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Baby Turtle Hatchings
After the broken sleep, I decided it would be a great idea to get up for 7am to grab the snorkel again and head out looking for some adult turtles, one of the other guests had spotted one the day before. I didn't see one but I did go past large schools of both little and slightly bigger fish, who didn't seemed to be that bothered of my presence.
On going for breakfast we were told that some baby turtles had hatched around 4am (we were a few hours too early with our walk). Usually they put a cage around any eggs that they know about to protect them from lizards but these must have gone undetected. About 25 of these turtles were placed into a plastic drum of water, the other 90 odd must have made it into the water. They were about the size of half my hand, all black in colour (the same black as a jelly baby) and were just moving around this container as if they thought they were in the sea. Occasionally they would not be moving (this is them sleeping) and if you put them in your hand they still try to make a run for it.
I wrote last year about my enjoyment of being in a kayak, after breakfast we took one out to head to the 4th beach. The kayak was wooden and little bit harder to manoeuvre than a plastic one. We had the beach to ourselves, and the shoreline looked as if it had a layer of seaweed (it's brown here). On further inspection this seaweed was a huge school of tiny fish, thousands of them, swimming around in a pattern and often leaving a circle the size of a Frisbee in the middle of them that was hollow. On snorkelling we found a few fish but not too many. Later I heard that because they can only protect the main turtle bay from fishing, most of the other bays are over fished and the coral has been damaged by nets (turtle bay used to be the same but has slowly started coming back to life). The tide was coming in as we kayaked back, on turning the corner to head back to our resort it started getting difficult keeping it heading in the right direction. My arms were quite tired by this point but I somehow thought it might be easier to let it go 360 degrees in the opposite direction and then try to keep it straight when it got back round to the right place. It worked!
I had paid for us to have a Native Sauna. It was quite interesting, and looked like something my friend Vince would construct in his garden. In fact, I hope my description of this will force his wife to nag him to build one (I will have to test it out for authenticity of course). It was a wooden hut, that was covered by plastic lino on the inside. It had a doorway that was made from some rollable plastic, with a metal tube at the bottom to keep it down and lock it in over the door. On the other side was a hole, this hole would feed in the warm air/steam from a pit outside of it that was filled with herbs and leaves and left to smoke from a small fire (they put lemongrass, lime leaves and other stuff into it). So the end result is a amazing smelling sauna, much better than the sweaty old man one back home.
The sunset was much clearer this evening, no cloud in the way. The manager of the resort "Pong" had sat down with us for a chat, he lived in Stuttgart for a few years with his previous wife and had two children that now come and visit him each year. He worked for a charity previously for 15 years that took him all over the world. Turns out he is also big into his coffee, so I started probing about "Filipino Coffee". Mainly it's been influenced by the American chains but he did say they sell brewed coffee at the resort but most people don't ask for it so he never mentioned it.
Dinner was away from the main bar area, under a small hut with wooden furniture, and candlelight. Earlier in the day I had seen the restaurant bring in a bowl of fresh squid so I had chilli squid, with some rice of course. That made it 3 good dinners out of 3, although this one was maybe not the best, a small bit of heat and I'm not even sure how to describe the sauce.
Bowls of rice; 17
Turtles seen; 131
Hours snorkelling; 3.5
- comments
A&G Briliant goodvto see you are enjoying every thing local .spoke to yr mum yesterday ...shes fine had a nice long chat .lov A&G x
Katy Looks and sounds awesome!!x
Tom Sounds like your sauna had a glory hole.