Travelling Hopefully - A Brief Chelonian Interlude

Lest you think that my time at the beach resort was a non stop idyll of sunbaking, drinking inaccurately named cocktails and bitching about the service I would like to point out that I also took the opportunity to pester sea creatures.

There were two options for this, one could either go snorkeling or one could visit a turtle sanctuary.  I decided on the turtles which turned out to be a good choice as the snorkelers apparently had to face serried ranks of jellyfish outraged at the invasion of their domain.  I went swimming with turtles which involved a visit to a modest sized lagoon with subterranean access to the sea which kept the water clean and salty.  This was ideal for sea turtles which was good as they had little input into their presence.

Officially the place was a sort of sea turtle hospital.  It's illegal to kill them but naturally they get caught in fishing nets and when this happens the fishermen bring them to this place who pays them for the turtles and then nurses the turtles back to health before releasing them back into the ocean.

That, as I say, is the official story.  I have to admit that the turtles we saw all looked pretty damned robust and of course the centre gets its money to buy turtles from fishermen by charging tourists to come and swim with them.  We were told that healthy batches of turtles are released into the sea twice a year.  There appeared to be no figures for how many might have crawled (very slowly) under the wire.

Humans are not really designed to move in three dimensions.  Back and forward and side to side are relatively easy but up and down is not something we are good at (unless we're Masai).  The preceding couple of sentences are intended to explain my sudden shock at swimming in the lagoon and finding myself surrounded, in a three dimensional sense, by turtles.  Some of them really quite large.  What made it even odder (although somewhat reassuring) was the total lack of interest the turtles had in me.  They swam over me, under me, around me and on occasion into me with batting an eyelid.  Possibly this is because turtles don't have eyelids, I must check that out.

We were assured that the turtles only ate seaweed and not, for example, interfering tourists.  Large clumps of the seaweed in question were tossed into the lagoon to create a sort of armour plated vegan feeding frenzy.  One or two of us did get minor nips.  Apparently we looked a little too much like seaweed.

PS, I've just checked google.  Apparently sea turtles do have eyelids.