Day 83
I woke up at usual time after a very enjoyable night in a proper bed and went over to house for breakfast – I had the chocolate milo cereal again – VERY YUM. Much better than cornflakes.

I heard tales of last nights antics over at Long Beach – apparently some poachers had turned up and wanted the eggs. (Turtle eggs are a delicacy in Malaysia and can be sold for quite a bit ££££).

The boys had stayed all night trying to protect the turtle. They had had to bribe poachers to leave and then there weren’t any eggs anyway. Nightmaaaare.

This mornings activity: Turtle Survey.

So Victoria, Jo-el and I headed off to the beach. I had been informed that usually we canoed over to turtle bay to do the survey, but we hadn’t last week because of Georgia.

So Victoria and I set off in a canoe. It took ages and was very tiring. I wouldn’t have minded if we were just going canoeing, but to go canoeing, then snorkelling for 2 hours and then canoeing back seemed a bit much to me.

Anyway that’s how it went down so we got over to turtle bay (eventually) and had a snorkel around looking for turtles. The annoying thing was, one of us had to stay in the canoe and follow the other two around so that the snorkellers (is that a word? It is now) were protected from boats.

Not ideal but a good opportunity to catch some sun. Silver linings and all that.

We saw lots and lots of turtles that day which was good. Jo-el tried (again) to teach me free diving, much to my reluctance. He made me swim under the floating raft and just stay underneath.

He said a lot of free diving is just staying calm and not freaking out.

I did not enjoy it one bit and cut my hand on some of the shells stuck to the bottom.

And then we had to canoe home.

Very VERY tiring.

We headed to Mammas for lunch (as usual)

and then I headed home for a nap. None of the other volunteers seemed to nap and I was starting to wondering what was wrong with them.

Then Victoria, Jo-el and I headed down into the village to get some freshly made donuts from the restaurant by the jetty.

Then we all had a big rush to pack and get ready to go back over to Tigre Ruan. This time it was Jay and Jo-el and Victoria and I.

We arrived back at camp and unpacked all of our rations.

Jo-el cooked us a lovely dinner that evening of pasta with rosemary-infused olive oil. Just the fact that it WASNT RICE made me stupidly happy.

We attempted to watch Deadpool on Jo-el’s laptop after dinner which inevitably was interrupted by an evening full of turtles. We concluded that Deadpool was jynxed and vowed never to watch it again.