Turtle Sanctuary Visit

On 9th July 2011, we departed from Kuantan to Kerteh around 2pm after lunch. I still had my headache at that time. So we rode the bus and all the way there I slept. Untill we reached Kemaman we stopped for coffee at the famous coffee shop there. I went to the pharmacy to buy some medicine and after a cup of iced coffee with the pills I was fine. I'll talked about the coffee shop in another entry.

The route to the turtle sanctuary is very treturous (I'm being over exxagerating on this)

As a part of the awareness program by the sanctuary, I will not provide the place because the management there don't want the public or tourist to come because this is a private place. So I will not be mentioning the name of the sanctuary.

So what kind of sanctuary is it? This is a turtle sanctuary visit.

Why do you need to go there? Our company funded this place along with Petronas to create an awareness towards the turtle. It is a good social responsibility by these 2 company.

Have you gain any knowledge when you were there? Yes, I have gather and gain so much knowledge on the visit to the turtle sanctuary. Previously I was so naive but now I am a knowledgeable person on turtles.

How does the place like? It was very basic. You have to live in long houses, share the bathroom and I even slept on the beach while waiting for the turtles to land. A few pictures to show you:

The Long House

Exhibition Hall

The Bathroom!

The Toilet!

The Shower Room!

The Bunkers!!!

Do you think that people will come there and ruin the sanctuary? Yes & No. If this place is made public, surely less and less turtles will turn up up and laid eggs here. The nature of turtles is that they are shy creatures. Ancient animals are shy animals thats why they are getting extinct. 

Now I'll continue to the activities we done there...

After Maghrib, the activities begin with a short  tour around the sanctuary and have a look at the baby hatchlings. The turtles are so damn cute Okay!Got pictures somewhere..hold on let me search for it..Ahhh!Here it is. Cute right?

Next it is time to free the baby turtles...I have a video for this. Hope you enjoy. Again..it is CUTE!

Then after the freedom session we went back to the long house to have our dinner. It is seafood BBQ again. Yummeh!We got fresh prawns, crabs, fishes, cuttlefish and squids. All the food served are fresh and I like the tamarind sauce very much. Yummeh!!!

There is not much activities while waiting for the turtle landings. So most of us talks about our project. See even when you are going on a vacation you still need to work. Am I right?or Am I right? There is 3 shift to round around the 7km strech of beach to look out for any turtle landings. But because of some misscommunication there is only 2 party. I am in the 2nd shift. By the way there is no telco service there. *wink

At around 11pm we were called on duty to survey the beach and so the journey began. We walked about 3 km and found nothing and waited about 1 and a half hours  before we decided to go back to the sanctuary. I even had a nap under the stars on the beach. It was COOL!!!COLD and GREAT. Nature is the best. On our way back we saw 2 tracks of turtle that just landed. So we were asked to be quite and wait for the turtle to lay its eggs.

Here is the video after the turtle laid it's eggs...

Should I continue more? Well there is another video when I put bcak the eggs inside the ground after the turtles laid its eggs. We need to buried back the eggs within 2 hours for the eggs to survive.

The next day activities is too dig back all the turtles shells that were born. There was about 250+turtles were hatch. We need to count back on how many were survived. Turtles will hatch about 60-65 days after it was laid. We also found I turtle that survived. We called it Razeman because he is the one that do the digging and save the turtle.