It was a decent enough drive through the countryside that took us to Bundaberg, a place that my son had stayed at for a while whilst he was over here in Oz. The town was quite a big one and seemed to be surrounded on all sides by vegetable and fruit farms. As ever we first popped to the local Information Centre to try and get the lowdown on the best beaches round here so we could snorkel and relax on for today was to be a day of some serious chilling, the reason being that tonight we had booked the Turtle Experience at Mon Repos!
So off we went for a bit of a snorkel at a beautiful little place called Coral Cove. This was another of those places which is certainly a sight for sore eyes but where isn’t in Oz. It had all the requisite features, blue skies, aqua seas and golden sands but this was all set off against black volcanic rocks, which seemed to make all of the other features stand out even more. As sometimes happens, the snorkelling turned out to be not too great as there was quite a bit of a swell and we soon found out that as well as looking impressively black, the rocks and the barnacles on them were also quite dangerous to be rubbing up against! A couple of guys on their dinner break seemed to be having better luck than we did or knew the tides a bit better so we left them to it. Now pleasantly ‘exerted’ we felt that we had earned a bit of a rest.
So we drove off to a little place called Bargara which turned out to have it’s own lovely little beach too. Even better was that next to the beach was the entrance to a little lagoon the locals used for swimming and in it the kids were having a great time, laughing swimming and generally messing about, much better than seeing them mesmerised by their phones or their computers. We joined in the fun but at a much more relaxed pace by doing a bit of book reading and we even indulged in a bit of a kip each too. This was of course necessary (lol) as we wanted to be fully recharged for tonight as we had no idea what to expect or how long it would be before we saw a turtle.
Somewhat refreshed, we cooked a bit of food and then drove down to the Turtle Rookery and viewing centre to eat it in the car park there. Lots of cars were already parked up so we wolfed our food down and in we scarpered. Once inside we were separated into groups and the guides there explained to us that we would wait in these groups to be called up onto the beach where, if we were lucky, we would have the chance to see a female Loggerhead Turtle lay her eggs – fingers crossed eh!
We had only just been put into our group, lucky (?) group two, when we were shouted up as we thought, to go on the beach, things seemed to be looking hopeful. Dash and dammit though – we were only being called up to watch a video about the conservation effort at Mon Repos and how that here they had been particularly successful in helping turtle numbers rise which was great news really. The film done we were called up again and this time we were off outside, surely this had to be the real thing didn’t it?
We followed our guide and strolled along the boardwalk that led to the beach and then as a group, quite a big group at that, we continued along the sands to where another guide was waving us onwards with her torch to where she stood next to some turtle tracks. This was a good indication that a possible mum-to-be had come ashore here. Then, I am not really sure what he needed to be doing but we had to wait for our ranger to ‘set things up’ at the nesting site and then he took us to her to make a semi-circle around the mother’s back whilst she was busy digging her nest into which she would be dropping her clutch.
Whilst she dug, our guide a guy called Everett, explained a bit more to us about the programme and about the turtles themselves. A couple of things that I should point out at this juncture are that the turtle’s eyesight is as good as ours is out of the water, something which I did not expect and this was why we had to stay behind her outside her field of vision. If she did catch wind of us she might be ‘spooked’ and perhaps abandon her egg laying for another night! This also meant that no cameras or lights could be used at this point too, so all there was was a single light pointing down into the hole that the turtle had made thus far.
The mother then proceeded to lay her eggs and she really went at it laying 171 eggs to be precise. When turtles have laid between about 15 to 20 eggs they enter a ‘trance like state’, therefore after this number we were allowed to quietly walk round the mother and could even take photos and films which was frankly quite amazing. Then as she was nearing the end of her egg laying we once again switched the lights off and let her be whilst she covered her eggs. The guide then proceeded to inform us that our mother had unfortunately buried her eggs a bit too close to the high tide mark so the eggs would need relocating just a bit higher up. So the ranger’s helper was starting to dig a new nest site whist our mother was filling and covering hers over, for us to soon be uncovering!
Her work finished she lumbered her way back towards the sea and it may have been partly due to her size but the egg laying had taken a lot of her strength, you could see that she was absolutely shattered and seemed to just be using willpower alone to make her way back to the water. Once she was back in the sea safely and on her way further out we were asked if we would like to help with the relocating of the eggs and we were most enthusiastic volunteers. The ranger passed us the eggs from the turtle’s hole and we took them up to the new nesting site, easy enough but really good fun and we could take snaps too of our little deliveries as it were. This was a most excellent way to round the night off so, job done we wandered off back to the centre to find ourselves the recipient of a certificate each. Not really sure what we had done to deserve such an accolade as it was the mother turtle who had really been doing all of the work, maybe it was just because we had the biggest smiles! And as we received our awards, group three was only just heading out so God knows what time they would be finished, so once again we had been quite lucky as we still had quite a drive before us to get to our next port of call.
It was not too far but it was dark and in the sticks here dark is very dark indeed, so much so we almost drove past our stopping place. One quick (or to be more accurate, one slowish) U-eey though and we were soon parked up and able to get our heads down but we both definitely went to sleep with smiles on our faces, it had simply been an unforgettable evening.
Our Excellent Adventure! 