The wild life

Ben mentioned the massive rain we had the other night. It has brought out all kinds of crazy animals. We saw a frog with the little suction toes climbing on the outside of a glass door. It's also stirred up the bugs a bit more, which to this point haven't been bad at all.Last night I was startled by a toad as big as a softball (probably the source of the mysterious noise). They also caught a red crab (at the top of the hill mind you) that was almost six inches across its body. So imagine it's big legs clawing at the bottom of a blue bucket and you've got it. We've also seen several puffer fish with spikes all over them washed up on the beach. For obvious reasons, all the dogs that roam the beach won't go near them.

Today, our last full day here, we went to El Centro de las Tortugas, which is The Center for Turtles for all the rest of you. It's not really a museum but a research center where they do conservation work for marine turtles especially. It's cool because you get to see them up close. There are 8 kinds of marine turtles, and seven of them live in Mexico. The biggest they only have a skeleton of, because its diet is jellyfish and it's hard to manage that in captivity.

The center represents a big push for conservation here. This beach only fifteen years ago was the site of massive turtle slaughter- more than 1,000 per day were killed here. (You can see why it wasn´t a hot spot for tourists.) When the turtles were a protected species and hunting them was banned, the economy spent a little time experimenting with slash-and-burn, and then someone told them about turistas like us. There are also a lot of posters attempting to convince us that eating turtle eggs is NOT an aphrodisiac. In fact, the guide told us that they only have more cholesterol than regular eggs. So remember: real men don´t need to eat turtle eggs.