Sea, surf and turtles

Just before heading back to Mexico city, Malu Lajous kindly invited us to her beach house in Puerto Escondido. Yes Mexico has other beach areas apart from Cancun ;). This is a beautifully well kept small fishing town on the west coast. The main beach, Zicatela, is very famous amongst surfers from all over the world, a big international competition takes place every year in November.

Turtles come and lay their eggs on the beach every year in August/September. They come out of the water at night and can lay up to 130 eggs in a single hole. If the eggs survive their many predators, 45 days later the eggs hatch and the small turtles still face similar predators in the sea. In the last decades there have been very big incentives to protect these turtles (http://fmcn.org/mares-y-costas/). We were lucky to see how this is done upfront. Two men walk up and down the beach 4-5 times per night and wait patiently to see if any turtles come to lay their eggs. If they see one, they then move the eggs to the protected area pictured here. Palm leaves cover each batch of eggs as this year it hasn't rained much and the sand can get very hot. Unfortunately some of the eggs, got cooked by the heat of the sand. The efforts to protect these amazing creatures have been successful, with many more turtles surviving. Once the baby turtle has been set free, it comes back to the same beach 10 years later to lay its own eggs. There are different species of turtles but some of them can way up to 1/2 a ton! Despite turtles having a very hard shell for most of their lives, I was surprised to see that their egg shell is actually very thin (almost transparent), soft and the exact same shape and size as a ping pong ball.