Turtle mothers, turtle babies

Once Upon a time I saw a nesting mother...

We’d only just passed by this spot five minutes ago. Ahmaly and I fell silent and looked at each other.

“Isn’t this what we’re looking for?” I asked the sand in front of me.

“Yes, look they’re tracks” Ahmaly replied, her red torch following this new path up the beach. A distinctive row of flipper pushes and under shell drag lead to the bush line. The smell of firecrackers and rain clung to fresh sea air, our dark red torches bouncing cautiously as we proceeded. She was halfway towards her intended patch of darkness away from the trails of light pollution. 

Excitement boiled inside me as Ahmaly reached for the volunteer phone in her pocket. This was it; this is what we were here for. Lightning strikes lit up the sky as mother Elaine began to dig, the swipe and swoosh of her fins in time with the spraying thud of light sand into the air. Forty-five minutes later, with a waiting nest, she was ready to begin the drop of her brood. 

The old poacher, now paid to help Conservationists, was ready to scoop as the eggs dropped. His efforts would ensure a zero breakage success rate from mother to collector to box to new nest to hatching in 60 days. Six volunteers stood nearby, protectively waiting for the soft balls, silently egging her gargantuan efforts on. She looked exhausted already.

  

The next morning

Six hours later Ahmaly, Daniel and I in a thick black hoody, sat on the speedboat driven by Boy out to Munjor Beach.  The sun was rising over blue waves and a chilly early morning wind caught at my cheeks. Daniel from Singapore, lowered his binoculars from the horizon grinning at my somewhat unnecessary layers. We were about to swim over a reef to a fresh egg nest.

No one ever tells you this, and why would they, but dinosaur eggs are very soft, almost like fabric. You did read that correctly, the word, dinosaur. Turtles are  dinosaurs.  Another mother had laid a new batch on this beach while we had been watching ‘Elaine’ do the same back on Juara beach.  We lay together on our bellies among the trees, burrowing gently, downwards to the nest below, careful not to knock or break any eggs. They were the size of Chinese lucky balls.

“Aarrrgh!” I cried out, feeling the stodgy goo between my fingers. “No!” The shift in sand and my hands on the delicate shell had broken an egg.

Five minutes later I struck misfortune again, unaware that my oafish digits were to blame. Sand crumbled down towards the nestled ping pong balls, exacerbating our efforts. On the third crush, this time from a slump of sand, two more came out dripping yellow yoke. I decided to step back and one by one, two by two, out they came in to the waiting mouth of our poly foam box. The total broken came to rest at five out of 104. Ninety eggs were ready to take to their new address: the Juara Turtle Project hatchery.

This may all seem rather mysterious. Turtles? I thought she was in Thailand? Where the fudge is Tioman any way?! I shall enlighten you. I was staying in Ko Lanta, swishing my toes in the sand of the hostel common area, looking for a… ‘something.’ There it was, Jaura Turtle Project, a place to stay, do and maybe even learn?   On the minibus leaving for the ferry port: rammed in as we were, old ladies cast their inquisitive eyes at these curious foreigners. I am as ever enthralled by Thailand and it's nuances, in fact all of South East Asia. This is a part of the world where dashboard-nodding dogs are replaced by dusted purple nodding elephants that smile back. It is a place where children learn how a Gecko sounds instead of a sheep, with an upwards 'uh' tone to the downwards 'oh', so fun for little mouths to repeat. Half a week later, when the nodding elephant was a memory behind several more bus journeys and a stay on Perhentian Kecil, that incidentally reminded me of Kellerman’s in Dirty Dancing, I held on to the interior of a tiny Jeep careering over an incredibly steep hill. Juara was at the bottom.

Turtles hatching

“Put one on top of the others,” instructed Charlie.

A crowd of us had gathered around the 1ft diameter fenced nest in anticipation.  Just a couple of small nondescript heads were poking out, and a few rings of sand clung in patches where their eyes should be. They had finally reached the fresh air at the top. In a bid to wake them up to their need to get out of the shifting sands around them, we followed his advice. Just the top baby turtle began to shift his flippers in a flurry of fins.  Charlie picked him up expertly by the ‘rails’ of his shell, his little fins thinking they were in water and not suspended in air, and placed his tiny body in the centre of the baby heap. With a sudden great push from below, they heaved upwards as one. It was like watching an erupting volcano or bees leaving a hive en masse in search of pollen. 

They crashed up against the fencing, trying to get to the waves ahead of them. They climbed over and over each other, some falling on their backs with their necks stretching out so they could flip themselves back over; and a few of us motherly volunteers succumbing to a kind of cross species broodiness and picking them up ourselves. And this is definitely a real phenomenon. How else do you explain all those videos of kittens on You-Tube?

When we released them two hours later, a small crowd of families had gathered. Now, beating themselves against the inside of a foam box, they sounded like a crowd of birds flapping their wings against the wind. The evening was at that point where it changes suddenly from light to pitch black. Twilight is especially fast on the equator and this was a blessing for our brood of 200. The box was tipped and the most we could do now was hope they all made it to the sea, not back up the beach or in the beak of a hovering bird, the likelihood of either most certainly swayed by the presence of a crowd of humans. At the same time, a storm was appearing with globs of water greeting us a cool hello. 

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Great swipes now came from the bottom of the great hole Elaine had previously dug. She slowly turned her vortex in to a small ridge, and even slower, after about an hour, she managed to shift her exhausted self and nudge her shell away from the covered nest beneath. I left before she made her about-turn to face the waves. Something told me, besides my own tiredness, staying to watch her return could be a step past the line between impassioned volunteer and intrusive voyeur.  I crept away, leaving her safety to the remaining volunteers.

Tid-bits of Volun-tourism

Clean up on Tioman Island 

The phone was ringing an urgent tune.

"Hello, Juara Turtle Project?" I asked.

"Hi, it's Julie, there’s more washing up on the beach. Can you ask Charlie if anyone can come down to help?"

A short explanation came from the other end with a request to gather troops. I was volunteering at Juara Turtle Project on Tioman Island, where fishermen had been dumping their oil in the bay. It seems they wanted to save themselves the official fees in Singapore’s busy ports, 123 nautical miles away.

Charlie, ever the horizontal hippy, the big man in charge, drawled in his methodical California accent:

“Whoever wants to go can take a bike. There’s rakes down there still.” 

Lumps of oil were melting in to the sand, fast.

Three of us hopped on to reclaimed Dutchies, sans breaks, and creakily wound over to the hotel in question, using our flip-flops to skim along the floor when we needed to slow down.

Tioman Island is a remote easterly national conservation park, shaped a little bit like a wine bottle. Steep mountains separate quiet villages and a lack of partying has kept this secret Malaysian location away from most of the backpacker crowd.

Juara bay lies on a calm patch of barely visited sand. Clear waters and reefs dot the coast under a white-hot sun. By night phosphorescent plankton can be seen shimmering in the moonlit water, waiting for nesting turtles to wash ashore.

When an oil spill happens, whether near or far from land, eventually it is brought to solid ground by the ebb and flow of currents. The black grease normally solidifies in to lumps of tar, sometimes sticking itself to rocks, rubbish or animals. When it melts under a hot sun, it slips through fingers, in to the sand, blending with the grains, meaning that what is raked up is sand itself. As the tide pushes itself back on to the beach, the water filters in to the sand with all this oil and then you just have a giant never ending shit storm of impossible clearing and tiny crabs whose home is this now polluted beach.

On arrival to Julie’s hotel, rakes and wheelbarrows aided us in scraping and filtering oil from the sand. It would keep coming back and by the next morning a fresh sheen of dark stickiness would cover our scooping. Our debt to nature was beginning repayment, even if it appeared futile.

Three hours later I was covered in oil, sweat dripped off my brow and my back was sore from bending in to the polluted sand. Raking, hauling was thirsty work and followed by cold ice tea, courtesy of Julie’s gratitude. The hard work left a strange mix of satisfaction and unrest. I was happy to pitch in and play eco-warrior, and I took the opportunity to play eco-warrior with gusto because I wanted to. I was, simply put, not so full of delight at the cause.

It would be wonderful if the chances to clean and conserve need not occur; that would mean everything is and will continue to be in balance in future. As someone who at least tries to live with a sense of reality, hilarious though the claim may seem, these opportunities will continue to come for a long time. The experience of tripping in to a minor catastrophe really encouraged me to take up my recycling bag and join the ranks in the War-On-Pollution. It's like the war on terror but with cleaning materials and no one gets bombed. We have the opportunities to help now, but they won't be here for much longer before its' gone. The question now is whether we choose to take the chance while we have it. 

Cleansing Ko Lanta

 Breathing and cleaning up in Ko Lanta, Thailand  

The grainy sand sticks to my toes and won't let go, leaving a dusty perma-film along the soles of my feet. The hot wind blowing across my back distracts me from the heat of the sun. An unknown black lump has attached its sticky tack to a washed up water bottle. It moved at my touch, slinking and clinging between my fingers, like toxic play-do.

Getting up, I took a few steps nearly treading in another blotch of mystery goo. Ahead of me tiny lumps had bottle caps in-bedded in them, larger ones showing off a sand casing, sprouting plastic straws, and even one completely shaped around a lost flip flop.

I conceded that missing the Klong Dao clean up was justified while my book –filled beach time with long thoughts on how to make dream catchers, turned in to a two-woman black gold treasure hunt. Only the treasure was unwanted, and, we wondered, where had it all come from?

If you ever wondered what an island of hippies might look like, go to Ko Lanta. The smell of incense cones and clunk of wooden wind chimes will explain it all. Stumbling off a Songteaw few days previous, I lumbered around muddy potholes on Thailand’s second largest island, in the dirt track next to Chill Out House hostel. An ivy-laden gable tickled my hair as I trundled inside to discover wooden tables in a tree house, people playing Jenga and a bed to myself for 100 baht per night. After the prices on Koh Phi Phi, where you’ll pay two thirds more a night for a strobe-lit dorm full of teenagers crawling all over each other, like drunken incestuous rats, this was a very good deal.  I was also quickly informed that the best Pad Thai on the island was a two minute walk away and could cost just 40 Baht per serving (about 80p).

Not only did Ko Lanta impress my wallet, it turned out to impress me. After months of living in Bali and months of buses on winding Asian highways- the traveller’s road- I was in need of some peace and quiet. Bangkok had ruined me again, Kanchanaburi educated me in the hardships of war, Krabi showed me how easily a beautiful place can become a tourist wreck and Phi Phi told me how sad it all was. I needed somewhere to exhale.

I spent my time here eating the cheap pad thai, visiting a lighthouse and getting attacked by monkeys that were too familiar with humans and ice cream. Sunshine bleached the tops of womens’ hijabs as they whizzed by on their scooters in the midday scorch.

I visited a Mangrove forest for the first time and saw tiny crabs scuttling along the silt, squaring up to each other as they held up a giant red claw each. Their mismatched arms a sign of virility in this swamp of roots pulling out of mud. I even fed some malnourished and poorly treated elephants. Why did I feed the elephants you ask? Well I’m so glad you did.

So often in South East Asia, elephants are used to attract tourists to certain areas. People need to make money and feed their families. But too often putting food on the table comes at the expense of a creature’s liberty or even their health. Quite often Mahouts will use a Thotti, a long wooden stick with a metal hook, to control the elephants. This ‘control’ generally comes in the form of beating and driving the hook in to an elephant’s ears. For more information on this go to One Green Planet.com. 

On the drive to the Mangroves rainy season storm clouds hovered above menacingly. A Canadian girl and I wondered in to an elephant trekking ground, after finding a monkey park with the monkeys all tethered to posts, unable to run about or escape. This time of year is slow business for the locals, allowing us a better look at the animals. We stopped the bike and went to say hi to the Mahouts in a dusty open field. Two hungry looking baby elephants were bound to a tree, their ears ripped and full of bloody holes and mother tied to a post across the other side of the field. With a look to each other we decided to find a market to get bananas for the animals, we were not going to give money and feed the supply and demand of this treatment.

It’s up to you to decide whether we did the right thing that day. To us it felt like the right thing.