The Backpacking Housewife Read online

  ‘Then you should go and get it cleaned and rebandaged. It will be time for lunch soon.’

  I grab the first aid supplies I’d brought with me, and follow Marielle back to the common area. ‘If you need more bandages, our first aid kit is always kept here,’ she says, pointing to a large box on a table. ‘Help yourself to whatever you need. The last thing we want is for your foot to get infected here. That would be very – how you say – problematic?’

  I sit down on a bench and start to remove the sea-soaked bandage, thinking that the constant warnings about not getting this damned foot infected were starting to feel like a curse.

  I wince in pain as I peel the gauze off the sticky and bloody wound. To my disappointment, the cut is still an open flap of skin and the graze looks just as angry as when I’d first done it, although that’s hardly surprising, when in the last twenty-four hours I’ve had to climb off two boats and wade twice through the sea. I give it a good clean, wash it thoroughly with clean bottled water and then dab on an antiseptic cream before protecting it again with a clean dressing and a plastic bag.

  All done. I wash my hands and join everyone for lunch.

  We sit around the table like one big happy family, chatting and laughing, while we eat our meal. Marielle is the cook and she has prepared steamed coconut rice and fish curry.

  It’s delicious. I compliment her on her cooking.

  ‘Merci. We usually take turns in the kitchen. Can you cook, Lori?’ she asks me.

  I nod with enthusiasm. I’m in my comfort zone with that particular question.

  ‘Yes, until recently, I was a housewife with a family. So I know my way round a kitchen.’

  Everyone looks absolutely delighted that I have proven culinary skills.

  Ethan also looks surprised ‘A housewife? What prompted such a lifestyle change?’

  I immediately regret mentioning my family. This is the first time in the past couple of weeks that anyone has picked up on something I’ve said in passing about my family and asked me about it directly. I feel myself blushing. ‘Well, my two sons, Josh and Lucas, are both grown up now and my husband and I have recently separated.’

  I say this in such a matter-of-fact tone that I even surprise myself with my composure.

  ‘Well, we are very glad you are here with us, Lori,’ Marielle says, just before she mentions my injured foot again. ‘While your foot is healing, would you consider being our chef?’

  I try to hide my disappointment. I haven’t come here to cook. I’ve come here to help save the turtles. Feeding the people who save the turtles isn’t really the same thing at all.

  ‘I’ll be happy to cook our meals, as long as I can also do my shifts on the beach,’ I insist.

  ‘Of course!’ Ethan agrees, while spearing his piece of fish with a chopstick. ‘Although we should warn you, we only have a limited range of supplies and we can’t always get fish. It’s hard to be creative with a couple of vegetables, but if you can do something a bit different with rice, we would all appreciate that very much indeed. Wouldn’t we gang?’

  Everyone shouts their mutual appreciation of something a bit different.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I tell him. ‘And I’ll wrap up my foot so that I can still do beach patrols.’

  When the meal is over, strong ice-cold coffee is served, and we all continue to sit around the table for what Ethan calls the afternoon briefing. This is apparently when the shift rota is discussed and jobs are allocated and any problems anyone has are addressed.

  From what I can tell, Ethan runs a tight ship here.

  ‘Okay. We’re now into the last two weeks of the turtle nesting season on the island. So, this briefing today is mostly for the benefit of our lovely ladies Laura, Jodi and Lori. We currently have thirty nests in the hatchery and twenty-two of them are due to hatch at any time. There’re thirty-two more on the beach. So, we all need to be extra vigilant in keeping a lookout for any signs of emerging hatchlings. Also, David and George have today moved two nests from the far end of the beach where they were laid last night and transferred them into the hatchery.’ Ethan looks at me to explain. ‘This is because we often have poachers coming ashore at night in that area of the beach.’

  ‘Ah, they come to poach the eggs,’ I say to him, nodding in my understanding of the situation. Then, realising what I’ve just said, I suddenly catch a terrible fit of the giggles.

  I feel terrible about it but I can’t stop myself.

  It seems so terribly rude to laugh at something like that. I’m sure it’s totally down to nerves. But now I can’t seem to stop giggling. My eyes are streaming and my face is red and I look like I’m crying. I truly want the sand beneath me to open up and swallow me whole.

  ‘Haha – Lori just cracked an egg joke, everyone!’ George gaffs, snorting with amusement.

  ‘I’ve got one for you, Lori.’ David laughs. ‘What day do eggs hate the most?’

  I can’t speak so I shake my head.

  ‘I know, that’ll be fry-day,’ Laura groans.

  ‘Hey, I got a new one. What do you call an egg on safari?’ asks Jodie.

  ‘An eggs-plorer, perhaps?’ Ethan offers.

  ‘You guys crack me up…’ George groans, and everyone is laughing again.

  Ethan smiles at me with a school-boyish gleam of appreciation in his eyes. And that’s when I notice his eyes are the colour of seagrass, dark green, with twinkling light brown speckles.

  ‘Strangely, we never get bored of egg jokes here,’ he says to me. ‘But yes, we do have a problem with poachers from the mainland. So, I’ve drawn up a new shift rota. David and George are on the early shift tonight from sundown to midnight. Then it will be Laura and Jodie on the midnight to dawn patrol. Marielle and I did the second shift last night, so we are the lucky ones who get a night off and we will take over from Laura and Jodie in the morning. Lori, if you’d like to join any of the teams then you are most welcome.’

  ‘Why don’t you come out with David and I tonight, Lori?’ George offers.

  ‘Thanks, that’ll be great,’ I say, grateful for the invitation. ‘I have so many questions about the turtles. I hope you won’t mind me taking notes, so that I don’t forget anything.’

  ‘If you like, I can give you the grand tour right now?’ Ethan says to me. He is sitting back in his chair now, his long legs stretched out, somehow making these small hard and rickety bamboo chairs look comfortable. ‘Then you can ask as many questions as you need.’

  My tour begins at the turtle hatchery, which is situated near to the common area building. The hatchery is a large rectangular area of flat sand that’s raised up from the beach with its sides supported by long lengths of bamboo. It has a low fence around it made of netting to protect it from predators and inside are cone-shaped metal and net frames that identify the site of each individual turtle nest buried in the sand. I count the nests. Twenty-two of them have red markers on them. These are the ones Ethan says are due to hatch any time.

  ‘The hatchery is where we transfer the eggs that we think might not hatch successfully in their original site on the beach,’ Ethan tells me. ‘It could be because a nest is too close to the end of the beach where the poachers are likely to come ashore. Or, because it’s too close to the tideline and in danger of being washed away. Or, maybe we think that the nest is likely to be disturbed by natural predators. We have a lot of monkeys and lemurs and lizards here that will dig up any nest they find. But, we will only move a nest if we think it’ll stand a better chance of survival in our hatchery. If we think it’s going to be okay where it is then we just mark the site very discreetly, so we are not alerting the poachers to its location, and we monitor it.’

  ‘And how long does it take for the eggs to hatch?’ I ask him, with my pen poised over a fresh page in my notebook.

  ‘Incubation is around sixty days.’

  ‘And how many eggs are laid at one time by the mother turtle?’

  ‘Usually around a hundred or so and she’ll
come back and lay up to five times in one season. The same female uses the exact same beach where she was born decades ago to lay her eggs. So we often recognise her.’

  ‘But how do you know her again? Does she have a marker or a tracker device attached?’

  Ethan smiles. I can tell he is amused by my many questions.

  I’m thinking about my dear old dad, who’d kept racing pigeons in a shed at the bottom of the garden. They’d each had a ring on their leg to identify and track them over great distances.

  ‘Nah, we take her photograph and make a note of anything that marks her out as an individual. You see, every turtle has unique markings on their head and some might also have a scar or a chunk out of their flipper or shell which helps us identify them on our database. If she’s new to us, we’ll give her a name.’

  ‘A name? How lovely!’ I exclaim. ‘I can’t wait to see a nesting turtle for myself.’

  We wander over to the office building that Ethan calls Turtle HQ. Inside is a desk, a computer, and a wall-sized white board with lots of squares and names and numbers on it.

  He points to the whiteboard. ‘This chart and these squares represent the nests we are monitoring right now. For example, this one…’ Inside the square it says: Choosy: (2) 10/11. 22/23. ‘This means that a turtle named Choosy, laid her second nest of the season on the tenth of this month, and it’s located on the beach between markers twenty-two and twenty-three.’

  ‘That’s a great system. I love all their names!’

  There’s Bubbles and Seashell and Shelly and Speedy … just to name a few.

  ‘It’s been an amazing year so far,’ Ethan tells me proudly. ‘We’ve had a record number of turtles coming ashore and hatchlings born this year. It makes being here on the island for a couple of months every year really worthwhile.’

  ‘Yes, it’s such a big commitment. How many years have you been coming here?’

  ‘Too many to count. This was my very first turtle project, so it’s very special to me.’

  ‘Well. It’s my first and so it will always be special to me too,’ I tell him sincerely.

  And he gives me a lovely warm smile that gives me butterflies in my tummy.

  ‘Ooh – and there’s a computer in here,’ I say. ‘Does that mean we have internet?’

  He laughs and drags his fingers through his short spiky hair. ‘I wish. We do occasionally pick up an internet or cell phone service because we are quite close to the mainland, hence the problem with the poachers. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

  ‘Sounds a bit risky. I mean, what if something happened here, like an emergency?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, it might feel like we are castaways but we do have radio coms.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not worried,’ I tell him truthfully. Everything about Ethan Jones is so reassuring.

  Next on my tour is the scuba hut. ‘Here we have all the equipment needed to go diving including a compressor to fill the air tanks. Sometimes, when we aren’t monitoring the turtles, we’ll do some reef diving. In fact, there’s another team arriving on the day we leave here, who will take over from us and then focus on house reef conservation for the next couple of months.’

  I proudly tell him I have my Open Water Diver certificate. He seems impressed.

  ‘If you like, when your foot’s better, you can do your advanced diver course here. I’ll teach you. It’ll only take a day or two and then you’ll be able to dive deeper to thirty metres.’

  ‘Really? You mean you’re a dive instructor too?’

  ‘Aye. When I’m not managing projects like this one, I’m usually off somewhere in the world teaching diving so that our project ecologists can become marine biologists too.’

  ‘Actually, I’d only done a handful of dives when I managed to cut my foot.’ I tell him this in case he’s under any illusion that I’m some kind of expert with hundreds of logged dives.

  But I’m now convinced that Laura and Jodie were right. Ethan is a modern-day Indiana Jones.

  Ethan hands me a pair of rubber boots. ‘These will help keep your foot clean and dry.’

  I put them on. They’re a little too big, but if I can also find a pair of socks, they’ll do the job nicely. We walk along the beach, me in my welly boots and Ethan in his bare feet.

  He points out the areas between the palm trees where we’ll need to keep a keen eye for any hatchlings exiting the nests. ‘There’s a full moon tonight. It will act as a beacon to bring the last of this season’s nesting turtles ashore,’ he tells me. ‘Two months ago, we had a super moon, and that’s why we have so many nests due to hatch right now. I expect we’ll be very busy over the next few days.’

  ‘And that’s why I’m here to help!’ I enthuse.

  ‘There are twenty-six palm trees between here and the end of the beach,’ he tells me. ‘The trees are our markers. So, for example, when we saw Choosy’s nest marked as 22/23 on our whiteboard, it means it can be found between the twenty-second and the twenty-third palm tree. That’s our system. Simple but strategic.’

  ‘You didn’t explain why she’s called Choosy?’

  ‘That’s because she’s always a little choosy over where she’ll make her nest. We don’t know exactly how old she is, but from her size and condition we can take a guess she’s getting on for around fifty years old now, much like myself.’ He gives me another boyish grin and I feel my heart flip over.

  I could listen to Ethan talk about turtles and his conservation projects for hours. He speaks so passionately about it and yet he is so practical and clear about what needs to be done to help.

  Then there is his Scottish accent, which is incredibly attractive and even, dare I say it, sexy.

  I’m really enjoying being in his company. We wander along slowly and my eyes are continually scanning the sand for baby turtles. I hardly dare blink. Then I see something.

  A little something crawling on the sand.

  ‘I think I see one. Is that a baby turtle?’ I point a finger to the spot.

  We kneel down to take a closer look. Ethan uses one long finger to gently excavate the sand.

  I’m so excited, I’m holding my breath. But then I see it is, in fact, a little crab.

  That evening, after dinner, which is a plain but satisfying dish of rice and beans followed by a rice and mango pudding cooked by Marielle, I take one of the hammocks strung up between the trees at the front of the camp to relax for a while. I’m thinking that if I’m going to be up late tonight, it might be a good idea to take a nap in this hour before dusk.

  But it’s hard to close my eyes and focus on the lulling sound of the distant waves crashing over the coral at the other side of the lagoon, when I’m being stared at so intensely by a creature in the tree directly above me. I’ve never seen anything like her before. I say ‘her’ because this creature, which looks like a cross between a large fruit bat and a fox, has a little wide-eyed fur baby clinging to her belly. When George and David appear ready to patrol the beach, I ask them about the creature, because they are scientists and will probably know about the animals here.

  ‘Ah, it’s a lemur. Cynocephalus Variegatus also known as the Sunda flying lemur, except it is not actually a lemur and nor does it fly. It’s an arboreal gliding mammal found all over South East Asia,’ George informs me knowledgeably.

  ‘Well, it’s very cute,’ I say, rolling out of the hammock to pull on my socks and rubber boots, while trying not to show how much pain I’m in from my throbbing foot. But once we are patrolling the beach, with the evening sunset firing up the whole sky, my pain is forgotten.

  All I want now, is to see a turtle coming up the beach to lay her eggs in the sand or to see a nest erupting with a hundred little baby turtles all wanting to run free to the sea, and I’ll feel very fortunate and very privileged indeed.

  George hands me a torch. ‘We have a no white light policy here, so you’ll see the torch shines a red light. All the lights we use at night in the camp after dark are red lights too. This is
because turtles can’t see red light.’

  ‘It’s not just natural erosion or poaching that has endangered the turtles. Many of their original nesting beaches are now so developed that white light pollution from hotels and bars and other buildings confuses them and then the poor turtles have nowhere to nest,’ David explains. ‘If a turtle can’t nest on the beach where she was born, then she’ll have no choice but to evacuate her eggs at sea and they’ll all die.’

  I feel so bad for the poor mother turtle, imagining her confusion and stress.

  Learning about these turtles and their struggle for survival, and how the only time they will ever leave the sea is to come ashore to lay their eggs, has really brought it home to me how important this work is and I feel so honoured to have been given a chance to be part of it.

  ‘I think that one of the most amazing things is how they know to come back to the same beach where they were born,’ I say, recalling Ethan also telling me this interesting fact earlier.

  ‘Yeah. It’s instinctive. But no one really knows exactly how they remember.’

  The last shimmering glow of the sun has now disappeared over the line of the horizon and the white light of a brilliant full moon has taken centre stage, illuminating everything around us and casting shadows across the beach, into the line of trees that marks the start of the jungle, where strange noises emanate and where birds roost and huge bats flutter.

  George and David tell me that what we are looking out for are distinctive tracks made by a turtle coming ashore. I’m told they look like tyre tracks in the sand, coming from the tide line and straight up the beach.

  It’s not long until we see an enormous silhouetted shape moving slowly from the surf and up the beach. My heart is doing somersaults in my chest when I realised I’m seeing a huge old green turtle. ‘Oh, my goodness … she is absolutely gorgeous!’ I breathe ecstatically.

  As the turtle heads up towards the tree line in earnest, we follow her at a safe distance and we speak only in whispers. I make sure to keep a step back from David and George, so I can watch what they do to help her in this situation. Then we sit and simply observe her for a while, as she is busy mooching around in the area where the beach meets the jungle and where the fine white soft sand is mixed with soil and vegetation. Like Choosy, she seems to be quite particular as to where she will lay her eggs and she combs the area for the very best place.