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.