Blogs from Hawaii, Pacific Coast, Guatemala, Central America Caribbean

PLANO Y CALIENTE A febrile landscape spreading out sweating under broiler flame you drop down descending in this chromed and rainbowed Blue Bird once yellow as a canary a parrot drop down gears whining muffler full throated rumbling the distance seen from these mountain hips stretches hazed as sea fog Hiroshima plumes rising there and there and there again the paper leaf of the cane is set to the match to sweeten before it is crushed the liquor hummingbird nectar the dust rises behind tractor wheels dust dust forever dust from trailer wheels spilling over with heaped tangled cane cocoa brown the sun descending through this gauze of smoke light bending the sun's message a blood orange sliced open at its perfect equator a sacrifice crazy crimson flesh now touching treetops sun so perfectly round a ... read more

We arrived to the turtle project in Hawaii (in Guatemala, not in US!) on the 31st and stayed there two nights for ¨training¨. It is Olive Ridley turtle season but they also get some Leatherbacks during their season. The first night there, there was a nest of turtle hatchlings in the hatchery which we had to measure their lengths, record and then release the turtles on the beach by the ocean. They were so small, they fit in the palm of your hand, and surprisingly quite strong flippers. Typically once they hatch, they have a day or two to start eating in the ocean so we release them right away. We had to wait until every little hatchling made it to the ocean and a few were a bit slower than the others working out where ... read more

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 ... read more