EXPLORE | THROUGH THE LENS
NGM MAPSGiant tortoises can safely sleep with their heads and necks exposed on Aldabra Atoll, where they don’t fear predators.(To get to it, I had to charter a propeller plane to the
closest island with an airstrip and then take a small
boat.) And Aldabra, one of the world’s largest coral
atolls, is quite inhospitable to visitors. The shoreline
is razor-sharp coral rock. There’s no permanent
freshwater, but there are plenty of mosquitoes, and
it’s so hot that tortoises bake in their shells if they
don’t find shade during the day. Yet the tortoises
thrive here because nobody was tough enough to go
and get them—and because the atoll was designated
in the 1980s as a special reserve by the government
and as a natural World Heritage site by UNESCO.
Protected from human interference, the
population of tortoises has rebounded
to roughly 100,000.
For two weeks of my six-week stay on
Aldabra, I was based at Middle Camp, a
daylong hike through hellish mangrove
swamps from the research station run by
the Seychelles Island Foundation. I lived
in a hut with a dirt floor and a tin roof. At
night coconut crabs scuttled across the roof to
the sound of screeching metal.
Every morning when I woke up and walked outside
the hut, I had to remind myself that I hadn’t traveled
back in time. I could see flightless Aldabra rails,
coconut crabs the size of dinner plates, and giant
tortoises—roughly four feet long and weighing up
to 550 pounds—just wandering around. The number
of sharks in the bay was insane. Frigatebirds and
boobies nested in the mangroves.
The tortoises didn’t seem to distinguish between
me—a National Geographic photographer—anda frigatebird or a coconut crab or a flightless rail.
We were all part of the ecosystem, and they treated
humans as they treated every other creature: They
ignored us. When we left our hut doors open, which
we often did to let in air, the tortoises would walk
right through. It didn’t matter if we were cooking or
sleeping or preparing camera gear. Our quarters were
part of the daily migratory highway. When we sat on a
small sandy patch behind the hut to eat, the tortoises
would try to walk over us, almost bulldozing us out
of the way. That’s how much they feared humans.
In the late afternoon or early evening, when-
ever they’d finished grazing, the tortoises
would plop down and fall asleep with their
heads outstretched. That made nighttime
trips to the outhouse perilous. To get
there, we’d have to go 200 feet into the
mangroves, negotiating what I called the
tortoise slalom trail. It was a trail without
a pattern, because of course they picked
different places to sleep every night. Avoiding
them was important: Falling headfirst over a tor-
toise onto the sharp coral rock could lead to serious
injury on an island far from medical facilities.
Nothing was easy on Aldabra, and much of it was
insanely difficult. Yet living among the tortoises in
this primordial place, in one of the last spots where
reptiles still rule, was one of the happiest times
of my life. jPhotographer and marine biologist Thomas Peschak has shot
nine feature stories for National Geographic. He specializes in
documenting both the beauty and the fragility of the world’s
oceans, islands, and coastlines.AFRICAASIASEYCHELLESINDIAN
OCEANAldabra
Atoll