turtles!

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happy pesach... almost. So I decided to volunteer with the turtles. After enjoying the loveliest of days on saturday in Puerto Viejo (walking around the tidal pools, sitting on the beach, watching a kingfisher dive off of a palm going full speed into the ocean)... I then proceeded to have an awful night trying to sleep because everyone was extremeley loud, and some local ticos (as they are called) were being abnoxious and actually laughing at me when I asked them to keep it down. So I had it and the next morning went to the local park, which I was ambivilent about at first because I heard it was touristy, wasn´t sure whether there was much jungle to hike in during my free time.... I was completely off.... wow! what a place!

The park is called Cahuita, it is a mixture of beach and rainforest right alongside it. There is a beautiful 3 hour hike or so, maybe less, but I made plenty of stops to watch a band of howler monkeys shouting at each other, and later watched some Capuchin monkeys gang up on some tourists and take their bag. I also spotted a sloth from afar, and just had one of my favorite hikes ever. Dad you gotta come down here.

So the program which I really begin tonight consists of walking the beach for 4 hours, zigzagging the beach, looking for the huge leatherback turtles to lay their eggs and then hiding the eggs to prevent poachers from getting them. When finding a turtle there are two options, one is to collect their eggs (while the turtle is laying them) and relocate them to a different spot where poachers supposedly won´t find them. Option two is to just cover up the spot that they lay the eggs. There seems to be a fight for speed to see who gets to the eggs first, and the difficult thing is that the poachers also apparently watch us at night to see where we place the eggs. It is estimated that they still take about 18 percent of the eggs, which is much better than the previous 80 percent.

A normal night is 4 hours, and starts at either 8 or 11, but can last up to six hours if we find a turtle. So sleep will be minimal but satisfaction to the max. ok, all for now,
I´ll let everyone know how it goes.
mikael

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