To the Ocean

Another beautiful day, I wrote in 2013, quoting Christine in whose B&B I stayed on my first visit to Costa Rica in January that year. And it’s true: even if the day doesn’t start out as promising, with clouds and steely-purple hues in the sky, any day in Costa Rica just has this knack for turning out beautiful. My second visit, in November last year, confirmed it even though it was a different season: no grimness stays too long, no rain lingers – sooner or later, the sun comes out and fiercely blesses the shimmering world of the ocean and the beach rimmed with tall-trunk coconut palm trees. The weather on the Pacific coast has a mind of its own: it is consistently changeable and fully unpredictable but you can count on your daily sunshine.

This time I was doing things differently – I was there to stay in one spot and not travel around. From the moment the bus from San Jose dropped me off at Los Delfines (I was the only one to get off there) to the moment I boarded the same bus going back to San Jose two weeks later, I never left Tambor Bay on Nicoya Peninsula, and during those two weeks, this little corner was my entire world, in which, I think, I could have stayed. And many do. Los Delfines in particular is made up primarily of Americans and Canadians who bought houses there; those who still work spend their summers here, and the retired ones often live here full time. It’s attractive because it offers the most beautiful golf course I have ever seen, regularly frequented by iguanas, deer, armadillos, caimans, scarlet macaws and a plethora of other birds and creatures. It’s also smack in the middle of a beach one can only dream of, a beach which in my mind is The Beach, not unlike the Mediterranean Sea being The Sea for me. Something that instantly and immediately permeates you from head to toe, and settles in naturally, like a part of you that has always been there, and it feels like you. The beach is six kilometers long and constitutes the majority of what is Ballena Bay, wedged between the villages of Pochote on the northern tip and Tambor on the southern tip.

Tambor beach

What brought me here is not golf. I’ve only once swung the golf club, when a friend took me to a driving range -- the phrase I at first completely misunderstood for something to do with cars -- just to give me some sense of what hitting the ball (or trying to) felt like. When and where I was growing up, golf was simply not on our horizon of possibilities, and was scoffed at or ignored as something boring and/or pretentious. For Eastern Europeans, golf was perhaps a little too western, too “capitalist.” And even here at Los Delfines, despite the fact that I was fascinated by the grounds, and that I got to know a few of the Canadians and Americans who were regulars and very nice people, there was something about that golf “thing” that still left me cold and even uneasy. Perhaps it was “The Golf and Country Club” label that made me wary, or the sight of locals maintaining the land and filling the guard posts that brought back to mind many graduate seminars about the effects of colonialism. Faced with golf and local manual labour, some quasi-instinctive ideology from my early life kicks in and fidgets uneasily even if I try to keep it still, and it might just forever be there. 

A fraction of Los Delfines golf course

What brought me here were turtles, and the desire to get up close and personal with nature. A couple of months before I arrived, I spent days browsing through lists of conservation NGO’s all over the world, realizing there are so many: an uplifting thought, perhaps - if nothing else, because it suggests the increasing awareness of the urgency to act. I made my shortlist, contacted a few places, and in fact, the first one that drew my attention was the one that gave me the best “vibes:” those ethereal and unverifiable signals that we are sometimes – always, maybe – on the alert for, can’t be called anything else. The organization was called Tambor Bay Turtles, and it was in the middle of what looked like nothing, in the westerly nook of Costa Rica. I checked the map, and somehow knew this was the place. And it was. As I have thought many times after, I probably couldn’t have picked much better. A small organization, conceived and led by people who truly care, in a paradisiac spot, TBT was just what I was hoping for. All such organizations depend on private and public funding, and the participation fee the volunteers have to pay – but each cent was worth it.

Nicoya Peninsula is red-marked, with Ballena Bay mid-way down the easterly edge of the Peninsula

Digression: when I started writing, I had an image in my mind which was to be the centre-piece, or a kind of a pièce de résistance in this text. I first envisioned it as a poem, or a prose vignette with a poetic ring maybe. Now, as I keep going, and am nowhere near that image yet, this is turning into something else – a travelogue/documentary/memoir of sorts – and with all this prefacing and meandering, it will take a while to get to that initial image. But once I get there, it’ll be embedded in a solid little world.

My volunteering experience only started last year, in any real sense of the word. And for someone who, as a teacher, is used to being over-the-top ready, steadily authoritative, and almost entirely self-sufficient in her work, the position of the most basic volunteer is not the easiest one, especially if one ventures into something one knows nothing about. The short stint in a vet hospital in Kitchener while I was visiting friends, and a weekly volunteering on the feeds and clean-ups at a horse rescue throughout the summer just outside of Montreal, both meant accepting and dealing with the humbling post of someone who needs directions, corrections, explanations; someone who depends on others; someone who, at least in the beginning, must wait around until shown what to do and how to do it. In short, it is the position of someone who must inevitably feel like a child again – a strange feeling, which in our adulthood we seem to avoid like the plague.

Those two first forays into the volunteering world showed me that, yes, it was very unlike my usual operating mode, but that there was something very liberating about it, despite some awkwardness too. Being off the familiar turf made me fully open and alert to even the smallest things, and I was not expected (by others or by myself) to react out of my standard professional role. It felt, in a way, like landing freshly on the planet and sizing everything up for the first time. (The stiff euthanized puppy on top of the freezer in the back room of the Kitchener vet hospital, or Zeph’s hard-to-muck liquid poop at the horse rescue are just two such firsts). So by the time I had discovered Tambor Bay Turtles, I was ready – not necessarily for any one particular discovery or experience, but for this heightened state of breaking out of the pre-established behaviour, for this constant buzz of newness with its potential for humbleness and for learning.

The TBT crew is minuscule, and it’s partly that aspect of it which is impressive: you get to see clearly how just a couple of people can start “something,” which then takes off and gains exponential momentum. Ron, the founder, is a retired Canadian business manager, who has been vacationing in Costa Rica for a couple of decades, and who took interest in Olive Ridley turtles a few years ago. Olive Ridleys, one of the seven giant sea turtle species, still come in droves during the “arribadas” from June to December, to lay eggs on the beaches where they have been doing it from time immemorial. When Ron talked with the locals about it, it was suggested that there were fewer of them lately, so he got the permission from the Costa Rican government to carry out a research, which then confirmed that the turtle visits on the Tambor Beach have been dropping, mostly due to human and animal predation that has increased in the recent years. Ron is hard to describe, but a “visionary softy” might just do it. A tall and handy man, with a jovial personality and the “people talent,” he’s always on the lookout for some project, some improvement, some productive busy-ness which involves hands-on work. He decided to start a small organization whose purpose would be to help maintain or create good conditions for the turtle eggs to survive and for the hatchlings to make it into the ocean once they crawl out of the sand. He read about sea turtles and conservation, and invested in making a proper hatchery on the bank of the Panica River where it flows into the ocean a few kilometers down the beach from Los Delfines, on the outskirts of Tambor village.

The red marker is where the hatchery is, on the confluence of the Panica river into the ocean. The green rectangles in the middle are where the Los Delfines terrain is, half-way between Pochote and Tambor.

This is where Iratxe comes in. The first year, Ron did everything on his own, or with minimal help, mostly from his wife and other Los Delfines regulars who would sometimes offer to take part in patrolling the beach at night. This is the most important element of the “job,” which needs to be done in order to spot the turtles and/or their nests: this is almost exclusively a nocturnal activity, which shifts with the changes in high and low tides. Then, when the turtle has gone back into the ocean, as quickly as possible the eggs are dug out, transferred to the hatchery, and buried in a new nest there. All this was too much work for one man, so he started looking for an assistant, and was lucky to find a Spanish biologist who had been working for a few years in the Corcovado National Park in the south-western wilderness of Costa Rica. Iratxe already had a significant experience in turtle protection and nature conservation, and was crucial in getting Ron’s project off the ground, practically speaking. She prepared the scientific backbone of the project, drew out the charts and report-forms so that they could statistically trace their activities and the turtles’ behaviour, and put into practice all the theoretical ideas Ron was coming up with. When they decided to start welcoming volunteers, she took on the role of the coordinator, and the hostess of the house where she and the visiting volunteers stay.

When Iratxe picks me up at the stop where the San Jose bus drops me off, it’s all already well worked-out. The house, which is the third-last in a row of houses just off from the Los Delfines golf terrain, and about fifty meters from the beach, is easily distinguishable from the other similarly-built houses around, by the bunch of flip-flops and working Crocks or hiking boots left outside on the porch. On the wall to the left of the entrance, hangs a big white-board with the weekly agenda: beach patrol times, the names of the people doing them, and any other activities (for example, making the hatchery roof, or doing the beach clean-up, or organizing the village eco-festival). The main work station, with all the equipment (white and red lights, clip-boards with report sheets, backpacks with gloves and bags, probing staffs) is there too, along with Iratxe’s desk with the laptop, the printer and even the laminating machine. The main living and dining room area, with a kitchen giving out onto the back yard (ornamented only with a hammock between two palm trees) is usually filled with a friendly, thick humming of the ceiling fan; the interior of the house contains three bedrooms with their own bathrooms. The house is often quiet, with no music or loud noises since someone could be napping in preparation for or recuperation from a night beach walk. One thing you learn quickly here, is how to sleep and be awake completely differently, without a consistent schedule.

What more does one need in a yard...

When I enter with Iratxe, Maxime and Bastien are sitting at the dining room table, with their laptops open, doing some research. Both around twenty years old, university students from Marseille, they are doing the practical part – the “project” – for one of their courses. As I will learn a little later, neither is actually from France. Maxime was born and bred in Hungary, but his father’s family is from France so he wanted to continue his education there. Lanky and nimble, with blond hair and chestnut-brown eyes, he moves with deliberation and delicacy; polite and attentive, he is already a mature person in the body of a boy. Bastien is a good-natured giant. Tall and hefty, with a happy glimmer in his blue eyes, he’s – perhaps somewhat unexpectedly – gentle and courteous. One of a few children in a wealthy South African family, he has already travelled more than an average adult person, and has flown into Tambor on a tiny propeller plane from San Jose, landing on a primitive strip of cleared palm trees and bushes, which ends right on the beach. When a plane approaches it from the ocean side, it flies so low, it almost looks like it’ll touch the water before it disappears in the tangle of green lushness.

The three of us are the only volunteers at this time, and our times largely overlap: the two of them arrived some time before me, and would leave a little before me too. We occasionally have a fourth for a couple of days on and off – a Tico, Kevin, who’s the same age as Maxime and Bastien, and who comes here from Punta Arenas as part of the obligatory social service program at the university he’s attending. Quiet and slow-moving, he’s happy and grateful he’s in this sweet spot. When Kevin is around, we all attempt to speak Spanish since Kevin doesn’t speak other languages, and it’s always a little funny, this groping for the words – not even the right words, just any words that will do the job, especially for Bastien and me; Maxime is a little more advanced. It feels a little like reinventing the self and the world with each sentence. Otherwise, we speak in English, occasionally in French but not often, since Iratxe doesn’t speak it. She herself chooses to speak English to us, with her cute, child-sounding Spanish accent, because it’s probably the fastest and most efficient way to get things done. The boys are young and can get carried away in their adolescent worlds, but they are studious, and curious, and resourceful. One afternoon, they decide to make mashed potatoes but since there is no butter and the milk has possibly gone bad, they boil two eggs and mash them into the potatoes, for a little bit of grease – and it tastes great.

The boys are also ready to work. There is never any lateness when we have to get up at all kinds of odd hours of the night for the walk (midnight, 1, 2, 3 am….). A little bit before the scheduled meet-up in the living room, people’s alarm clocks start buzzing, tingling, chirping in our different rooms, and a few minutes later we begin to emerge and get our lights and equipment, put on our walking shoes outside on the porch, divide ourselves into two teams – one to go left towards Pochote, the other to go right towards Tambor – and often in silence, we set out. There is a minimum of two people per team – with one being the leader (the person who has found nests before and knows what to do), and the other, or others following around to learn and eventually become skilled enough to be leaders. This would take some strain off Iratxe and Ron, who usually have to go on every single walk. Occasionally, some of the friendly Los Delfines residents jump in and can relieve someone for an odd walk or two: there are Sue and Jeff, retired Californians who have recently moved here full time. She’s a serious birder and often gets up before dawn to go bird-watching and takes anyone interested along; both are smiling, well-meaning, and California-pleasant people. And there are Chris and Murphey (and sometimes their son and his girlfriend), a Canadian couple from Ontario who rent a vacation house in Los Delfines every summer. They are both eager players of pickleball, and often have passionate battles with Ron, the most devoted and competitive pickleball player, on the courts by the “clubhouse” on the outskirts of the gigantic golf course. Ron insisted on showing me the wonders of pickleball so I went one time and had an introductory lesson, but really spent most of the time taking videos of Maxime and Bastien for their Facebook pages.

Most of the time, however, it’s just us volunteers with Ron and Iratxe on the beach walks, and those are the best times. There has been a slight lead in the number of found nests on the Tambor portion of the walk, but we are always fair and try to alternate: those who did the Pochote portion the previous night, get to do the Tambor portion next time. The consolation for those who go to Pochote is that they finish about 15-20 minutes earlier, since it’s a slightly shorter stretch. For the first few walks, I struggle with footwear: most of the beach is sand but there are whole sections which are dominated by pebbles, and in both directions, we have to cross streams and rivers, which – depending on the tide, or the amount of rain – can be quite deep. There have been rumors of caimans’ rare intrusions into these streams, and we did find a skeleton of one, washed out on the beach close to Tambor. Iratxe always goes in black, worn-out Crocks; Maxime usually goes barefoot. I tried a pair of flip-flops I thought I would be wearing on the beach-walks, but they gave me blisters (I had never before walked six or seven kilometres per night in them); then I tried my short rain boots but they quickly filled up with water and pebbles and were extremely uncomfortable; then I managed to find and buy in the one village store a pair of Crocks that fit me, but they filled up with tiny pebbles and big grains of sand, and made my feet bleed, around both big-toe knuckles. So I finally settle with the most comfortable pair of flip-flops I have ever had, and was hoping to keep from wearing out too soon: the Hawaiianas, that my friend Marcos brought me from Brazil a couple of years before.

The walks themselves are magical. There is no better word to describe them. You get to experience a beach in a way which is probably brand new: in the middle of the night, with absolutely no people around, with minimal visibility which amplifies the sounds of the ocean and the thick fabric of stars in the sky, and with a myriad of nocturnal beach residents you’ve never considered or seen before. It’s a heart-wrenchingly beautiful and only slightly hair-raising sensation. Iratxe never uses her white light while we’re walking (which always perplexes me), while Ron uses the big “torch” which he sways left and right in front of him, looking for turtle traces in the sand. If Ron is in the team on the other end of the beach, once both teams turn around from the final walk-point and start going back to Los Delfines in the middle of the beach, you can see his torch-light from several kilometers away: a small bright dot moving spastically through the dark space just above the ground. As the pre-arrival instructions demanded, I brought both with me, a white headlight and a red one: the red is required for any encounters with an egg-laying turtle so that she’s not disturbed or dazzled by the white light. I quickly realize, though, that my red light is too weak, so I use my white headlight for some portions of the walk (and sometimes try to switch it completely off, to see how much I can see in the dark), and I borrow a powerful red pen-like light from Iratxe’s stock of those in the house. Whenever we spot fresh turtle trails in the sand (crescent-moon shapes from both left and right flippers, and small dots from the tip of the tail), we are ready to turn off the white lights and switch to the red, just in case the turtle is still on the beach; seeing a red dot at the other end of the beach in the pitch-dark night vacuum means that the other team may have encountered a turtle. Then we are excited and somewhat jealous: the crown of one’s work here is to witness the egg-laying from beginning to end, see off the turtle back into the ocean, and then transfer the nest.

The vast majority of the walk time, however, is spent in the visual combing – in the next-to-zero visibility – of the beach surface in order to spot the tracks. At first, it seems impossible to distinguish between various prints, traces and tracks on the beach: there are many of various kinds at any given moment (human and animal-made), and on top of that, as time passes, or the tides move in or out, they fade or disappear. When you’ve seen a few, though, your eyes adjust and know what to look out for; nevertheless, this is a much more difficult task in the pebbly sections of the beach, even for an expert like Iratxe. Ideally, one person is walking along the beach close to the water checking for tracks leading out of or into the ocean, while the other one is walking in parallel just around or above the tide-line on the upper edge of the beach (where the turtles usually make the nests) checking for the characteristic circular traces made by the turtle’s flippers as she closes the nest, filling it back with sand. As we do this, we encounter numerous creatures, big and small – the beach, you learn, is never really asleep. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of hermit crabs which seem to love coming out of their holes at night. In the beginning I am worried I might step on one, but quickly learn that they are incredibly sensitive to even the slightest tremors in the ground, so as our feet approach, stomping in the sand, they scatter away surprisingly quickly on their little legs, or they simply drop into their (perfectly round) hole in the sand. They often wear all kinds of empty shells on their backs, as a “safe house” in case of emergency; Maxime once saw a crab with a plastic red Pepsi bottle cap on its back.  Then, if you aim your light a little further away from the ground just in front of your feet, you’ll see birds - typically two kinds at night: small groups of the rapid-walking sandpipers following in well-rehearsed choreography the edge of the ripples, and here and there a solitary heron standing, often on one leg, in the shallows, waiting for something. And if you have a good light and aim it into the distance, especially at the bushes and trees at the upper edges of the beach, you might see the glimmer of eyes: these are raccoons, or brown foxes, who come down to the beach looking for the same thing we are – turtle nests. There are sometimes human poachers too although they find ways of keeping a low profile; Ron has come across a few but during my time there, we encounter none. The unwritten rule on the beach is that whoever or whatever gets to the nest first, it’s theirs.

The night-beach magic is generated by all of these factors meshing together into a multi-dimensional snippet of life as it is when most humans are away, but above all, it comes from the constant soundtrack of the restless breathing in and out of the ocean, booming and rumbling through the thickness of the night. You can’t quite see it clearly, but you hear it and you feel it, the moving massiveness of it, sending the waves to crash and expire at the feet of the beach. When you are close to the water-line, you feel the micro droplets bursting through the air, or you feel the silky strokes of the calmer wave-ends wrapping around your feet seductively. If you’re barefoot and feeling the coolness of the wet sand, the tactile and the audio impressions – heightened by the near-absence of the visual ones – give you a unique sensation of blending in with the elements, at the convergence of water, land, and air. This altered (for lack of a better word) state of the mind and of the body is so special that we sometimes walk in silence, enjoying it each on our own; at other times, we have discussions about meaning and philosophy. At no point do we feel sleepy or tired – we feel, paradoxically, daydreamy and alert at the same time.

When we come across a turtle, suddenly everything becomes very practical and focused. It happens twice while I am there, towards the end of my stay, just as I am beginning to think that I might not be lucky enough to find more than turtle eggs during the walks. Identifying and digging out a fresh turtle nest is in itself exhilarating, but seeing the whole process – with the turtle emerging from the ocean, walking up the beach above the tide-line, digging the hole, laying the eggs one by one (for an average of about a hundred eggs per laying), then burying it all up carefully and walking right back into the ocean – is something else. In the deserted nocturnal world, the slow appearance of these silent giants has something of a mythical feel to it, evoking ancient wisdom or primeval rituals. You instinctively tone your presence down to a whisper and a stillness.

While laying her eggs, a sea turtle is in a kind of “trance,” where she seems to be functioning on a natural automatic pilot, not fully aware of her surroundings. She executes all parts of the nest-making and egg-laying meticulously and slowly, not paying attention to anything else. Iratxe uses this time to measure the turtle’s shell with a measuring tape, and to jot down the coordinates of the nest in the walk-log. Once the turtle has finished laying moist and soft-shell eggs the size of ping-pong balls, which plop gently down from her body into the hole she expertly dug, she is busy stomping over the nest-opening with the back flippers in order to close it; then she pushes the sand around and over it with the front flippers. When her instincts tell her that it’s all done well, without a pause or a look back, she starts walking back towards the ocean, as if on a tight schedule. We walk a couple of meters behind her, to see her off and wish her a good return. For a moment, while she’s walking into the shallows, her shell seen from behind looks like an old-fashioned skirt with frills – then she disappears from view. 

Measuring a turtle during the laying

This particular time, we have just started the walk when we happen upon the turtle, so when she’s gone and we’ve collected the eggs, we continue the walk towards Tambor because there’s still a lot of our beach section left to check for other possible nests. This time Alberto – Iratxe’s boyfriend – is walking with us: he is a local fisherman and tourist guide, so this beach is practically his back yard, and he knows it like the back of his hand, or, rather, like the sole of his foot. Lean and tall, with tanned and tattooed arms, he’s walking extra carefully because he’s the one carrying the new-found eggs in a plastic bag. The eggs are not very heavy but whoever carries them, gets serious arm-fatigue simply because of trying not to move or swing that arm much, to minimize chances of any egg cracking. There are no other turtle traces on what’s left of the beach, and when we reach the end of it, which is on the bank of the Panica river where it flows into the ocean, we are about to turn, and as usual, walk all the way back to our house in Los Delfines, transfer the eggs into a big, square Styrofoam transportation box, load it into the car, and drive six kilometers to the hatchery to make the new nest, and record all the numbers into the tracking log. This is the hard part of the job, because it adds another hour and a half on average to the whole walk, so by the time you get to go to bed, it’s often about to dawn. The hatchery is just on the other side of the Panica river: a fenced-off ten-by-five-meter sand rectangle, on a small elevation about one hundred meters from the ocean. Inside, there are about half a dozen rows with about eight nests per row (and some more space for additional rows), a piece of wood stuck next to each nest with the number of the nest, the number of buried eggs, and the expected hatching day (about 45 days after burying) written on it in black marker. Next to the fenced area is a small, one-room concrete hut, with metal bars painted red but with no glass panes in the windows, where all the equipment for various activities is kept, including tools, all the record books, and the spools of green mesh which is used to secure the space just above the newly-built nests so that the hatchlings can’t disperse randomly once they crawl out from their nest – they are too far from the ocean here, and need to be taken to the beach in crates. Then they are released a few meters from the water, and if this happens in day time, we watch them protectively, along with any villagers or bathers who happen to be there, until they finally make it into the waves. No matter how many batches you’ve seen off in that fashion, it always seems special. Inside the hatchery hut there is an old chaise-longue where Ernesto can nap for a couple of hours at night: he’s a Tambor villager who was very happy to get the job of a night-guard at the hatchery – not so much to prevent thieves from getting to the eggs (if there are poachers, they stick to the beach) but to check the night activity in the nests, and spot as early as possible the new hatchlings bubbling up from the sand, so he can take them and release them into the ocean. Baby turtles are delicate and need to get into the water soon after hatching and getting fully activated; otherwise, there is a serious risk of them drying out and dying, especially if caught by the unforgivingly hot sun for too long. Ernesto is a small, humble-looking man who is always happy to see us, and add a few words in Spanish to our chatter. On the nights when the mosquitoes are particularly invasive, he’ll often smoke or burn tobacco inside the hut, in an attempt to “fumigate” them, so when you enter, you might get heady from the clouds of eye-pinching smoke. The walking team who gets the Tambor side will sometimes yell across the river and call Ernesto, who’ll come out and wave from the other side, or give report on whether there has been any hatching yet. Once, Ron saw Ernesto waving a machete on the other side, hitting the ground left and right, trying to kill a snake that crawled out from somewhere – the cause for chuckles when he narrates it with some dramatization.

A hatchery nest with a nest protector and a wooden marker

A small crowd of Tambor residents and guests, watching baby turtles walk into the ocean

That night as we stand at the end of the beach across from the hatchery, with a bag of some hundred eggs in Alberto’s hand, the Panica river is swollen and higher than usual, flowing out of the jungle darkness up in the hills at the back, possibly bringing who-knows-what with it. The temptation for Alberto, though, is too big: he decides he is going to cross the river, holding the bag high above his head, and deliver the eggs to Ernesto, to save us that extra hour and a half that the walk back to the house and the drive to the hatchery would take. Iratxe is not too comfortable with this idea, but she agrees, so we stay on the bank, watching Alberto wading into the water gingerly. He tests each step before he puts his full weight on that leg, and progresses slowly. The river is about ten meters wide, and at the mid-point, the water reaches up to his chest. Chances are slim for any real trouble but nevertheless, we’re feeling a light buzz of adrenaline, a little like those times when the walk coincides with the highest tide, which pushes us up against the thick mangrove bushes on the upper edges of the beach and we slosh through knee-deep waters, struggling to keep our flip-flops on. Alberto makes it safely and without stumbling to the other bank, and then we see Ernesto’s and his silhouettes moving inside the hut. Some minutes later, he’s back on our side of the river, dripping but smiling. Iratxe asks if no eggs got wet, and he says playfully, no, none of the turtle’s eggs got wet, but his certainly did. We are all smiling although our smiles remain unseen in the darkness. As we walk back, we’re still looking for any new turtle traces which may have appeared in the meantime, but secretly hoping we don’t find any more as by now we’re ready to crash.

The Panica river in day time

The day I originally wanted to focus on when I began writing this, starts out hot. It is probably one of the days that stuck with me the most, but I now find that it is right for it to be just one of the things that happened, mentioned in passing, as an inevitable but natural moment when humans and their efforts are involved. It is the day of the village eco-festival, which Iratxe has been organizing together with some village elders, trying to create connections and get the local population more involved in the conservation and protection activities, which is one of TBT's main long-term goals. There will be plenty of things to do: beach clean-up, demonstration of what a turtle nest looks like, making instruments with old plastic bottles for the kids, a music performance with the ukulele, a Zumba class, face-painting, sand-sculpture building, beach volleyball and Ron’s special contribution: the S’mores-making station for the kids on the edge of the volleyball court. The day before, we worked hard around the main village area where the festival will take place, cleaning the common grounds, and sweeping the uneven main street leading to the village beach, then filling the pot-holes with gravel which Ron got from who knows where, and which a small front loader brought and unloaded where necessary. There were three or four elementary school kids who were recruited to help us shovel the gravel and pat it around evenly (but only one of them, the youngest, was really working diligently). When this was finished, we walked over to the hatchery where there was more work to be done: Ron’s latest project was to make a canvas roof above the nests, to create shade and try to lower the temperature of the sand by a few degrees. Making the roof meant that first a few posts needed to be secured, so Ron, Maxime and Bastien went into the groves behind the hatchery with machetes and hacked down a few big bamboos. Then we all carried these unwieldy massive trunks to the hatchery, which was no easy task: freshly cut bamboos are moist and surprisingly heavy. The boys then busied themselves measuring and cutting the posts to the size needed, while Iratxe and I had to sew together two gigantic pieces of canvas which would be tightened above the posts once those were stuck into the sand around the nests. We spread it out on the grass and attacked it from the opposite ends, finally meeting in the middle. It took all five of us to put in the posts and stretch out and attach the canvas, and Maxime and Bastien temporarily removed some of the protective green mesh over the nests so we could work around them. When we were done, exhausted and dehydrated despite drinking water the whole day, we wrapped up with the day: Maxime put the green-mesh nest-protectors back in their place, Bastien and I picked up the tools, and we all jumped into the car (one of us sitting in the back with buckets and crates and tools), to finally get to the house and get some rest before the night walk, and before the festival the next day.

The hatchery with the canvas roof installed

The festival day is meant to be a relaxing one, so we wake up refreshed, grab some breakfast which we usually eat separately as we emerge from our rooms –  unlike dinner, which is prepared and eaten together at the dining-room table –  and then set off for the village. Iratxe is in some pain: she injured her big toe the day before when she stepped on a piece of wood and a splinter pierced her flesh. The warrior-type that she is, she refuses any treatment, and limps through the rest of the day. It is fiercely hot; the air feels near a combustion point. Just sitting tightly packed in Ron’s pickup truck sends beads of sweat down my back. When we get to Tambor, we first go to the hatchery hut so we can organize groceries, cups and plates, and any demonstration material to be used when the festival starts. Among other things, there’s a wooden box with one side made of glass, which will be filled with sand and fifty ping-pong balls for the turtle-nest demonstration. The box was designed and made by a local carpenter and handyman, Lenin, who speaks English very well since he lived in England for a few years with his English wife. It’s about 9 am, and just like every morning, we first go to check if there are any new hatchlings in the “hot nests:” those that have reached the end of the incubation period and are expected to hatch any time. Ernesto who is there during the night leaves early in the morning, so there are a couple of unsupervised hours at the hatchery when, theoretically, some babies (as we call them) could show up within the green-mesh walls of their nest, waiting to be collected and taken to the ocean. Once the nest hatches, which can take a few hours since the baby turtles have to crawl up from different depths of the nest to the surface, the majority of the batch is taken to the water and released, but there are usually some eggs that take a little longer, or some baby turtles that are a little slower. So about a day or so after the main batch has been released, if the number of the hatchlings doesn’t match the recorded number of the eggs in that nest, the “exhumation of the nest” is done. This simply means that with gloves on and very gently, you begin to dig the sand where the nest was, on the lookout for any remaining turtles who got trapped there for some reason, or for the unhatched eggs. If your fingers do come across a tiny body in the cooler dark sand in the depths of the nest, there is no easy way to describe the feeling you get when that tiny body starts moving around in your hand, and the miniature flippers are tickling your palm even through the glove. Perhaps it feels like a small miracle, this life that was buried and is now activated, and eager to start running its course after a delayed start. You are, incredibly, holding something that – if it survives all the risks awaiting it in the next moments, days, weeks, and years – will become one of those beautiful enormous creatures, cruising through the world’s oceans, keeping their primeval rituals intact and mysterious. Just a few months before, I had a similar feeling of transcendence – or, rather, belonging – when standing by a giant sequoia in the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite Park, I held a tiny seed of the sequoia tree, which ranger John placed delicately in our hands, and let our imagination connect the dots.

New hatchlings walking to the ocean

This morning, though, we’re just looking for the signs that the hatching of any of a few hot nests has started, so we kneel down by those and peer through the mesh, but the nest tops are empty. That’s when we see them. Bastien is the first to spot one, and then we find another one, and another one, and up to a total of about ten baby turtles stuck in the rhomboidal openings of the hatchery fence, dead. They are all stuck in the same side of the fence, the one turned towards the ocean, a hundred meters away. They somehow got out of the nest, and led by the infallible instinct, started walking towards the water, which they could sense even at that distance, and with some obstacles in between. After the initial shock, we’re quick to gently pry them out of the fence, but it’s too late. They are all dead, parched in the sun. A note of tragedy hovers above. For a few moments, the heaviness of these unnecessary deaths – small as they may be – is felt in the air around us and we are quiet, trying to see how this happened. But Maxime knows already, as a thick frown is settling on his face: he says, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond, that the previous day, he probably didn’t secure the green mesh protectors firmly in the sand when he was putting them back. Iratxe says not to worry, there are many eggs and baby turtles, and some loss is natural, and besides, we don’t have time to brood upon this – we need to get the festival going. And so we busy ourselves and move on, but there is something a little off, a little lost, in the brilliance of that day.

Back at the village centre, things are beginning to pick up the pace, but no one seems rushed. Kids of various ages are running around barefoot, while people are putting up different exhibit-tents, arguing unseriously about how to do it best. We set up our tent and bring all the materials; then we borrow a few chairs from the communal hall just up the street, where later the villagers will play bingo. Then Lenin shows up in his pickup truck, hauling a huge square piece of wooden floor: the stage for the musical performances a little later on. We help him unload it and place it where it needs to go. In the meantime, two elderly American women, dressed in multicolored flowing garments, set up their face-painting tool kits at a bench underneath the coconut trees, and there’s instantaneously a line-up of differently-sized girls, waiting shyly for their turn. A woman with a tray-like bag strapped around her shoulder walks around selling her home-made dulce de leche in plastic cups, some people are already drinking in the two side-by-side resto-bars, a jolly band of teenagers are playing volleyball trying the new net provided by Juan Carlos – Juanca, for short –  who runs a small upper-scale resort down the unpaved street in the direction of the hatchery and who is himself an avid player, while Ron is already tipsy, with a turtle painted on his cheek, happily giving orders to a small army of kids whom he’s recruited to help out with installing the S’mores stations. And the day unrolls fast, with the smells and sounds of human summer throngs, drowning the sporadic shrieks of howler monkeys from the jungle in the hills. In the distance, the ocean sparkles and shimmies from the heat. The morning failures seem like something that happened long ago.

Marshmallows and S'mores!

My second-last night, after the early-evening beach walk, Ron insists on taking me to the Los Delfines golf course in his old golf-cart, to show me the nocturnal wildlife – it’s his tradition with all the volunteers; Maxime and Bastien, who are gone by now, did it a few nights before but without Ron since there’s room for only two people in the cart. Golf-carts seem to be popular around here – many people have them, and use them as the most convenient means of transportation for short distances. Ron shows up at the door 5 minutes late, just after 9 pm; he was clearly asleep – his eyes are red, his shirt is wrinkled. I hop on, and the cart’s electric whir resumes as we set off. The silence of the night is otherwise deep and unbroken except for an occasional animal call here and there. We pass by the pond just up our street, with vivid shrubbery and some tall trees; in the most widely-branched one, a huge flock of white ibis are already settled for the night. They make the tree look like an enormous magnolia, with large pure-white flowers. This flock is here every single night; they show up just before sunset, there’s still some murmur and movement for a little while as they are settling down, and then they get quiet and motionless. Seeing them there night after night, makes me feel happy in the simplest way, like seeing an old friend would. Another group of regular end-of-day visitors that you can count on seeing if you know where to look are caimans. They seem to enjoy the cooling splash of the water flowing over a small dam-like structure at one end of the pond: about three or four of them are there almost every evening, their tight elongated bodies – like small alligators – immobile in the poses they strike. Their eyes are watchful and alert though: if you come a little too close, they’ll bolt and disappear with a swoosh of water before you see where exactly they went. As we get deeper into the grounds, Ron is occasionally combing the lawns and bushes with his big light if he thinks something’s there. The water sprinklers are on, and we have to dodge them in a wide berth to stay dry. The mosquitoes are on our case and I’m glad that in my wisdom I wore long sleeves and long pants. We chit-chat of this and that as we whir through the shady lawns and over little hills, meeting mostly the main residents of this area – some big-eyed gracious deer, watching us go with a steady but curious gaze each time we pass by. Ron is a big-hearted sociable guy who wants to make everyone happy, but lately there’s a shadow of a certain loneliness and trouble hanging over him: there are problems with keeping the volunteer house afloat financially, and he is also having some issues with his wife, Mary, who seems to have got somewhat tired of his enthusiasm for nature and for socializing. So he’s hyper-energetic when there’s a new person to show the wonders of this place to and share some of that enthusiasm with. “I want you to see an armadillo!” he says, looking around carefully, “I’ve seen him here several times.” We pass by a fenced-in field with a few horses in it, and then skirt the golf terrain catching the eye-glare of a pair of brown foxes, not afraid of us at all, and waking up a few birds as we brush by some bushes. There’s one more place where the armadillo operates at night, Ron says, and he drives us off the lawn and down the empty streets just next to it. It’s not very late, but everything here is already in the night mode, the way it would be in residential suburbs. We whir down the streets slowly, passing by gardens and front yards steeped in the night, when, suddenly, Ron exclaims, “There he is!” and points the light just ahead of us. The armadillo is completely unperturbed by our presence and the disturbance we’re creating; he’s walking at a steady rhythm, like a mini-knight in his finely wrought armour, wiggling his butt a little as his snout sniffs left and right for whatever it is that he hunts. This could easily be one of the highlights of my trip: watching this armadillo – not an animal of my childhood and as such somewhat fairy-tale-like – trotting nonchalantly down the street and across front lawns, fully in control of his little world. We follow him for a little while, then watch him disappear discreetly behind a hedge. This sighting cements our wildlife-tour, and we drive back, feeling the sweet sensation of accomplishment. When Ron drops me off at the house, it’s nearly 11; I hop off, he waves and drives on to the house where he’s staying with Mary, and that’s the last time I see him. The next day he’s doing some errands and doesn’t come by, and early the morning after, I’m leaving.

White ibis settled for the night

My last day is not very busy, and I spend most of it in the hammock at the back of the house – where often an iguana comes and climbs one of the palm trees – and on the beach. It’s the end of November, and the weather is getting nicer here – with less rain and more sunshine – but where I’m going, it’s already wintery, so I want to soak in as much of the balmy weather as possible. I walk down the hot asphalt of the street barefoot, trying not to step on tiny pebbles, or on the termite line zig-zagging across. It’s around 4 in the afternoon and there’s almost no one on the beach. I break into a slow run right by the water’s edge, where the sand it wet, firm and cool, and my feet leave well-delineated footprints, which last only a few moments before the tongue of the next wave erases them. I turn to Pochote first, with the sun at my back, and meet no one except a medium-sized flock of large black vultures, which are sitting on the branches of the trees behind, or hopping around on the beach in their ungainly way. Every now and then, I notice delicate white discs with a star shape in the centre, wedged into the wet sand – they are so beautiful it occurs to me I could bring one or two with me as souvenirs. I have no pockets, so I pick one up gently and hold it in my hand, as I turn around and run towards Tambor now, the sun spilling hazily all around. My hand with the star-disc in it gets very warm and clammy and when I open it to see how the disc is doing, I see that it’s cracked in a few places and is crumbling. I leave it with a mound of pebbles higher up on the beach, and look for another one, but the same thing happens, at which point I give up the idea of bringing a small piece of the beach with me. It is right, perhaps, not to be able to take everything with you; some things need to remain in that realm of yearning or longing or imagination, which gives them such power. Later Iratxe tells me that these are urchins popularly called “sun dollars” and they’re known for their brittleness. 

Iguana sunning itself  on the palm tree; Tambor beach at low tide

The following morning, I’m taking the bus to San Jose at 7 and while in any usual circumstances this would sound early, here it isn’t really – in fact, if I’m all packed and ready the night before, I can go for one last beach walk, the one just before dawn, around 5 am. While the night walk immerses you in the normally unseen mysteries of the nocturnal beach which seem to play out in a parallel universe, the dawn walk offers a continuous witnessing – each time a little different – of the beginning of the world. At first, everything is still enveloped in the night, and made up abstractly of indistinguishable spaces: land, water and sky might as well still be one single entity producing that low hum which seems to be coming from a deep core of everything. Then, the first thin strips of day begin to streak the horizon in greys and dark blues, and discrete things begin to loom out of the darkness as rough shapes slowly sharpening into their distinct forms: the beach with bulky logs left stranded by the tide, the palm trees along the edge, the ocean mass framed at the tips of the bay with land formations jutting into the open expanse of the water. There is depth and perspective now, giving the world a full-bodied feel, and in the distance, the cooler shades are imperceptibly warming up to a hint of orange and yellow. In a few minutes, it all explodes in a fiery, bleeding drama of sunrise, and then we’re at it again: a beginning, or the beginning, again. A brand new world to see, a brand new story to create, if you have it in you. 

Three faces of sunrise

Later – on the bus, on the plane, on a different continent – I dream of baby turtles walking with determination across the sand to the ocean, leaving erratic and criss-crossing lines behind, being pushed back by the waves a few times before finally getting into the deep. I dream of torrential rain pounding on the warm earth in the middle of the night, dripping rhythmically from the drooping leaves with that certainty, that oomph of being alive. If there is such a thing as one’s “happy place,” this one’s mine. Aside from practical questions – about how and when I can go back – I’m left wondering at something more important: that hard-to-trace chain of the smallest events or likes or decisions that had to be found or recognized or made by me, and that ultimately led me there. It might all be a series of coincidences, and I should be thanking my lucky stars. But what I would like to believe is that I let myself – in a wisening manner of an ageing person – listen in on the faint signals coming from inside about what I want and what I need, and let my reactions to those signals create the path I took. In the manner of baby turtles unmistakably orienting themselves to the ocean, perhaps.

Determined babies

Oh, the night-shower

What being alive looks like