Unfortunately, no dating agency can help Lonesome George — as the last of his kind, he will never find a true soul mate. There are 14 subspecies of the Galápagos tortoise (three are extinct) and George is the sole surviving giant tortoise of Pinta Island.

He has so far stubbornly failed to breed with other subspecies. Hopes were raised last year when eggs were found in his enclosure, but these proved infertile. Efforts to find him a mate continue, but in the meantime souvenir shops continue to do a roaring trade in T-shirts featuring a bespectacled reptile reading Playboy.

Lonesome George is the star attraction at the Galápagos’s Charles Darwin Research Centre but prefers to hide from the paparazzi. Hordes of 12-year-old schoolboys chant in Spanish: 'George, George, where are you, George?' Eager Germans wait with poised zoom lenses, but the celebrity continues to skulk inside his shell. He's lonesome, but he has his pride.

The research centre is named for the archipelago's most famous visitor, Charles Darwin. The Englishman was just 22 when he joined HMS Beagle and became the unpaid naturalist, geologist and gentleman companion of the ship's Captain FitzRoy. On her five-year voyage around the world, the Beagle spent five weeks in the Galápagos in 1835, a stay Darwin records in his journal, The Voyage of the Beagle.

More than 170 years later, I am sailing in the wake of Darwin aboard Angelique, a yacht with seven crew and double cabins for 16 passengers. It’s not luxurious: my cabin has bunk beds and a shower the size of a coffin. But Angelique is a romantic choice — she’s pictured online as a lovely wooden yacht with white sails.

'They're not likely to ever use those sails,' a Texan woman says knowingly. She’s part of a group of American retirees who take a sailing holiday in a different part of the world each year, but this time have been stymied by regulations preventing private sailing in the Galápagos and forced to come en masse on an organised cruise.

"…I am partly here for the wildlife…"

Our five-day voyage is led by Galápagos-born Harry Espinoza, an enterprising man who studied biology, then taught himself English, German and French on audio tapes in order to become a tour guide.

I am partly here for the wildlife: 300kg tortoises that live for a century, iguanas that surf ocean waves, and blue-footed boobies — birds whose shifty courtship dance resembles a mime routine and who are comedy gold for T-shirt makers, who print two strategically placed blue feet and the slogan, 'I Love Boobies!'

A combination of climate, marine currents, isolation and evolution means many creatures on these remote volcanic islands are unique. It's a wildlife lover's once-in-a-lifetime dream, with 17 endemic reptile species (including the famous tortoises), 28 endemic birds and 50 endemic fish.

My trip is also a pilgrimage, except the driving force is science, not religion. The Galápagos is the birthplace of Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection; it's where he found vital clues, even if it wasn't until his return that he pieced them together, and 20 years more before he dared publish his theories in The Origin of Species, angering the Church and forever changing the way we understand the world.

The Galápagos archipelago, 1000 kilometres west of South America in the Pacific Ocean, belongs to Ecuador and consists of 13 main islands. In the next five days, Angelique will sail to six. We can expect to see everything from albatrosses to Darwin’s finches — the 13 endemic species with varying beak sizes, adapted to fill every feeding niche, that triggered his ideas on natural selection.

"…the only shooting is done with a camera…"

Animals here are unafraid of humans: seals playfully swim circles round me when I'm snorkelling and iguanas don't blink a lazy eyelid as I stamp down a sandy track. In his journal, Darwin commented on the birds’ 'extreme tameness', saying: 'A gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree.' Today, cheeky mockingbirds peck at tourists' waterbottles and the only shooting is done with a camera.

Our journey starts on the main island of Santa Cruz with a visit to a tortoise farm. Centuries ago, about 200 000 giant tortoises roamed the islands, but populations were decimated by sailors who took them aboard as an early form of meals on wheels.

"Young tortoises make excellent soup…"

Up to 700 were taken by one ship. Later, feral goats ate the vegetation, leaving tortoises no food or shelter. In Darwin's time, tortoises were the islanders' meat staple, yet it's a shock to learn the revered naturalist ate them: 'The breast-plate roasted (as the Gauchos do carne con cuero), with the flesh on it, is very good; and the young tortoises make excellent soup', he writes in The Voyage of the Beagle. My idol, giving out barbecued tortoise recipes.

In another move to fall foul of modern environmentalists, yesteryear's hero also rode the tortoises. 'I found it very difficult to keep my balance,' he writes. Now visitors are not allowed to come within a few metres, let alone touch them.

Santa Cruz's farms are one of the few places for guaranteed sightings. Traipsing along with the Americans I find a giant, wallowing in the mud, who gives me the evil eye and hisses loudly. Darwin received a similar response: 'These huge reptiles, surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs and large cacti, seemed to my fancy like some antediluvian animals,' he wrote. I agree (after looking up the meaning of 'antediluvian'), tortoises do look like primitive beings from before the Flood.

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