Island Paradise

While the rest of you working stiffs are toiling away at your 9 to 5s I'm onto my third Banks of the evening watching monkeys run across the golf course having spent the afternoon scuba diving. Life is tough in Barbados.

Dinner is on the way (Andy's whipping up his famous jerk chicken I think?) so I've got a few moments to blog. The trip has been amazing thus far, and I've taken some cool photos, but the story I'm about to tell has nothing to with photography.

We'd just finished a sumptuous banquet of jerk chicken and grilled potatoes at Just Grillin' when we decided to take a walk along the boardwalk, then the beach to the Hilton. At the end of the boardwalk we had tired legs, and the temptation to turn back to the car wasn't helped by the rum punches consumed earlier, but we powered on in the spirit of adventure and healthy living, and it was a good thing we did. As we approached the end of our walk we noticed a couple of shady characters in the trees near the beach with red torches strapped to their heads, a few furtive glances were exchanged in the dark but we carried on up the beach and left them to their demented parlour games. 100m further down we saw 2 sets of tracks on the sand, one coming up from the water, then returning in into it, that's when the penny dropped (well, that's when it dropped for Andy, the rest of us were still in the dark). We hastily returned to the red head men to enquire what they were up to.

Barbados is currently in turtle-egg-laying-season. I'm sure there's a more succinct name for it but turtle-egg-laying-season will have to do. The men were part of a turtle protection society and they were standing behind a huge mother turtle overseeing her egg laying process and covering up the tracks and evidence right after to protect the eggs from poachers or hungry animals, and now we too were witnessing this amazing display of nature only a few feet away. This turtle must have been around 70-80cm (I've not wiki'd how big turtles get but it looked longer than 2 rulers but shorter than 3) and it was beautiful, the guys told us she was around 25-30 years of age which seemed pretty amazing, all these years I've been at school and uni and work and travelling this old girl was just swimming round the world's biggest swimming pool without a care in the world. I could go on about it, but I suspect it's one of those things you had to see, so I'll leave you with a few pics to go on with.

3 more days till I'm back to civilisation.

From Barbados Blog