Postcard: special delivery

The queue at the post office is an unusual one. Blue-footed boobies stand atop coastal boulders and Galapagos sea lions recline on rocky sofas. Lava herons nibble on Sally Lightfoot crabs and the tracks of sea turtles ripple through the sand dunes, reaching almost all the way to the mail box.

I'm at Post Office Bay on Floreana Island, one of the most southerly of the 19 Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. By Galapagos standards, the bay is little more than a beach with minimal wildlife, but it's the mail box that sets it apart.

As one of only two Galapagos Islands with natural freshwater, Floreana has been drawing visitors for centuries. For early sailors and pirates, it was a mandatory stop, filling their holds with water and giant tortoises.

So regular was the traffic that in the 1800s, a wooden barrel was positioned behind the sand dunes on what is now called Post Office Bay. Passing sailors would place letters to home inside the barrel, carrying on other letters addressed to places on their journeys, or near to their homes, to hand deliver.

"It's still working," my guide Juan Carlos says. "It's like the Ecuadorian postal service, though. It takes ages."

Today, visitors come armed with postcards, which they place into the barrel before sifting through other postcards for addresses near home. The expectation remains that they will be hand-delivered.

From our catamaran anchored in Post Office Bay, we've shunted on to the beach aboard the requisite Galapagos zodiacs. The equatorial heat wraps around us, the sunlight gleaming from the sand but disappearing into the black basalt headlands.

At the back of the narrow beach, turtle tracks and a walking trail lead through the dunes into the sandy clearing that forms what must surely be the world's most remote "post office".

Around us, the island rises into barren slopes punctured with lava tunnels. The thin trees are like latticework and the earth is as scrubby as an outback. Once, giant tortoises roamed these slopes but they were wiped out by sailors carting them away in their boats for meat. Floreana's tortoises were effectively victims of their own ability to survive for months when turned upside down on to their shells.

At the mailbox in the sand, I pop open the door of the barrel and the postcards come out in piles. I riffle through one pile, then a second, then a third. The postcards are all very pretty - images of sea lions, beaches, a few printed jokes about boobies - but none of them are for people in my home city or state.

In a fourth pile I find a postcard of a hawk, the top predator in the archipelago, its head tilted in the typical curiosity of Galapagan animals, its eyes all-seeing. I turn the card over and there in flowing print is the name of a friend who lives two suburbs from me. I am not just his friend now, but also his postman.