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Published: January 5th 2008
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Turtle lays eggs
The big moment arrives We had tried turtle watching on a previous holiday in Sri Lanka, and been unsuccessful - we managed to pick the first night of the turtle watching season when there were no turtles. It was a nice beach, and the stars were pretty, but that wasn't really the point.
So we thought we'd give it another go in South Africa, with a company that said they could almost guarantee a sighting. And we came up trumps. Which was just as well, because it was a heck of a slog to get there. First, there was a four hour drive from St Lucia to a place near the Mozambican border, in the region of the Tsonga people, the last hour and a half of which involved bumping along a sandy track in a 4x4. Then, a six kilometre walk along Bangkhet beach (three there, and three back), with only the stars and the moon providing any illumination.
We thought we would be unlucky again. There were plenty of "double tracks" from the previous night, signifying that the turtles had already come on to the land, laid their eggs, and returned to the sea. "The sea's pretty rough tonight," said our
Befriending the dogs
Quite important, with hindsight... guide, Peter, "maybe they somehow knew that was coming, and all came on to the land last night."
But then, we got lucky: an elusive single track. The turtle in question - a loggerhead of about one metre in length, her back covered in sand and barnacles - had decided the sand here was too firm to nest, but we got to watch her gentle amble back to the sea.
And then we got really lucky: another loggerhead on her way out of the sea, and this one had decided to nest. We had to wait quite a while for her to build the nest, which involved digging a big hole in the sand, before we could go over and use torchlight and flash photography while she was in a "trance" laying her eggs. Her head and front flippers were buried in the sand, while her back end was over the nest, and she fired into it eggs shaped like little squashed ping pong balls, maybe 50 or so in total. Once she had finished - and it took a while as she was an old girl, perhaps 60 to 80 years of age - she used her back flippers to cover over the eggs, as if building a sandcastle, before trotting back to the sea. It was an incredible thing to see.
To really hit the jackpot, you would get to see the much rarer leatherback, which is huge - about three metres in length. We saw leatherback tracks on the way back to the 4x4, but sadly they were doubles - the lady had been and gone while we were watching the loggerhead.
We made it back to St Lucia at 3.15am, and you would think that would be the end of the day's drama - but not quite. We didn't notice, as we were driving along, that the streetlights were all out - St Lucia was experiencing one of the power cuts which are all too frequent and lengthy in this part of the world. In addition to the streetlights, this meant that the electronic gate to our guesthouse was not working, and nor was the door buzzer. There was no point shouting for help, given the long driveway leading to the house.
There was only one thing for it: I would have to scale the security gate. The top of this was lined with spikes, but I noticed (and in retrospect, this is something of a design flaw) that at one end they were shorter and less spiky than at the other. I decided to go for that end, and after much shoving and heaving and precarious balancing I got myself over, collapsing in a heap on the other side.
Cue ferocious barking from the guesthouse's alsatian and golden retriever, which came bounding over towards me. I quickly got to my feet, and started patting them on the head. "Nice doggies, you remember me, don't you," I said nervously. Thankfully they did, and I was spared a mauling.
Meanwhile Gemma was still in the street. She tried climbing the gate, but gashed her elbow, and we decided to look for alternative options - we knew there was a way of opening the gate manually, as this had been mentioned to us before. I said I would run down to the house and try and rouse someone.
This wasn't too effective. In the dark, it took me an age just to unlock the main door to the house, and in the pitch black inside it was all I could do to grope my way to the corridor where I knew our room to be, and dump our bags there. This was in the guest wing, and I suddenly realised I had no clue where the owners lived. There was no point shouting for help here - all this would do would wake up the other guests, who would be annoyed, and who wouldn't know how to open the gate anyway. I suspected the owners were somewhere beyond the other two locked internal security gates (I have mentioned before the South African security obsession), but was not sure where exactly.
So I decided to have a scout around outside for a ladder, but the best I could come up with was a chair. By now I had been gone for some time, and was conscious that I had left my wife in a darkened street, at 3.15 in the morning, in a country where everyone is terrified of crime, and in a town where the most dangerous animal in nature, the hippo, is known to roam the streets at night. I figured that maybe I should go and check up on her, offering the chair.
Gemma eschewed the chair and decided to have another go at the security fence. I suggested using the wall adjoining the neighbouring property as a halfway resting point, and that did the trick - she made it over.
All we had to do then was grope our way to, and then into, our locked room. This involved much thudding against walls and floors, and banging of paintings and plates attached to the walls, but we got there in the end (interestingly, none of this noise, or the barking of the dogs, woke anyone else up!). After we had retrieved our camping torches from our room, we had a quick shower - for there was plenty of sand and sweat from the beach to remove - and then made it to bed just in time for sunrise...
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Since the above, we've travelled on to Durban for an overnight stop, then passed through Port Elizabeth, and now we're staying for a few days in Graaff-Reinet - the last "new" stop of our trip. Graaff-Reinet is an old Boer frontier town, where the "light bites" section of the menu is headed by a slightly smaller rump steak and chips than on the main menu, and the "continental" breakfast includes fried bacon and scrambled eggs. I'll write again in a few days.
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