Last night I put together a short video from the last vacation, going to Sukamade Beach in the Meru Betiri Nationaly Park in South Eastern Java.
The trip from Banyuwangi to the beach took at least 8 or 9 hours for about 80 kilometers, the last 30 or so alone took 5 or 6 going up and down a very bad “road” through the jungle and mountains. It had been raining a lot so it was muddy and the rivers we had to cross were overflowing. You can see on the last river crossing how the water was above the knee of the people standing there. We got mired in a ditch shortly before that, luckily close to a village so a group of men came out to help us and after digging pulling and pushing for half an hour we managed to get unstuck and carry on.
A kilometer or so from the beach there’s a ranger’s station where thy carry out a sea turtle protection program; the night we arrived we went to the beach to wait for the sea turtles to come ashore and lay their eggs, that the park rangers would dig them out and rebury them inside a warehouse in the station so that wild pigs and poachers wouldn’t scavenge them. Unfortunately the tide was low and the rain was getting stronger so we had to leave the beach before seeing a turtle, although in the morning we were told that a couple showed up late at night.
The eggs take a couple months to hatch, the turtlings borrow their way up through 30 to 50 centimeters of sand to the surface, then they are placed in a holding pen for a couple days before being taken to the beach to be released.
We took a bucketload worth of baby turtles to the shore in the morning, and released them on the beach. This fellows are amazing, the moment they touch the ground the home in on the sea and paddle frantically in that direction, it’s perplexing to see a turtle with such energy! All in all I think we released a couple hundred little turtles, it was a wonderful experience and well worth the trouble of getting there. There was only one other visitor on the ranger station (on his way out when we arrived) and only 3 rooms for accommodation so I suppose very few people go to see the place.
So here’s a few pictures, my girlfriend about to die of cute overdose, me releasing a few turtlings and our fantastic guide, Fendy, holding a couple eager baby turtles up.
This is the video I mentioned at the beginning, baby turtles appear at around the 4th minute mark if you want to skip the “Wages of Fear” AKA “Sorcerer” revival at the beginning.
I took a small remote controlled plane (as in “fits in a large shoebox” kind of small) with a couple cameras, one for recording video and another to see live through a video downlink, this is the video from the flight, it gives a nice panoramic view of the beach and coast, it’s a very isolated place.
