Should You Come To La Tortuga Feliz?

Day 7
Saying for the day: “Circumstances don’t make the man, they just reveal him to himself.”
Since we’re not working any more shifts at the hatchery or the beach, we can now announce the Total Turtle Tally:
Carrie: 61 + 73 + 1 Adult = 135
Jonathan: 119 + 73 = 192
Turtle Time! Carrie and I worked the evening shift together last night from 6:00PM-10:00PM. 73 turtles hatched from one nest!
It’s the first time Carrie and I have had babies together!
Started off the day washing last night’s coffee mugs and dishes that people didn’t do yesterday (they were supposed to).
Carrie and I have dish and kitchen duty today (our last day), so we are doing dishes for 18, three times, today. It’s been a long time since I’ve washed dishes for that many people. It reminds me of working for campus catering at UNC, the job I consider the worst job I ever had.
There’s no refrigeration here, so we get dinner, as well as the next day’s breakfast and lunch, delivered to us daily from a boat. (It also brings soda and snacks to sell to us and some of the locals/guides.) La Tortuga Feliz has the right to patrol + police the 4+ km of beaches here on the sandbar island, but other people live on this island here as well, so this is the daily delivery of stuff for everyone here.

Do I recommend you come to La Tortuga Feliz?
For us, 7 days was good. Your experience may vary. Recommendation? Read our notes, look at our pictures. Look at the La Tortuga Feliz web site, and make your own judgment.
Here’s what I would tell you.
Reading through these notes on the afternoon of our last day here, here’s what I think other people might see we did here:
We paid $25/night per person ($50/night for the two of us, not including our Spanish classes), to clean toilets, do dishes, sweep dirt, be up at all hours of the night, sweep dirt, get dirty, be chewed on by mosquitoes, fleas, gnats, sand flies and ants, sweep dirt, and sleep on seemingly moldy beds with pillows that smelled bad enough for us not to use them. Oh, did I mention that we swept dirt?
All of this is true as far as what we’ve done in our time here at La Tortuga Feliz. And I have learned that traveling this way for very long, and volunteering in this way for very long, would be very difficult for us. I also have the impression that reading our notes from La Tortuga Feliz might discourage others from volunteering here. If our notes have done that for you, it’s unfortunate.
I loved my morning kayak experience. I loved meeting the people we’ve met. We shared common ground before we met (it takes a certain kind of person to volunteer for a project like this), and I was happy to build on that common ground. I love that the money we’ve spent here not only fed and sheltered us, but also goes to pay the guides who patrol the beaches and also will go to bringing local schoolchildren here to have them see the living process of endangered species so they can stop/slow the process where it begins – at home, where people eat the meat and eggs from endangered turtles.
As a side note, I personally have no problem with people eating turtle. I would feel funny about trying it myself, and would never knowingly try it as long as there existed the possibility that it was coming from a species that is rapidly vanishing from the planet.
I think it’s hard to convey that potentially contradictory perspective (you can eat turtle, as long as it’s not endangered) to someone who is poaching turtles, and has been poaching turtles, because they don’t know any different, or because they think poaching is the best way to earn money to support a drug habit (which is why many of them are poachers).




In any case, what we have gained by being here are friendships with people from Holland, Germany, Britain, Ireland, Wales, and Denmark, as well as people in California, New Jersey, Arizona, and Alaska. I’ve also gained a unique experience of working with turtles.
Experience is biography. Common experience ties people’s biographies together. What we’ve experienced at La Tortuga Feliz (both the minor “hardships” of living a relatively rustic life in the jungle, and the missed sleep due to odd times for shifts in the late evening and early morning) binds us who volunteered here together in a way that perhaps nothing else could have. I really like knowing that and look forward to staying in touch with our new friends.
Turtles take 25-30 years before they come back to lay eggs, usually on or near the beach where they were born. In 25-30 years, we may find ourselves seeing green turtles laying eggs on a beach near here, and know that we played some small part in the preservation and continuance of a dying species.

Here’s the video I made summarizing our experiences at La Tortuga Feliz.

Related posts:

1. Carrie’s Baby Turtles at La Tortuga Feliz
2. Kayaking at La Tortuga Feliz
3. It’s Turtle Time! Hatching Turtles at La Tortuga Feliz
4. La Tortuga Feliz: First Impressions
5. Raking Leaves And Tarantula At La Tortuga Feliz