We have had Turtle Island on our itinerary for about as long as we'd had the Gibbon Experience penciled in. Turtle Island has been touted as "the" way to experience the turtle life cycle firsthand, and everyone was pumped about going. That said, we'd read a pretty negative write up about it in Lonely Planet, and we went in with guarded expectations. The gist of the LP article was that the reserve seemed to be only for show, and wasn't actually achieving its goal of conservancy. It seemed to me to be a little disjointed, not really making an effective argument and trying to make connections that didn't seem to be connected. I was hopeful, anyway.
You have to book Sepilok Turtle Island through a travel agency. The island and the conservation efforts are run by the government, but the facilities and food are run by a subcontractor. Turtle Island is not cheap - it's about $1000 for a family of four for just 24 hours from start to finish. The island has limited capacity to just 50 people, and they all follow the same schedule:
9:30am Pick up from jetty - one hour speed boat ride to island
10:30am Check in and free time
12:30pm Lunch
Afternoon - free time
6:00pm Beach closed - congregate at main dining hall / information sessions
7:30pm Dinner
Evening - wait for a mother turtle to start laying eggs, then the turtle program starts
6:00am Beach open again to walking
6:30am Breakfast
7:00am Boat back to Sandakan
It's a fairly rigid schedule meant to shuffle people to and from the island - you can only stay the one night. There's also plenty of downtime, so we were all looking forward to that (the kids, having shared a room for the last two nights were a little short on sleep!).
We arrived to the jetty on time and joined a bunch of other small groups as we all loaded into two speed boats. The jetty had a lot of activity from local fishing ships, which are right out of Mad Max meets Waterworld.
Not five minutes into the boat ride and the kids were..... Out!
We hadn't really known what to expect from our booking, but the eight of us would be guided by a great guy named Robert throughout the turtle island experience. He really added to the experience and was a great resource to ask any question we could think of. Robert quickly got us sorted and took us to our chalet. Chalet may sound higher class - the rooms were very basic - fairly neat but not overly comfortable, though they had AC which would be nice for sleeping.
We rented some snorkelling gear for the eight of us, as well as some beach mats and headed to the beach. Selligan an island is a nice, white, sandy island (perfect for turtle landings, of course!) and as we walked to the snorkelling area we could see large craters that looked like the remnants of some WWII beach landing - evidence of turtle landings!!
The snorkelling was pretty good, but the tide was fairly low and continuing to go out. Before long, it was time for lunch!
Our afternoon was free time, which was great. We all did our own thing - blog work, walking on the beach, backgammon, snorkelling and making short movies - you'll have to guess who did what!
The island really is beautiful, as are the Canadian moms seen walking up and down the beach....
We all got cleaned up, then before dinner, the four kids and I threw the disc around on a shaded football field. It had been about three weeks since we'd played in Ho Chi Minh City, and the rust was showing.... Hopefully hoops won't have suffered by the time we get back! The four kids even played their twisted version of 700UP that they've developed over the years with the Norseman gang called "Jacker". They missed Phin's evil genius but Robin was a fine stand in for him.
By 6:00, we were starting to get antsy. We met Robert in the main building and went upstairs for a briefing. Kim and Beth loved Robert for his constant repetition for the schedule to come, as well as setting expectations. We learned a lot about the operations on the island, as well as the lifecycle of the male and female turtles - it's not good guys.... The male turtles look pretty bad - during mating they almost drown the females by hanging on to the back of her shell for hours at a time (while other males egg him on and sometimes try and butt in to the proceedings...), and they they pretty much float away and are gone from the picture. You could almost feel the eyes burning from females throughout the info Center, as if we were somehow responsible or in any way related to such boorish behaviour.
Turtle island itself is very successful at getting mothers to lay eggs on the island. They have dozens of "landings" per night (the record is over 180 pregnant females turtles landing in one night), and many of those females follow through by laying eggs. During mating season, a female turtle could revisit multiple times over several weeks until the eggs have been depleted.
After dinner, the waiting began. Sometimes people have to wait until the wee hours of the morning to see any activity, but Robert said the combination of it being high tide in the evening and it being prime egg laying season meant we most likely wouldn't have to wait long. Sure enough, at around 9pm, a guide came joggin in "turtle time!!!!". We had a fairly big group to look at just one turtle (they really minimize the interaction with the turtles and are very strict in behaviour - no lights or flashes and absolute quiet), and we all filed excitedly on our way to one of the beaches on the other side of the island.
When we go there, we saw an amazing sight. A huge female turtle had done the one hour climb to the nest area (somewhere,far enough from the threat of water washing the nest away) and had dug her egg laying hole - she just started laying eggs.... So beautiful. When they are laying eggs, they are in a trance state, so anything that could possibly wake her up (lights, noise) is not good - she could stop the process and retreat to the water. Every few eggs, another ranger would carefully remove the eggs and put them in a bucket for use in a later step. We watched for 10 minute in awe while she finished up.
When done, she woke up and the ranger explained that they would now check the health of the mother (for barnacles or injuries), measure the length and width and, with this one since she had never laid eggs on this island before, apply a tracking tag onto each front leg in order to keep statistics. While they did this, the mother used her back legs to cover up her eggless nest. After a rest, she would head back to the water.
As we were leaving the beach, we could see other mothers up and down the beach in varying stages of the egg laying process. A couple were climbing up from the water, and nearby, one was digging her nest - flinging sand all over the place. We were then hustled over to the hatchery for the next step in the process.
The eggs that were taken from the mother's nest are taken to the hatchery, carefully buried and surrounded by a green mesh, labelled with the date, the number of eggs (ours laid 63 tonight) and the mothers ID. This step is to ensure that baby turtles born 8 weeks after they were laid, are not eaten by monitor lizards, crabs or birds.
Next! We were ushered down to a nearby beach and were able to watch the release of babies that were hatched eearlier that evening [fun fact - if the temperature is on the low side during the first four weeks of gestation, the eggs are more likely to be male (Men are COOL). If the temp is slightly hotter than usual, the eggs are more likely female (Women are HOT).
When the baby Green turtles were released, most of them quickly made it down to the water, but a small group looked exhausted and weren't going very far. The ranger eventually had to help one straggler find his way down the beach and into th water. They don't release the babies into the water, because they need to imprint themselves onto the island. Once this is done, the turtles have the ability to find their way back here years later (perhaps 30 to 40 years later) when they're ready to lay eggs of their own.
What a day, and what a special experience for the kids. Turtles are one of our favourites: like a lot of people, elephants and turtles have a weird, special place in our hearts. It was really amazing to see them up close, giving life to a new generation of turtles. It made us think of the elephant sanctuary we'll be heading to in Thailand, but that's for another day....
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