First Day Luck

New & Improved - with pictures!

 I am finally in El Rosario, a very small fishing villages located in a string of very small fishing villages along the southern Pacific coast of Guatemala. The closest Google Earth-able town is Monterrico or perhaps Hawaii. Monterrico is a small, fairly touristy beach town and Hawaii is where most of the sea turtle people go to volunteer.

My shuttle to Monterrico picked me up at my doorstep in Antigua at 8:30 and I chatted a little with some other travelers (from Houston, Michigan, and the UK) who were also headed to the coast, though only for a few days. The heat increased substantially along the way. The coast is hot.

The shuttle driver dropped me off with my embarrassing amount of stuff on a street at the edge of town where the micro bus to the pueblos comes by. I waited for about two hours, sitting under a ficus tree at the edge of a field teeming with dragonflies across from Tienda La Esperanza and a smaller hardware store.

And now I’m here! I made it! I meant to be here a month ago or more, but now I am here and the adventure has already begun. I only hope that my internet is strong enough to post this stuff; if you want to see pictures, please submit your prayers to the Tigo modem gods.

This morning I got up at 6:00 and waited for Trent, the Peace Corps volunteer from Iowa (if I remember correctly) who has been living here for the past 7 months and has about a year and a half still to go. He is thinking of purchasing a horse.

He and Benjamin and I headed out to check on the turtle hatchery (tortugario). Benjamin is a local kid who has been helping out and now working in the turtle hatchery since he was quite young. I live with his family here. He is also a fisherman.

When we arrived at the tortugario we found two nests had hatched and some of the nestlings had escaped the wire nets, so we couldn’t count exactly how many had hatched from each nest. Trent was surprised, he had never seen so many baby turtles at a time. We scooped them up several at a time and plopped them into a bucket, carried them to about 10 feet from the farthest-reaching wave and set them down, facing the sea. We stood and watched until they had all disappeared into the surf. Fifty-four olive ridley sea turtlings.

Benjamin left Trent and I, and we continued on down the beach to perform crawl counts: counting the visible turtle tracks from the night before. Trent told me that the turtles had been coming up at low tide, which made it hard to find tracks the next morning after high tide had washed most of the evidence away.

We did find one set of tracks. Trent pointed them out to me: they look like a unicycle with a tractor tire came up out of the ocean. We were following the tracks with our eyes as they crossed the beach, and when we reached the end we realized the owner of the tracks was still around.

Trent’s immediate assumption was that the turtle was sick - they rarely come up to lay eggs during the day, and it was at least 8:00 by that time. She also wasn’t moving at first. We sat behind her so as not to scare her and watched her for a while, then she started swishing her fins around and tilting her whole body side to side, resembling some sort of dancing mushroom.

Trent wasn’t sure if she had laid eggs, would lay eggs, or was simply confused. After about 20 minutes she packed up and left, with some difficulty.

Trent and I started digging up the area she had been sitting on. He couldn’t identify a definite hole by poking the sand with a stick to feel where it’s been loosened, so we dug all over. When nothing turned up, we assumed she hadn’t laid any eggs after all, filled everything back in, and continued on the end of the beach.

We went up to the hot, sandy road and headed back, stopping for a few minutes at a home where a man named Chepe happened to be (He is actually my neighbor). Chepe is an expert ‘parlamero’ - turtle egg finder. He listened to our story and accompanied us back to where we had encountered the parlama.

He started out by poking around with a stick, but we had dug up and disturbed most of the sand anyway. He inspected the area and poked a few times more at an area slightly above where we had been digging and he put his stick down and started digging himself. And lo, a nest of turtle eggs!

The nest was apparently on the larger side. We carried the eggs back in a t-shirt. It was settled that Chepe would receive 50% of what the eggs would be worth on the market, and we took all of the eggs to the hatchery to be reburied.

When we arrived at the hatchery, 6 more baby turtles had hatched and were trying desperately to escape their wire net. Two other nests look like they will hatch soon: the sand on top is caving in. We buried the nest in four different holes - about 130 eggs in all!

So today was an excellent first day. Trent and Benjamin told me I must be ‘pura suerte’, because that sort of thing doesn’t happen most of the time. Hopefully I can keep it happening…

Remember that you can donate about $20 and purchase another whole nest to pack into the hatchery! Talk to my parents about it, or send me an email, or whatever.