Parque Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. To be more precise, Parque Hawaii is about 7 km from the middle of nowhere. Monterrico is in the middle of nowhere. We decided to take the more reliable and much more expensive tourist shuttle to Monterrico instead of attempting the notorious chicken buses. This decision turned out to be a good one. A fellow turtle-saver at Parque Hawaii later told us it took him 7 different methods of locomotion to make it to this place. The most exciting is the rather rickety looking flat-bottomed ferry that loads several cars and large trucks before heading out across the swollen river. Some people who had done it before looked at the river. ''It definitely wasn't flowing this fast last time,'' they decided. We look wistfully up at the bridge which is 99 percent complete but probably has a couple of years before becoming operational.
Monterrico is dead, but luckily we find Malte, a German who is also headed up to Parque Hawaii, and who took the same shuttle to Monterrico from Antigua. We attempt to catch a bus but get the times wrong and everyone is insisting there isn't another bus...there isn't another bus for 3 hours...there isn't another bus for 2 hours...they have no idea really, it seems. Erin refused to get in with the drunk guy offering to taxi us. We finally hitch in the back of a pickup. At the center we meet Patrick, another German who has been here for three weeks and will stay a total of seven. He shows us to our upstairs dorms, the hatchery and the beach, the kitchen, and then walks us down to the store, about half hour away in nearby Hawaii. And so our week saving turtles begins.
It is a strange little commune in the middle of nowhere. Scott and Sarah, an English couple who have been here several years, run the center. Scott is very fond of talking with an Irish accent and likes pirates. There is a bathroom and cold (very refreshing) shower. Breakfast and lunch are handled individually, but pairs take turns cooking dinner for everyone. Generally the menu involves lots of pasta. The store is kind of limiting. During the day there are various odd jobs to do, but the main activity is lying in a hammock. It is at night that the volunteers here really get to work.
We meet Solange from France, Malte, Patrick, Jonas, Eike, and on our last day Hannes from Germany, Anna and Lucy from England, Neil from Canada, and Duncan from the Netherlands. They all stay for periods of times ranging from days to months. They all come together to keep the turtles coming back to this stretch of the beach. It is not an easy task.
The turtles come up on the beach to lay when the beach is dark and the time is right, usually in the hours before midnight and in the early morning. There can be up to 15-20 nests per night in the high season from September to October. But stretched out over the eight kilometers patrolled by the park and the hours of the night, it seems much less. The bad guys in this charade are the parlameros, or turtle-egg poachers. In comparison to the 10-20 volunteers Parque Hawaii can put into the field every night, there are up to 200. As you might imagine, the parlameros find the eggs more often than the volunteers do. A lot more often. After all, they do it for years and years, while the volunteers stay for only weeks or months.
The collecting of eggs was officially banned by the Guatemalan government several years ago, but was never enforced. A compromise created was that poachers give 20 percent of the eggs to the hatchery in exchange for a receipt that lets them sell to official buyers. This number is actually 10 percent. And a black market still exists where no donation receipt is required. Some parlameros are happy to give their donation, but others get angry. They sit out in the dark, damp sand for hours waiting for turtles, while we patrol the beaches to try and catch them for a donation. Sometimes they bring their catches to the Parque to get their donation receipt, which make it easier for us to just buy the whole nest.
The volunteers run nightly patrols starting around nine and going until 2. In the early morning a crawl count is performed to count the number of turtles that had laid eggs that night. Turtles are rarely seen first by the volunteers. In fact, they are rarely seen at all. During our patrols, we saw only one turtle, and her eggs had already been taken. We were left to watch her cover her no-longer-existent nest, measure her, and escort her back to the ocean. The Germans had better luck, each one except for Hannes seeing a turtle their first night on patrol. Although it is not common on our beach, on some beaches parlameros will wait for a turtle to lay her eggs, collect them for money, and then kill the turtle for even more money. Fishing trawlers were more dangerous to our turtles. Volunteers find dead ones washed ashore nearly every night. Volunteers generally walk about 4 km out, away from the park in the direction of either Monterrico or Hawaii, and 4 back, around 2 hours. This is harder than it sounds in the pitch dark on soft sand and in intense heat. On our night with the most patrols we had five pairs plus the crawl counts. Only two groups went out at the same time, one in each direction, so most of the time only half of the beach is being patrolled and only for a few hours out of the whole night.
But if the turtles do come up the poachers have generally got there first. Our job is to take the donations. If they wish to give it. Nevertheless, the idea is to foster communication and goodwill, so we wave and call cheerfully to our enemies as we pass in the darkness. It is a strange world. Sometimes they patrol the beach on quads and even trucks, making our work all but hopeless. Our one weapon is money. The eggs sell for about 15 quetzales ($2.10) a dozen. The center buys the eggs, when it has funds available, for the same price, turning the poachers into employees. This is the manner in which it receives the most eggs.
This month (one of the most active), the center will probably release about 16,000 hatchlings into the ocean. This seems like an enormous number until you realize that scientists estimate that only one out of every thousand turtle hatchlings survives predators, the dreaded fishing boats, nets, and poachers. 16 turtles doesn't seem as much somehow. And turtles will not return to any beach but their own. It is very easy to wipe out an entire beach in a couple years of collecting. Apparently the pacific Leatherback population has been effectively destroyed on our beach. The hatchery is the only thing keeping the turtles returning, and ironically, keeping the parlameros in business.
~Travis
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