After three and a half weeks, I finally packed up and left Antigua. Antigua is one of those places that is difficult to leave. It is so beautiful and one can always make excuses for why one needs to stay longer. I had some motivation to leave because I had made agreements to volunteer for a week at a Tortuga, (Sea Turtle) hatchery. It sounded like a fun idea. I have always loved sea turtles, and I thought it would be great if I could do my part to help them to survive. I knew from experience in Mexico that the eggs are highly prized by local populations and that activists and volunteers and necessary in order to sustain the populations. Turtles are also fun to look at and an important part of the marine ecosystem. So when I read about the work being done at the hatchery at Parque de Hawaii on the Pacific coast of Guatemala, I decided to give it a try. The Parque de Hawaii is about a two hour drive, (3 buses and one ferry ride) from Antigua. I arrived on a Wednesday in the late afternoon. The park director was on his way out when I arrived, so I was on my own to acquaint myself with my new surroundings. Immediately I was stuck by the fact that no one was doing any actual work. There were a total of 24 volunteers at the premises and not one person was doing anything meaningful. Some were in hammocks; some were sitting at the kitchen table talking. Some were at the beach. Some were reading. But everyone was basically doing nothing and no one at first seemed to be very interested in my presence. After a few minutes, I noticed something exceptional. Nearly all of the "volunteers" were women. All told, there were only 5 men at the park and 19 women! Here is the extraordinary part: nearly all of the Women were gorgeous. Some were drop dead gorgeous and others were just good looking, but all were beautiful and all very young. The vast majority of the volunteers were German students on a gap year after University. There was also two British nationals, one other American, and the park director, who was Guatemalan. After studying Spanish for three weeks, I was disappointed to learn that German was the language of choice at this place.
The group was planning a party for the night of my arrival, because one of the volunteers was leaving, (incidentally, it was one Of. the 5 men that was leaving). So after a group dinner, people began to drink - heavily. During dinner, the other volunteers began to notice me, (I noticed that the volunteers tend to suffer from a kind Of. lethargic sun stroke during the day, only to reemerge to consciousness around dinner time). The men were cordial enough, but it was the Women who were very excited by my presence. I quickly inferred that the few eligible men had been spoken for and this left an influx of 14 beautiful Women that were, as it were, available. During the evening, I was gradually approached by every single one of them. Some were coy, others taking a more direct approach, ("One week should be enough time for us to get to know each other") it was also amusing because all of the girls seemed to be engaging in a competition to see who could wear the least cloths. There were a lot of moskitos at night in the park, but all of the girls in a block refused to wear pants, preferring to complain about their mosquito bites and thus drawing attention to their flesh. To the dismay of the many German women, I retired early deciding that their could be no winners in a situation like this.
The next day, I was able to do a little work on the hatchery. The turtle eggs are buried in the sand about 10 meters from the edge of the beach. They hatch in groups of roughly 30-40 baby turtles at a time. They emerge from their nest in the sand and come up to a wire cage anxiously trying to make for the sea. After they hatch, we count them, measure and weigh them. We put them into a great bucket, and then carry them to the beach. Then we release them in a block. Often, we release more than one nest and their are more than 80 Tortugas scrambling across the beach at the same time. It is extraordinary because they always instinctively know in which direction the sea is. Our main job is to make sure that the locals yield for them as they walk by the beach. The babies are cute and was fun to hold them in my hand with their hard shells and squirming bodies.
The problem is that there is essentially no other work to do in the place. The only other thing you can do is walk the beach hoping to find turtles in the act of laying eggs so we can claim them. The problem with this is that for some strange reason, collecting Tortuga eggs in actually legal in Guatemala. For this reason, there are literally hundreds of people out on the beach at night, watching for Tortugas. Several times, we were able to find the tracks in the sand that led us to Tortuga holes in the sand with the depleted eggs. Even though there were more than 20 volunteers, there were many more local egg thieves. On any given night, you can expect to see 50 or more people on the beach, all searching for Tortuga eggs. I got into a few arguments with some of the locals, especially the Tortuga sales brokers, (people that buy Tortuga eggs directly from the people that find them) but it was to no avail. If the government cannot make egg collection illegal, there is certainly little that one person can do to convince them that this practice is unsustainable. The only bright spot in all this is that the government says that they have to donate 20% of the found eggs to a Tortuga hatchery like ours. Unfortunately, most of the found eggs went unreported and those that did donate eggs were consistently less than 20%. After a few days, I came to the conclusion that what we were really doing was keeping the egg collectors in business by helping them to sustain the populations to some extent. We were not making the change that I had hoped for, and the German girls were apparently much more interested in sex and gossip then anything else. After two days of mostly just sitting around, I decided that it was time for me to move on. All ready, several of the girls were beginning to stake their claims on me. Everyone was scandalized that I left so suddenly, but I had to go because it was the right thing to do. It was the Oracle at Delphi that said "Know Thyself". I knew full well that if I were to stay for a week, it would be a matter of time before I would get myself in trouble with one or more of the beautiful and very young women there. I boarded a local bus in the late morning for the El Salvador border.
