Ok so!! Where to begin. It's been a pretty awesome past month.....well apart from arriving in Bataan where I got my camera bag stolen along with money, passports, cards etc. But!! you all know about that already so I shant carry on!

So, when we got to camp we were introduced to everyone and shown around camp and then set up our beds etc. We then had a 'safety meeting' which is kind of self explanatory and common sense with everything that it goes through. Anyway....boring stuff aside... we were put straight onto patrols which consisted of walking for 4hrs on a beach, 6km there and back, searching for 'tortugas' that were laying their eggs. And I was lucky on my first night! Granted it wasn't my group that found the turtle it was the group before us, but the turtle was still there as we walked past. A beautiful 174cm (shell only - you don't measure the head) leatherback turtle. Absolutly amazing. Rob on the other hand didn't get anything. The day after we got patrol training - piece of piss! So we walked again that night and Robs luck didn't show up again....although this time my group got another turtle!! And this time we were there first so we got to carry the eggs and bloody hell they were heavy!! Teeny tiny little ping pong ball sized things that weighed the same as a bleeding cannon! Ok so I may be exaggerating a lil but they were not as light as they led you to believe.

If we didn't walk we were on hatchery shift which consisted of you sitting on your arse for 4hrs watching the hatchery where all the eggs were brought on a night, and checking the nests every 15mins. And we got a lot of babies in there! The first few nests didn't seem to be bringing up as many babies as they should've been doing but after a few weeks we got 25-60 babies a nest - which i might add that if you were on your own was not fun at all!!

Everyday at 3pm-5pm we would go down to where the hatchery was and dig a new one for the green turtles eggs as the sand cannot be used again for 5 years so we started digging on the other side of the hatchery to make the fresh incubator......or sand pit, either way. This consisted of digging out a large area of sand 1m deep and then shovelling and sifting it all back in again to make sure the bits of twigs etc were out as the sand has to be really clean. There were also exumations which were not pleasant at all. Some times nothing would be up with the nests, sometimes there would be alive babies crawling out - other times dead babies would be there or on the off chance the nest would be infected with maggots. The smell that came from those nests smelt like a sewerage plant. It was disgusting. But thankfully only one person was assigned to that so neither of us had to do it!

The group of people that were there with us were awesome. We had a right laugh with most of them. I say most because some people were those kinds of people that 'only came to see a turlte' and couldn't be arsed to do any manual labour at all. Needless to say they pissed us off. But the majority of folks there were amazing like I said. It was really wierd leaving the camp this morning as you become one big family and you really get set into your ways there. Not only that but the locals are amazing. One of the guides was awesome and even thought we don't know a lot of spanish could really have a good laugh with him.

The boat journey back to Bataan was really cool as the rain had lifted the river alot and we could see the jungle really well. Once we got into the taxi to Bataan we stopped to watch a Sloth sleeping on a telephone wire!! Crazy thing. One leg dangling limply, the rest gripping tightly to the wire. We didn't have to wait long for the bus although it was packed when it arrived so we had to stand....well Rob did, I got a seat after a while. And so we got to San Jose where we are now needing to sort passports out and try to find a cheap enough camera to see us through the rest of our travels. Not to mention sort out our route!!

Ciao xx