Tortoises, Mangroves and a Storm

This weekend, I have come about 30 miles along the coast from Puerto Escondido to San Agustinillo, a little village directly on a cove with quieter waves than Puerto Escondido. I found a room right on the beach and have open air restaurants on either side of me. The room is simple: lots of wood slatted shutters, a double bed, a mosquito net a bathroom with shower and a hammock outside. It is directly on the beach and about 25 feet from the ocean.

Saturday getting to San Agustinillo I got to ride in an air conditioned second class bus for just over an hour. That was great. Then I went to visit La Ventanilla-an eco tourist site owned by a cooperative and the Mexican National Center for the Tortoise in nearby Mazunte. The cooperative in La Ventanilla receives no government funding and maintains a lagoon with mangrove trees and saves tortoise eggs by collecting the recently laid eggs and keeping them in a protected area until hatching. I didn´t see anything about the tortoises as that all happens before dawn except for their nests are protected and marked with a stick. I was told that about 7,000 (as I recall) baby tortoises hatch a year for their efforts.

In the mangroves, I saw the trees, a cocodrile, lots of egrets (smaller than in Missouri, both white and blue), the finely woven nests of flycatcher birds and a termite colony-looking like a mud hut up in a tree. I was rowed through the mangrove in a launch. It was all very impressive, beautiful and hot. Apparently, the entire mangrove forest was ruined during a hurricaine in 1997 and so all the trees have grown up since then. They seemed plenty big to me, but I guess they should be bigger. Mangrove trees produce seeds that are about 1/2 an inch in diameter and 2 feet long. They have a pointy end aimed at the ground and when they fall from the parent tree into the mud; they are planted.

The members of the cooperative support themselves through tourism and donations and so I was told that they were lacking in funds. There was a bus full of women of my age, apparently a club outing and a fancy van full of foreign tourists from the nearby fancy resort, but perhaps they are used to more travellers coming in. They had some displays explaining their work, including the fact that they catch and tag the cocodriles in their lagoon. A recent census of cocodriles shows there are considerably more males than females. The guide attributed this to golbal warming as nests of cocodrile eggs incubate at warmer temperatures, more of the eggs will develop to be male. He said they were considering finding cocodrile nests and collect then incubate the eggs at a temperature that develops an equal number of females as males.

After that, I went to the Mexican Center for the Tortoise in Mazunte. This is a tortoise rehab and incubating place, and I am pretty sure it is run by the government. A primary income of this villiage was to catch and process tortoise. This practice was outlawed in 1990. It seems that this center was created partly to recompense the town for the loss of it´s main industry. So, they have lots of tortoises and turtles growing in water and like in a zoo. Apparently, there are 8 species of sea tortoise and seven are found in Mexico. Most sea tortoise do spend most of their lives in the open ocean, though. Beyond the chain link fence of the center, I could see boys on boogie boards having a great time with the waves.

I had a conversation with one of the taxi drivers I met yesterday. He said he lived in Oregon, doing basic labor and agricultural work for two years. He couldn´t remember the name of the city, but that it was the largest. So, he agreed that it was Portland when I named that. He didn´t really like it as it was too wet (while we are both drenched in sweat!) and cold. Also, he wasn´t able to get a good job as he couldn´t speak English. Then he said, "I need to learn English." Dr. Pablo, the guide at La Ventinilla also said they needed to learn English, but then when asked for details had no plans to get going with that idea.

I returned to San Agustinillo about 4:00PM. These places are less than 5 miles apart even though they have different names. I had a nice wrestle with the waves and sat down to a nice meal of calimari. About the time I was finishing with my meal, it began to rain. Then, thunder and lightening started. Then there was a deluge. All together, it lasted about two hours. At the end of one hour, I was in the open air restaurant and there was about an inch of water rushing through there to the sea. I got drenched going the 25 feet to my room. Then the electricity went out and so I sat in my room waiting for the rain to end, workng on Spanish homework and the differences of Por y Para by the twilight of the storm. The sea was amazing colors of muddy brown and light green. The waves were bigger then smaller and then again bigger.

The water from the hillside behind us created lots of streams of water going into the sea. There were occasional lightning strikes out at sea, straight from high in the sky into the water. Despite all the storm, it seems the worse that happened is the electricity being out, coconuts and seaweed washed up on shore and sand being deposited where it should not be (the main street, the floor of the open air restaurant.) I have not seen any buildings or trees or branches that have fallen. I am still in San Agustinillo and there still isn´t any electricity most places. This internet cafe must have a generator.