My tortoise travels took me on an extraordinary monthlong adventure on Aldabra atoll, one of the most remote and ecologically intact places on Earth. It’s home to the last surviving species of giant tortoises (Aldabrachelys gigantea) that once flourished in vast numbers across a 2,500-mile arc of islands dimpling the western Indian Ocean. Aldabra isn’t the kind of place where you can just book a ticket and show up. It’s managed by the Seychelles Islands Foundation (SIF) and is almost completely closed to visitors. Outside of the two dozen members of the research team, fewer than a thousand people per year visit this place — its very limited tourism comes from the occasional small eco-cruise and expedition ships.
Getting there was another story involving 36 hours of travel from Portland, through Dubai, to Seychelles. Then joining SIF’s team on a chartered small-craft flight (two hours) from Mahé to Assumption — Aldabra’s sister island, which has an airstrip. And then a last 90-minute leg across open sea in a twin-hull boat to finally reach Aldabra’s shores. But wait! A cyclone! In full disclosure, our safety was never in question. But it meant our synchronized flight-and-boat travel from Mahé to Aldabra was shifted forward by 36 hours. We arrived at the airport at 4 am — in torrential rain — for a very thorough biosecurity check, and finally took off through the mists as the golden sun rose above the horizon.
An ideal landing on Aldabra happens at high tide, when the boat can motor above the shallow reef. The smoothest landings can be mostly dry ones. Ours was neither ideal, nor dry. The tide was out, and our boat — the Manta — anchored at the edge of the reef. One of the island staff brought out reef shoes for those of us who didn’t have them, and we splashed through the calf-deep water across the jagged coral until we reached the white sands fringing the research station. The boat would unload later, when it could pull closer to shore. Welcome to Aldabra! The time difference from home was exactly 12 hours.
Thousands of generations of tortoises (150,000 giant tortoises living there today) have shaped the atoll’s ecosystem in profound ways — shaping everything from seed dispersal to soil composition. I took every chance to explore the atoll and get to experience them living their wild lives. It was a true island experience, from spending Christmas and New Year’s with 16 other people at the research station, from counting sea turtle tracks along the beach at dawn, to snorkeling the currents sweeping into the lagoon at high tide and exploring the lagoon’s mushroom-shaped islets when the tide was low, to a moonlight walk with friends down to a sandy cove for stargazing and conversation.
Toward the end of my stay, one of the most eye-opening adventures took shape: joining science coordinator Simon Watkins and two others on a two-night expedition to the far side of the atoll — boating across Aldabra’s lagoon twice the area of Manhattan — to a remote hut near the atoll’s highest point (a 60-foot dune) where massive numbers of tortoises come out morning and evening to graze in an ecosystem that they themselves have shaped. This is the legendary “tortoise turf” and one of the sights I had come all this way to see. It’s one of the most unique landscapes on Earth. Tortoises have created great grassy swaths of “tortoise turf,” where endemic sedge and grass species have adapted into dwarf forms to survive a hundred thousand generations of tortoise grazing pressure.
When Aldabra’s tortoises hit these pastures en masse — as many as 80 per hectare — their collective biomass density spikes to the highest in the world, surpassing the density of even the Serengeti’s vast herds of ungulates. I awoke at dawn and left the hut to meander along the low rocky cliffs, navigating around trundles of tortoises in the soft morning light and to nature’s soundtrack of crashing waves.
Seeing these amazing creatures up close and in the wild was a rare and amazing privilege, and the stories that emerged form one of the central pillars of my book.
My visit would not have been possible without the enthusiastic help and support from Dennis Hansen and Rich Baxter, and everyone at the Seychelles Islands Foundation including Frauke Fleischer-Dogley, Annabelle Constance, Nancy Bunbury, Anna Koester, and Simon Watkins.
