DINOSAUR

Hey everybody! Everything is going well - I'm manning the library by day, turtle wrangling by night. Last week I took a little vacation to Nosara with the other girls that are working here, and I took a surfing lesson! And I wasn't even eaten by a shark! Success! We also went to a rodeo, but I didn't really like it. I felt bad for the bulls the whole time, though at least they don't kill them or anything here. Still, they just seemed bored and irritated. It was quite an experience, though - the whole arena was built out of this horribly rickety wood and everyone was quite intoxicated and hanging off of the sides and falling into the arena. Anyone was allowed to charge on in, so all sorts of drunk people kept stumbling in and shouting at the bull and then running like mad. On the home front, not a soul comes into the library here (well, once two Australian tourists came in) so I've been reorganizing all the books. Fascinating, right!? I've also been composing letters begging for more novels to send to various libraries and universities around the country, because right now all of the books in Spanish are educational books on turtles and legislation. So I don't really blame the youth for not leaping at the chance to read the "Manual de Procedimientos para la ejecución de Plan de Manejo." Bleh. Also, today, I've set up a movie day (I wanted a reading day but the woman who supervises me here says that if I advertise it as a reading day not one person will show up) and I put up a poster in town, so I hope someone shows up. I tried to go announce it at the school, but apparently the teacher had decided to take a vacation this week, so classes were off. Hint hint, Mom! I'm hoping to ambush whoever comes with books after the movie ends. We'll see how it goes! But, the big news is that last night there was a LEATHERBACK TURTLE on the beach laying eggs!!! It was completely incredible! We were all sitting around waiting to go out on our normal turtle duty when we got a call from André, who was already out patrolling, and he said that a tortuga baula had come up on the far end of the beach. We all ran literally over a mile down the beach to see it, because they're really rare and endangered. I couldn't BELIEVE IT when I saw it! It was absolutely enormous! It was one of the top ten coolest things I've ever seen in my whole life. I wish I could've taken a picture to show you, but it was laying eggs and we're not allowed to take pictures because it might bother them. It was over six feet long and like four feet across, and its head was much bigger than mine. It grunted like a dinosaur, too. I asked how much it weighed, but to understand the answer I would've had to understand some horrible conversion and also numbers in Spanish, so I can't tell you how much it weighed. I'd estimate ten billion pounds. It dug a mammoth hole for its eggs (I could've fit in there with room to spare), but we caught all of its eggs in a plastic bag, because a lot of people had come out on the beach to see it and they're very worried about poaching, because again, tortuga baulas are endangered and their eggs are valuable. After it lay the eggs and everyone was marveling at the turtle, André pulled me aside and asked if I'd like to go on a secret mission, and of course I said yes - I am nothing if not a queen of espionage. He had hidden the bag of eggs under his coat and we walked a long ways down the beach (making sure that no one was following us) and then dug a hole and I got to put all of the eggs (68) into the hole. We covered it back up and camouflaged the hole and sauntered back all casual like in time to see the behemoth working her way back to the sea. The tracks that she left looked like a tractor had driven up on the beach. Whew! It was absolutely epic, even the weather - it was clear with trillions of stars right above the beach, but farther out on the ocean it was really stormy, so there was tons of flashing lightning. Amazing! It felt unreal. Anyway, I'm still pretty pumped about it. I hope that you're all doing well! Love you! Oh, the pictures are of me looking dorky with our surfboards and then someone else's picture of a leatherback so that you can get a sense of it.