Working on a turtle conservation project on the island of Nusa Penida was the last leg of my trip and definitely the one I was most looking forward to. Who could resist a couple of weeks in paradise with fascinating sea turtles?
As I approached the island by boat from the Bali mainland it looked idyllic, with lush vegetation and attractive wooden buildings. However as soon as I disembarked, I was dismayed to find myself in a rubbish filled shanty town drowning under a sea of plastic bottles. Thousands of tourists flock here every year to take photos at the famous Instagram beauty spots, but what you don’t see in these stunning photo shoots is just what the island looks like off camera.
Me and my fellow new volunteers rattled along the unmade roads in an old truck, and, as I had requested a private room, I was dropped off at my accommodation first. To say this was poor was an understatement, it would have scored minus 10 on Tripadvisor. It was a dirty concrete room with a woven reed roof, which I could see daylight through. The shower was filthy, the showerhead was clogged, the sheets were stained and, worst of all, the aircon didn’t work. My trip to the volunteer centre included crossing a rubbish dump where the locals were burning plastic in vast bonfires. Needless to say, I gave the organisers some ‘feedback,’ and moved to somewhere marginally less awful the next morning, before starting work at the turtle conservation centre.
There were 600 young turtles at the centre which had been hatched from eggs collected from the beach. I am not an expert on turtle welfare, but I have worked on 2 previous turtle projects. After my second shift at the centre, I started to have serious doubts about the ethics of the programme and the welfare of the turtles. The centre was run by local coordinators, none of whom were trained marine biologists and some of the practices I witnessed were just shocking.
There were 56 volunteers, all of whom had paid a sizeable fee to be there, and I realised that this project was nothing to do with conservation, it was a way of attracting ‘wealthy’ westerners to this deprived island to provide income and jobs for the locals. My suspicions were confirmed when I discovered that a fellow volunteer was, in fact, a marine biologist from Australia who had been asked to ‘take a look’ at this programme by the Queensland government.
I felt that I could not be part of this animal endangerment project and I decided to head home. A walk, a truck, a boat, a taxi, 2 airplanes, a car and 28 long hours later I was back in Surrey. My dogs were delighted to see me, and my family seemed quite happy too…
My travels for this year have ended, a little earlier than planned. Thank you to everyone who has read my blog, there isn’t much point writing without an audience. I will be spending the next few months getting a sham turtle conservation project near Bali shut down… Watch this space…
