Parlamero. . . . thats an interesting one for the CV!!

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Having thoroughly brushed up on our Spanish we made our way to our next volunteer project, in Hawaii. Not the American Hawaii, but a very small village on the Pacific coast of Guatemala and one of the main nesting sites for the Olive Ridley Sea Turtle. This was of course accompanied by the obligatory super long bus journey but we made all our connections on the magic buses without any hitches so it was a smooth 11 hours.

We arrived at the project around midday and were shown round and briefly told what the volunteers did. The majority of the work was going to be at night so we were advised to get a bit of sleep after our travelling, having no problem with being told to sleep we duely obliged and woke up feeling refreshed with enough time to have a walk on the beach before dinner.

Dinner was generally when everyone woke up and got together, we all ate together and each day one person would cook dinner for all the volunteers (normally around 15 people). The local village shop did not stock a huge range or variety of food, particularly fresh veg, but it was amazing the number of different meals people could concoct with nearly the same ingredients! After dinner we would be allocated our shifts for patrolling the beach to look for nesting turtles. Generally these shifts could start anywhere from 8:30pm to 4:30am, people would walk in pairs covering a distance of roughly 8km each night.

For our first shift we walked at 4:30am, we walked with some of the more experienced volunteers so we could pick up some pointers for spotting turtles and also on how to deal with the local parlameros. A parlamero (or parlamera if you're a girl) is the name for someone who looks for turtle eggs on the beach, it comes from the local name for the Olive Ridley Turtle, which is Palama. As it was the middle of the night and there were no lights on the beach it was pitch black when we walked apart from a little light from the moon, which were actually quite good conditions for the turtles. The moon gave just enough light that you could distinguish fresh tracks on the beach, I forgot to mention the beach was black sand so by distinguish I mean its like being able to see a greasy finger smudge on the paintwork of black car and is actually easier without a torch.

We were both lucky to varying extents on our first night in that we both saw turtles, Tash saw two and I saw one. I had been walking for just over an hour with Sarah, who was working at the project for the whole season and had worked the previous two seasons as well. We had been walking for a little over an hour and had reached the 4km mark where we would turn round to go back. During this time we hadn't seen anything but about 10 minutes after turning round we spotted a black stripe running up the beach from the sea and sprinted over to investigate and found a turtle at the end of the stripe making its way up the beach! What was even better was that there was no-one else around so we had beaten the locals to it, which meant that we would get to keep the whole nest (more on that in a minute). The turtle was probably about halfway up the beach when we found her and she took about another 10 minutes to pick a spot for her nest. Whilst she was doing this Sarah and I drew a big circle in the sand round the tracks; this is how you claim the nest and let other parlameros know about it.

Our turtle took about 15 minutes to dig her nest, which is really impressive to watch - for something so immobile on land they have a surprising amount of dexterity and are very careful to keep all the dry sand out of the nest as its bad for the eggs. Once she'd finished digging she spends about another 15 minutes laying her eggs, when she started doing this Sarah showed me how to collect the eggs. Whilst she's still laying you pull the dry sand away behind her and then dig a little tunnel down to the nest chamber so you can take the eggs out as they're laid. The reason why you don't wait until they are finshed is because they nest is about 40cm underground and the turtles do a really good job of covering them over and hiding them! After Sarah had dug the tunnel into the nest I collected the eggs as they were being laid, its quite bizzare catching them as they come out in groups of 3 or 4. The eggs are about the size of a ping pong ball and are not hard like chickens eggs, which meant you could hold your hand in the nest and catch them as they fell without them breaking. I was kicking myself for not having my camera with me because by this time the sun was rising and the turtle had actually turned to face the sunrise to lay her eggs. Our nest was quite big, 128 eggs in all, which made for quite a weight to carry back the 4km to the park!

My first walk on the beach was with Becks, another long-term volunteer from down-under. We were not as lucky as Sarah and Kev, in that the two turtles we found nesting had already been discovered by Parlameros, so we only got 12 eggs from each nest as Kev will explain in a minute. It was quite sad to watch the Palamero at work as they are not always very considerate of the turtles, seeing them solely as a source of money and not a living creature. This means that instead of digging a tunnel to collect the eggs like Kev and Sarah did, they often just wait for the turtle to finish laying and then pick it up and move it to the side of its nest. This really disorientates the turtle who does not really know what is going on and she continues to try to cover her nest, even though she is no longer on top of it. A lot of the Parlameros do not really associate the eggs with new baby sea turtles and therefore they do not understand that if they continue to collect and sell all their eggs to be eaten that there will one day be no more eggs. The project is trying to work with the local community to help educate them about the sea turtles and to get them involved in conserving them.

Once you have found, bought or been donated some eggs it is important to re-bury them as soon as possible. The project has its own hatchery where we buried all our eggs. For the eggs to hatch succesfully it is important that the nest you bury them in closely replicates that the mummy sea turtle would make: So you use your hands like the turtles use their fins to dig a 40cm upside-down light bulb shaped hole, making sure no dry sand falls in as you dig. The eggs are all then carefully counted into the nest and it is covered back up for the next 50 days until little turtle heads start pushing their way up out of the sand. The nests all have a metal cage like surround to ensure none of the emerging babies get lost before being released back into the big open sea.

Coming back to the local parlameros. . . . Although technically we were all doing the same thing the end result for the turtles was rather different: the local parlameros were collecting the eggs to sell in the cities for people to eat. Apparently its supposed to be an aphrodisiac and unfortunately it has become a main source of income for the local people and is not technically illegal for them to do it. All the law requires people to do is give a donation of 20%!o(MISSING)f the eggs from each nest found to the project, but somehow this has been whittled down so people just give 12 eggs regardless of how big the nest might be. As you might be able to guess the law isn't very well enforced!! The parlameros sell to buyers in the villages who then transport the eggs to the cities and sell them. The eggs are bought by the dozen from the parlameros but the price that they get for a dozen is the price for one egg in the city so only a few people are really making a significant amount of money from the whole process.

The purpose of the project is obviously to ensure the continuing survival of the turtles and so all the eggs collected or bought are hatched and released into the sea. The project is also important because of changed environmental conditions, even if the poaching of eggs were illegal (and the law enforced) the amount of eggs that would actually hatch naturally from nests left on the beach would be significantly less, to the point of almost none at all. This is because the temperature of the sand is generally too high for the eggs to develop sucessfully but the most recent and more severe problem was caused by Hurricane Stan last year. The hurricane removed large chunks of the higher areas of the beach where the eggs would normally have been safe from the salt water, meaning that where the turtles are now laying their eggs is below the high tide mark so the nests would probably be destroyed by salt water if left to hatch naturally.

As well as walking the beach at night, Kev and I also got involved in other stuff to help the project during the day - we don't need sleep! On our second day we went to one of the local village schools with Ysabel who visits local village schools every day for a week to educate them on conservation issues related to their local area. It was an hour walk down the beach to their little classroom and when we arrived we discovered that school had actually been cancelled for the day and the teacher had forgotten to tell Ysabel the day before. However all the kids had still turned up especially for her lesson (bet that would not happen in England!) and were very intrigued by the visitors she had brought with her! We didn't really do much other than helping them with their colouring and practicing our spanish. It was nice to see how eager and excited the kids were about their lesson, shouting out the answers and tidying up before even being asked to!

We also became offical painters at the project and embarked on a massive sign painting project for the educational area. It took us most of two weeks in our spare time but everyone was pretty impressed with the end result. I also managed to get a lot of paint on every part of my body and every item of clothing! The project has pretty much no money to buy turtles eggs let alone luxury items such as wood to paint signs with or make things with, so a lot of the building/painting work is done with driftwood from the beach or other waste or naturally sourced materials. We had decided the communal kitchen needed a bit of organising so I was given the project of making a spice rack. It was a simple design of a scrap of wood, a few nails and a hand-woven coconut husk surround but it seemed to do the job.

Another one of our daytime activities instead of sleeping in was to go out fishing for food for the Caimens that the project also looks after. Mariachi and Dimitri, two local guys who were employed by the project took us out for the morning into the mangroves. After winding through little channels inbetween the massive roots of the trees looking at the little freshwater crabs running up and down the roots we arrived in a small lake that the guys decided would be a good fishing spot. We needed to fill two 5 gallon drums with fish so there was no casting of lines and sitting waiting for a bite. Mariachi fished using a weighted net that he threw whilst rather impressively balancing on the front of the boat. Within half an hour we had a boat full of fish and were heading back to the village. The fish needed to b sorted into big ones and small ones (for the big and small Caimens!) Tash got involved with the fish sorting and after chasing the first few slippery ones around the boat she soon developed her technique!

Apart from the turtle breeding program the project has also sucessfully bred and released Iguanas and has a resident male Iguana called Pancho who was a real poser and was loving all the attention when we went into his cage to say hello. Pancho's a vegetarian so we didn't need to go catch his food!

The project, as Kevin described earlier, was based in a very small village on the beachfront. The nearest 'town' did not have a bank. let alone a cash point. Cash points were a 4 hour journey away so we decided to manage on the money we had brought with us, to avoid a very long trip to get more money. After the first week of dormitory living, we decided to down grade our accomodation to sleeping in our hammock under a rancho (palm-leaf shelter) to save money and make our visit last longer. It was actually quite enjoyable swinging to sleep in the sea air but it took us a few attempts to work out the best sleeping positions. The other problem was that the sun seemed to rise and hit Kev's face very early in the morning so we did not really ever lie in. Taking advantage of the sun waking us so early we also started doing yoga on the beach in the morning, followed by a refreshing swim! You could not actually really swim in the sea as the rip currents and waves were so strong it was hard just to stay upright but we still had a good old splash about in the shallows.

After finding turtles on our first night we saw absolutely nothing for the next four nights! But that was generally the way it went for everybody, with only around 15 to 20 turtles coming up on a good night in an 8km stretch of beach it was really a question of being in the right place at the right time and some of the nights there were as few as only 2 or 3. Because the turtles generally liked the kind of weather people and predators don't like we walked in some quite varying conditions! Generally we were quite lucky and it was dry when we walked but being as it was rainy season we did get caught out in the rain and on a couple of occasions in thunder storms as well! One particular evening we stood under our rancho looking up an down the beach watching a storm closing in and were just about to brave it and go out when we saw lightning strike the beach somewhere between 8 and 10km up the beach and though better of it. We later found out that the lightening we had seen had actually struck the house where some of the other volunteers from the project had been living!

The one weather factor that most effects the turtles coming out of the sea is the wind: they really like it when its windy, so much so that they will even come up during the day instead of at night if its windy enough. One afternoon the wind did pick up and so just on the off chance we thought we'd put in a few extra kilometers to see if we could find anything. We obviously weren't the only people with this idea as it seemed that every 10m there was another person sitting on the beach watching the surf but we carried on walking all the same. Our first walk we didn't find anything but went out later in the afternoon and found a nesting turtle, annoyingly we had probably walked past about 20 minutes prior to her coming out and she had come out of the sea right infront of an opportunist family who were just sitting on the beach. Very annoying. On the plus side the family agreed to sell the nest to the park so we still got the eggs, which is the most important thing!

One of the best parts of our jobs was releasnig the baby hatchlings. They generally hatched from early evening to early morning throughout the night. So every time you left and returned from your walk you would check the hatchery to see if any of the nests had little heads popping slowly out of the sand or alternatively a cage full of babies trying to climb out. Before releasing each nest of baby turtles, 'tortugitas', we had to carefully measure and weigh a sample of ten for data collection purposes. The little tortugitas were small enough to fit in your hand and you had to carefully hold their head down with your finger whilst you measured them. It was surprisingly difficult though because they were super strong and would try to use their fins to wriggle out of your grasp. Needless to say they were very cute and it was a joy to release them back into the ocean. The tortugitas will naturally waddle (actually they do a bit of sprint then stop to catch their breath then carry on) for the sea when you release them onto the sand as it is the brightest thing on the beach; on dark nights we had to guide them to the sea with our torch though. It is important not to help them to the sea as this first walk imprints into their memory for nesting purposes later on, as they return to the same beach to nest. Some of them were a bit slow so we were sometimes waiting quite a while, but eventually they all made it safely to sea.

Over the course of the second week we did our regular 8km walk each evening (except for one particularly dark night where we missed the marker and ended up walking 12km!) and collected a few more donations and released loads of tortugitas, which was all really cool but. . . . Tash still had not found a nest of her own (and we had not found one since we had been walking together). Then on our second to last night we finally found one! After a while your eyes start playing tricks on you so logs and even shadows on the sand all look like turtles. Some even look like their moving! So after running up to lots of logs and being disappointed we had to look twice when we actually saw one. We had arrived at the perfect time as she had literally just come out of the sea and started to make her way up the beach. After frantically drawing a circle round the tracks, and then having to do it again when the sea washed the first one away we waited for the turtle to finish digging her nest and start laying. I dug the tunnel down into the nest and Tash collected the eggs. The first few eggs that fell into my hand made me jump but then I got used to the goop and warm eggs falling into my outstreched hand every minute or so. You could kind of hear the mummy turtle sighing between each push but she did very well and managed to pop out 91 eggs for us to take back and safely hatch for her. When you burry each nest it is given a number so we will be checking how nests 246 and 247 (our nest was split into two smaller ones) are getting on very shortly.

SPONSOR A NEST OF BABY TURTLES

During the course of this blog you might have noticed that we mentioned the project buying eggs. The project acts as a buyer in the same way as the people that transport the eggs to the city for people to eat and so as not to create any tension between the local community and the project they have to pay the going rate for eggs. The money for this comes solely from donations from visitors to the park, external donations and from volunteers who end up using their own money to buy nests (we ended up buying 3 nests ourselves). The project has set up a website where people can sponsor a nest; with 100%!o(MISSING)f the money going directly into the hands of the volunteers to go out on the beach at night to buy as many nests as possible. Whilst we were there the price being paid for eggs was 15Q per dozen with the average nest being around 100 eggs (or just over 8 dozen). This makes a nest about 120Q to buy. So how much is 120Q? It's about £8.30, so for the price of that round for 3 people in the pub or for less than the cost of two packs of fags for all you smokers you could give 100 baby turtles the chance to make it to sea rather than becoming a gormet snack. The website is www.sponsoranest.com, you can make donations by emailing them to say how many nests you would like to buy and they then send you a Paypal invoice (you can pay with a credit or debit card as well). Its well worth checking out the website just for all the really cool photos in the gallery of all the turtles and tortugitas. If you want to know more about the ARCAS project where we worked their website is www.arcasguatemala.com. We also have loads more information about the work we did and the work the project does that we can send if any of you eager events organisers or teachers fancy doing a fundraiser.

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Photos

Time for work
Sunset was when everything kicked off!

Mummy Turtle
The locals say that the mummies always look like they're crying because they're leaving their babies behind.

Parque Hawaii
This is the view up to the beach entrance to the park (where we stopped to watch the lightening storm)

Working in the hatchery
....Tash excavating a nest that had hatched, she found a little survivor who hadn't dug his way out and took him down to the sea.

The Olive Ridley
The name comes from the colour of their shells.

Our private beach!!
Generally the only other people were on the beach at night, and then there were the turtles of course!!

I want to be a tree
Perfecting our yoga poses on the beach; I think I'd been doing some lying down poses before this picture!!

Mariachi fishing
He made it look so easy!

So is that a big one or a small one?!
Tash getting involved with the fish sorting process.

Scott and Pancho
Scott and Pancho had a "special" relationship!!

Pancho
Pancho was a bit of a poser!

Baby hatchlings
Complete with mini tracks!

Baby hatchlings
Nearly made it to sea!!

Baby hatchlings
Kev's footprint proved to be no problem for this hatchling.

Working in the hatchery
There was always something that needed doing.....

Our private beach!!
Ben enjoying the beach, slightly less crowded than his local beach at Bournemouth!

Comments

[marie]

my jaw is unable to meet itself again
WOW (said really loud and lancastrian-ly), i've learnt loads off this blog.. i am also slightly amazed that in such a natural environment you managed to plug in and send a blog! I love the pics - you have a cute one of a smily dog - soz - i should make more of a fuss about the sunsets etc!! Karl is jealous you saw buena vista social club - we told loads of people!! Take care, lots of love Marie x

[Kev and Tash]

RE: my jaw is unable to meet itself again
Hi guys, that cute dog is called´ashtray`(in spanish) - poor dog! Glad we are educating you, will try to keep up the ´intellectual` standard of our blogs!!! Buena Vista Social Club were cool, not sure how many of the band were from the original band line up, but at least one was we believe? They were all getting on a bit though but could still get everyone up dancing! Saw another nicaraguan band in Leon, not sure if they are famous, but they were pretty cool and sold their music genre as national, revolutionary and traditional! Maybe seems a bizarre mix but it was good.... sorry can´t remember their name though!

[Kev and Tash]

Turtles...
Hello! That´s really cool that you´re going to sponsor a nest; the money will definitely be appreciated at the project. We´ve been telling paul about how useful all his stuff has been, especially the dry bag! I´m off to get some more hammock time now! Bye!!

[Gem]

I love them!!!!!
Hiya, yes... I am eventually trawling through ur blog entries!!!! The turtles are fab, i love them esp. the babies!!!! and very jealous that ur sleeping in a hammock! very impressed with ur spice rack tash!

[Kev and Tash]

Hello Sis!
I noted that you had eventually subscribed to receive updates on our blogs! Didn´t know whether that meant you had actually read them though, so congratualtions! It must have taken you ages! Love you Tash x

[Scott & Sarah]

Missing you loads
Wow guys what a fantastic blog, reminds us of home and we only left yesterday. Thanks for the great plug for the project, we'll set a link from the website so new or interested volunteers can read about your wonderful experience. Thanks so much for volunteering with us, we miss you loads, hope life has been treating you fantastic. Hope to meet up with you guys soon, X X X

[Kev and Tash]

Hello parlamero professionals!
Hi guys, nice to hear from you - glad you liked the blog. We always mention the project to people as much as possible as we had a really good time in Hawaii. Wish we could have stayed longer. My mum´s friend´s daughter came to the project to volunteer about a month or so ago - can´t remember her name at the moment but she came through a gap year type company I think. Life is cool. Have just finished a 3 month stint volunteering at Ecolodge in Andes of Ecuador and are now heading south to Peru. Take care and send our love to the turtles when you go back next!!