It´s amazing what a clear easterly ocean view can do to make one a morning person. For the past week I have been waking up at 5:30am and being ready to work by 6am. When I leave my ¨house¨I can still see the moon and the stars, but as the minutes pass, the sky begins to brighten and I witness the day being born across the sea. There is something empowering and sublime about it. For me, a sunrise is definitely better than any cup of coffee.
I´ll tell you about my first week in a moment but first a bit about my hosts, GVI. Global Vision International has the following little blurb on their website which is a good little summation of their company: ¨Global Vision International (GVI) runs responsible volunteering programs in over 40 countries around the world. We offer volunteers the chance for a hands-on experience by personally contributing to important conservation initiatives and community projects. Volunteer programs run from one week to 2 years.¨ You can read up more about them here: http://www.gviusa.com/. I did a decent amout of research on these kinds of volunteer travel companies, and GVI seemed the most organized and well run of the bunch, and so far my experiences with them have only supported my research.
A typical day with them starts, as I mentioned, at 5:30 with a ritual daily application of sunscreen and bug repellant. At 6am, we begin our duties, which include things like making breakfast, raking the sand to keep sandflies down, readying the boat supplies, sweeping the common areas and cleaning the bathrooms. At 6:30 we eat breakfast, which is usually oatmeal, or cereal, or pancakes. Then we often have a lecture about reef ecology, or about the reservation we live on, the Sian Ka´an Biosphere, or about the local coral or fish species. After that, we gather BCDs, regulators and air tanks for the first dive of the day. While we are learning how to dive, we´re only generally doing one dive a day, but once we´re all certified to do reef research we´ll be doing two 40 minute dives every day. Lunch is generally lentils or beans and rice, or pasta and vegetables. We never have meat because the base doesn´t have electricity except for a few hours at night, so refridgeration becomes impossible. More dives go out in the afternoon, and then we put away the equipment, push the boats back onto the beach, and eat dinner--once again, a meal of vegetables with beans, rice, pasta, lentils, or potatoes. After dinner we have a briefing covering the schedule of the following day, and any comments that staff or volunteers wish to make about the days activities. In between dives, there is always a bit of free time so we can read our diving manuals, study our coral and fish species, or just relax in a hammock. Sometimes, we can even, GASP! take a bucket shower, and remove the layers of sunscreen, repellant, and salt from our bodies (only to layer it on again nearly immediately of course).
You now know what a typical day for me is like down here. That said, schedules can change from week to week, and we often have special events to take part in. Next week, Tulum hosts the annual celebration of the end of the turtle hatching season with the Turtle Festival. There are games for kids and special baby turtle releases, as well as artistic performances and vendors from all over selling environmentally minded wares. GVI will be participating by creating some of those games for the children, as well as helping with crowd control during the turtle release. Hopefully I´ll have a lovely update for you all on that next week!
Til then, I´ll leave you with two pictures of some baby turtles on our own beach here at our base, Pez Maya. Enjoy!
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