A long wait for the girls

After a short drive through never ending fields of sugarcane we arrive at Mon Repos, a 1.5 km strip of beach where the female loggerhead sea turtles return to every 3 to 4 years, to bury their eggs in the sand. The ranger station just behind the dunes provide a nightly tour so you can see these moving rocks come out of the water, slowly and awkwardly move to the dunes, start digging their egg chamber and start pooping out around 120 eggs each lay. They get very disturbed from noises and especially light, until they have laid around twenty eggs. Then they are calm and the rangers and volunteers can do their research tasks and invite the visitors to stand around the turtle in a big circle.
We sign up for the tour and visit first the interesting exhibit in the station. Then the long wait begins, entertained by movies about the turtles and the research projects on them. As the ranger tells us, these girls live in the wild and come up on their own time; with no guaranties. We sit and wait and almost give up on getting lucky this evening as we notice some excitement in the exhibit hall. Yes, a turtle is coming on shore and so many have gone already so now the whole group can go to the beach. The rumour goes, it's a very special kind, a flat back. But before we get to the beach we hear that she has been disturbed and returned to the ocean.
Another wait sitting quietly high up in the dunes now, we are lucky. Another turtle moves our way, a loggerhead this time. We wait some more till she's busy with her eggs. While we are standing around our turtle two more are coming up on either side of us. So we have to be really quiet now. How exciting!
And the long wait get an extra reward. Our turtle has been a bit lazy and laid her eggs under the high water line. Here the eggs can't survive. Normally the rangers wouldn't intervene, but now the loggerhead is on the edge of extinction, they do as much as they can to keep the turtles survival. So a volunteer is carving out another chamber higher up in the dunes and we get to carry all 138 eggs to this new save place. Maybe one of these eggs will be the one that makes out of 1000 to mature. I would love to come back to see the hatch ling crawl out of the sand and make a run for their little lives to the ocean. Must quite a sight. But this experience was magical also, helped by the full moon coming up spectacularly during our wait in the dunes.