1/7/2019 -Sri Lanka Day 8
🐢「龜」宿
Finally we get to meet the ‘entree’ of this Sri Lanka trip - the Turtle🐢
After a long day travel from Kandy to Ambalangoda, I slept straight 12 hour in the simplest accommodation with just a ceiling fan with 5 of us in one room. It is stuffy and hot, luckily the huge fan in the common area helped us cool down a lot while we gather. Ambalangoda, city next to the ocean, lots of tourists come to surf at this untouched turquoise piece of water, the Indian Ocean.
The program manager gave us a brief orientation including safety and the purpose of the turtle conservation center. A 20 minute city tour for us to know the surroundings, where is the ATM, supermarket, ice-cream store and Internet cafe. There are two turtle conservation sites, just 5 minute walk from our accommodation and our house us just a few meters from the ocean. The Disabled Turtle Home and the Turtle Conservation Center. Then After lunch, we started working!
Our schedule everyday is different. We will start working at 9:30am at the turtle disabled home, consist of feeding and cleaning the tanks. Today is Monday, we cut up 355 sardines, preparing them to feed the 26 disabled turtle and babies. In the Disabled Turtle Center, they only kept turtles that are handicapped. Most of them lost their front limbs, one of them lost 3, I can’t stop my tears, poor animals, lost the ability to live but luckily got save by some fisherman and send them to this place. A few other turtles always floating on top of water, as they can’t dive as they lost their limbs and they have swallowed too much plastic, this turtle hardly survive and under the great care of the turtle center manager. My heart drowned to see them swim without limbs. We are feeding them and putting the sardines right at a distance so they don’t need to dive or swim to get it. If they are in the wild, they will be starved to death. These turtle are beautiful and smart animals, for those that can dive, if they didn’t catch the sardines and got sink to the bottom of the tank, all we need to do is point to the sardines in the water, they will be able to dive down and eat it, most of those that can’t dive, we helped them to dive down by pushing them into the water and they are smart enough to pick up the food.
Each of these turtles are named and am still learning to remember their name.
There is a hatchery which eggs are buried deep under the sand, some of the eggs are hatched and we get to see the babies pulled out from the sand nest. These cute new babies will be released to the ocean after examination if they are born defective, they will be staying at the conservation. We are lucky that more babies will be hatched later this week.
Tomorrow, we will learn to clean each of their tanks! 💪🏻
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