Hey everybody. Maya here, broadcasting live from the beautiful beachside town of Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, our chosen free-travel destination. Our week on la Playa Camronal was harder than most of us expected, with killer bugs and long, often fruitless nights of turtle work. A fair ammount of our time during the day was spent relaxing, and the rest performing various seemingly meaningless tasks– we picked up garbage on the beach, gathered wood into a huge pile (a tedious, almost depressing activity, seing as how no matter how much wood we moved, it never seemed to make a difference on the stick-littered beach), and carving steps into a hillside (we just can’t seem to keep away from shovelling mud, can we?). At night, we split up into groups and took three hour shifts. The schedule was like this.
9-12………it was pretty likely that you would see at least a few turtles, and more than a few tourists.
12-3………you probably saw the most turtles during this shift, although you were barely conscious enough to realize you were no longer dreaming when you did.
3-6………..yes, you heard me. 3-6AM. this shift we spent asleep face-down in the sand. Because turtles never lay eggs during high-tide, these three hours were totally uneventful.
We rotated through shifts, each group laughing and complaining in turn about the turtles they saw, and the sand they ate. My first night out, I was lucky enough to have the 9-12 shift. My group and I were astonished when, after what felt like an eternity of patrolling the beach, we came upon two turtles, each preparing to lay eggs. They were small-ish, but strang in the darkness. Apparently, turtles go into a trance when they lay their eggs. For this reason, we were expected to dig underneath the turtles’ backsides, stick our gloved hands underneath them, and let the creatures lay their cold, sticky eggs into our fingers. This experience was totally surreal. The turtles made soft, gasping sounds while spurting amniotic fluid and what looked like ping-pong balls from their cloecas (I think this is how you spell it. A cloeca is the one hole that animals such as turtles, frogs and chickens use for all sexual and excretory purposes). After we collected and counted the eggs, we burried them inside a small structure used as a turtle sanctuary on the beach, and watched the turtles struggle back to the sea.
A few times, we got to witness baby turtles digging their way out of the sand and scrambling towards the ocean. The babies were adorable, tiny and quick. We held them once or twice while they tried frantically to escape. At times we were also required to unearth the eggshells as well as the unhatched eggs from their holes in the sanctuary. We were directed to pop open the unhatched eggs, and record our findings. Often times, the eggs were full of lumpy yellow custard. Sometimes, the insides resembled a round pinkish organ, tumor-like in its underdeveloped state. The saddest thing I saw, during our week at the turtle project, was a perfectly-formed baby turtle inside an unhatched egg, literally hugging its placenta.
We were all exhausted and dirty when we rode away from Playa Camronal in the back of pickup trucks at 3AM, telling ghost stories and falling asleep on eachothers’ shoulders. After what I believe was 10 hours of travel on busses and in taxis, we arrived in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca.
So here we are, in the land of dredlocks, smoothies, and reggae, riding our rented beach cruisers and soaking up the sun. We failed to celebrate Thanksgiving, seing as how it is more than difficult to prepare a holiday dinner on a bus. But we were all thinking of our families yesterday, a wishing them a Happy Thanksgiving.
12 days left, and until then, know that we are all happy, healthy, and livin it up!
We hope you are all doing well.
*Shout out to my mommy! I miss you.
