All This and Turtles, Too

Perhaps we should explain why we have vacation a month and a half after summer. The following two weeks are the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Eid (another festival). So everything pretty much shuts down until November.
Anyway, it is now 3 days until we leave for Socotra. This weekend, being free, we had planned to take a bus to Aden (as we've not yet been there, you see). Aden is a former British protectorate in the west of Yemen, and due to the outside influence is remarkably different than, say, Mukalla, a city which was happy to welcome no outsiders for... ever. But now we're here. The road to Aden goes through Shabwa Province, though, and that's a bit of a kidnapping hotspot. As there's recently been a rash of foreigner-napping, the police wouldn't let us through the first checkpoint. Then we decided to go to Sana'a. About the same time that we were booking bus tickets in the travel office, some villagers were busy kidnapping more tourists on that road. *sigh*. So we abandoned all of that, borrowed Nick's truck and headed east instead - back to the colony of green sea turtles, which you will have read about in another post if you were around for Season One of Yemeni Cricket.
This was our third visit, and the best one by far. Saw about 75 babies and 15 adults, four of which we got to watch lay their eggs (they lay close to 100 eggs each). Eat your heart out, Discovery Channel. And the icing on the cake - we arrived around 1:00 in the afternoon and stayed until 9:00 this morning, and had the entire beach to ourselves the whole time. It was marvellous.



















A few times we stumbled on nests in the act of hatching - these little fellas came bubbling out of the sand like water.




























































































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