North Island / Day 12-14

Hello everyone, it's me again. The past two days were amazing. Maybe some of you have already seen my Instagram story with the video of the baby turtles. On Saturday evening, we were lucky enough to see the turtles when they hatched from the nest. Before, we were always too late and only saw a few babies that were still in the nest. This time, we saw them all. It was quite a commotion in the nest, seeing them climbing over each other and trying to come out at the same time. In total, 101 babies made it to the sea. I was really happy about that 😊.

Afterwards, we went to another nest where it was suspected that the turtles would hatch soon. However, the crabs were faster here. There was only a small nest with 21 turtle babies. But we found 29 crabs in the nest, so unfortunately all the babies were dead 😔. Luckily, so many made it in the other nest.

On Sunday, we went snorkeling again and saw some more fish. We also saw a Hawksbill turtle, which is a very good sign. It was a male, which don't come to land, but if there's a male, it means that the females are not far away and they will come to land to lay eggs. So maybe I'll still get lucky in the next two weeks. Hawksbill turtles are not as shy as Green turtles, so we could swim closer without it swimming away. I also saw a shark while snorkeling. Unfortunately, I couldn't take a photo and I didn't dare to swim after it. It was about 3 meters away from me and about 1.3 meters long.

In the afternoon, we climbed the tallest of the three mountains on the island, the Grand Palace. From there, you have a great view of the East Beach, where we saw the turtle and the shark.

There's also a tree growing up there with beautiful flowers called Frangipani. I took a flower with me and kept smelling it the whole time because I couldn't get enough of the scent.

When we got back down, a colleague showed us the young of a Whitetail Tropic Bird. The young bird is hidden between the roots of a tree until it's big enough. I thought it was super cute.

This afternoon, a little baby gecko suddenly jumped on us and stayed with us the whole time. It was so adorable that I had to take lots of photos.

So, that's it from me again. We're now going to have dinner at the beach and watch the sunset.

See you soon.

Your Alex