rock face, and even sharks, ominous and graceful, keeping their distance like dark blue shadows in the depths.
(At this point a few of us got so excited we lost the rest of the group and had to be driven round the rock to join them by the grinning boat crew. Ahem. I may have been among that few...)
We have clambered, wet and exhilarated, back onto the boat, laid ourselves out to dry in patches on sunlight on the deck, and then eaten lunch on the water.
We have waded to a beautiful white sans beach, collapsed on the sand, followed a prancing, rather posing marine iguana, slick and spiky and the same time, and looking surprisingly furry, though we suspect these were scales. We swam next to a sea lion, apparently unconcerned at our presence or even, playfully, seeking it out.
We have briefly chased a whale, hoping for a quick flash of a tail, having spotted a blow hole in the distance, very excitingly, though to no avail.
Now, watching the shore appear again, gradually, the few buildings of San Cristobal looking odd and incongruous, we scan our minds for a suitable complaint.
"The horseflies on the beach?" Someone says.
"I don't think they actually managed to bite me though," points out someone else.
The conversation moves on. We have been defeated.
It is all just a little bit too perfect.
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