Turtles!

We followed this little hand-painted sign to a turtle farm on the beach; where supposedly this old man who buys turtle eggs from the locals hatches them and puts them out to sea. We pulled up and he started jabbering and showing us a fenced-in garden plot with little mounds staked out with initialed notes. Great, I thought, he's got nothing to show us so he's making a big deal out of his turtle graveyard. I liked him a whole lot better when he started scooping away sand from one mound, because anyone who is so willing to exhume a grave so you can have a look is okay in my book. He uncoverd some soft eggshell fragments and then suddenly there were flapping, struggling baby turtles everywhere. Live animals buried in the sand just seem terribly unnatural; we could not have been more startled if he had uncovered a squirming litter of puppies!
Afterwards we each took a handful of turtlettes over to the pool where they could swim for a couple of days before being released.