Late at night, when the tide is exactly right, they come ashore. In the pitch black night they drag their enormous bodies as far away from the ocean as possible. And then they dig. When the little hole they make with their hind-flippers eventually reaches a meter's deep, they let them fall. After carefully covering the pile of little pingpong balls with sand and erasing their tracks they heave themselves back home, back into the rushing water.
They'll find their way back to her and her kind. After two months and five days the little ones reach the surface of the hot sandy beach. Their instinct tells them to run. Reach the big white beacons at the end of the waves as soon as you can. Before it's too late. Run, and try not to look back. If you run fast enough, then maybe, you'll taste the ocean. Then you swim for four days and four nights straight to reach your kind. That's if you are fortunate enough to reach them without being eaten by birds or fish or get killed by humans. Only one out of a thousand will live.
Seeing a Leatherback turtle dumping 100 pingpong balls in a hole on a beach in Suriname in the middle of the night is definitely one of the more impressive experiences in my life. Yesterday night Wilbert and me were there, sitting in the sand next to this 50-80 year old female Leatherback making sure her species has a bigger chance of survival. As soon as they start digging they are in such a trance that you can come up extremely close to see what they're doing.
Matapica is one of the beaches on the northern shores of South-America that is protected by StiNaSu (Stichting Natuurbehoud Suriname). You can spend the night at this beach, after spending an hour and a half in the maze of mangrove trees they call 'zwamp' here. It is a remote place. The facilties are only the bare essentials. A house for the StiNaSu 'guard', a hut for visitors and a couple of trees to hang your hammock from.
Wilbert and I booked our trip with a family that lives at the start of the zwamps and has a couple of fishing boats. To earn some extra money the man of the house brings all those who are interested to the beach and camps out with them. He is a very kind man, fortunately knows his way around a zwamp and is very skilled in frying food. Every two hours he fried us something (chicken and chips for dinner, bananas for breakfast, kroketjes for whenever) or added something to the never ending pile of snacks containing crisps, cookies, chocolate, crackers, etc, next to the pile of bottles containing soda, juice, beer and Surinamese rum. Bringing three pallets of little bottles of drinking water seemed a bit too much at first, but after taking hour-long walk after hour-long walk on the beach in search for turtles the pallets seemed to get smaller and smaller.
We found three baby turtles that had gotten lost from their nests and had taken a wrong turn in their run to the sea. One tiny Leatherback and two baby green turtles. We showed them the way to the water and watched them race eachother. Awww...
Unfortunately the bigger turtles didn't show themselves on the first day. We saw their tracks, empty eggshells and little mounds betraying their earlier presence, but the chances of taking a picture of an adult leaterback by day were slimming by the end of the day. At night we would go out to look for them again, but picture-taking is out of the question then.
At least, that was what we were told. The five dutch girls that came with us on the trip figured that if we 'treat' the StiNaSu guide to enough of our rum, the rules might prove to be a bit more bendable. Unfortunately the only consequence of having an intoxicated guide was that he was no longer able to tell us anything about turtles, or shine his flashlight (the only one allowed) straight at them.
But at least we saw them! Four of them, one in all the different stages. The first one was already camouflaging her nest, the next was covering hers up with sand and the third had just started digging. We watched her dig her nest with her flippers and we saw her dropping her little white eggs in it. It was amazing. You think you can image an animal of 1,5 to 2 metres long crawling out of the sea and digging a hole, but the reality is far more impressive. They're huge, and the one thing I hadn't thought of is that they have to breathe. Ofcourse they have to breathe, but I hadn't realized that we would hear it. You can actually hear that huge animal that seems to have come out of prehistory BREATHE. It snorts, grunts and sighs while performing this tedious task of digging a hole at your behind with little fins you cannot see. It was impressive. We hadn't even expected to see the last one. She was just clambering up the beach to lay her eggs straight in front of the entrance to our little camp.
Sleeping in a hammock was our next adventure, but we passed with flying colours. Even with the drunk StiNaSu guy that kept trying to talk to us. Our night was good, but short. We were back at the beach at 6am, hoping to catch another one at daylight. We saw a lot of fresh trails, but no turtles.
After practically giving up (and having about 3 more meals) we tried one last time at half past one in the afternoon. Most of the group were ahead of Wilbert and me, out of sight already when Wilbert turned around and saw a big black shiny thing moving slowly up the beach. HOORAY! After waving ridiculously (zwaaien met je onderbroek, zwaaien met je hemd) at the others she unfortunatele went back into the ocean, apparently because she wanted to go further up the beach but couldn't. They told us she would come back in some time, downstream to find a better place. But still, we were able to take some pictures from up close when she was on her way down again. What an impressive creature.
All of our pictures can be found here:
We also shot some videos, I'll post those on here later.
"Aw, it's awesome, Jellyman. Little dudes are just eggs, leave 'em on the beach to hatch, then coo-coo-ca-choo, they find their way back to the big 'ol blue."
- From Finding Nemo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjtcbO3NqlE)
