The Best Excursion in Acapulco and the Tale of Doug, the Sea Turtle

A 21 day cruise aboard the Norwegian Pearl starting in New Orleans, passing through the Panama Canal and delivering us back home to downtown Seattle, hopefully all still speaking to each other, would include a stop in Acapulco, Mexico.  With a 5-year-old and my in-laws in tow and travel warnings in effect, we decided to go with a ship excursion and selected the “Endangered Baby Sea Turtles and City Drive.”

Cost: Adults $75

          Children $45

Time: 4 hours

Difficulty level: easy

We boarded a bus with our friendly guide, battled the busy downtown streets with interesting and amusing commentary to keep us entertained, meandered up and around expensive mountainous neighborhoods, and stopped for a photo op at an overlook with a view of the ritzy Banyan Tree Cabo Marqués where a room for one week would cost you roughly what I paid for this 21 day all inclusive cruise.  If I’m going to stay at a hotel, it better be under $150 a night and include a free breakfast (some of which I stuff into my purse wrapped up in napkins for lunch)! 

Unless the Banyan Tree wants to sponsor my blog and offer me a free stay, in which case I’d enjoy the view over oatmeal packets I brought from home, cooked in lukewarm tap water to save on my food expenses.  I wouldn’t know how to do rich even if I fell smack down into a puddle of it and couldn’t get out, so I just enjoy those places from a distance.

When we arrived at the Sea Turtle Rescue Center located along a gorgeous, peaceful stretch of beach, we were greeted by a dog stricken with heat induced laziness and a toddler playing happily amongst the sand and water filled tanks.  The facility is run by a local environmentalist and his family and it felt both homely and like a true labor of love.   

We were seated in a small outdoor classroom where we learned many interesting facts about sea turtles, such as (the facts were there’s, but don’t blame them for the bad jokes – those are mine)…

How Sea Turtles Pick the Gender of Their Babies.  And How You Can Too!

The gender of a baby sea turtle is determined by the temperature around the egg as it incubates. 

Warmer temperature = girl

Cooler temperature = boy

So if you want a girl, you should spend your 9 month pregnancy cruising the Caribbean and if you want a boy, Alaska.  I offer no guarantees, but I cruised Alaska on my honeymoon and ended up with a boy.  Just sayin. 

What Do You Call a Sea Turtle Who Swims 139.8 miles?

Lazy. 

The world record for the longest open ocean swim for a human without flippers was set by Veljko Rogošić when he swam across the Adriatic Sea from Grado to Riccione in Italy in 2006. 

In 2008 a female sea turtle was tracked migrating 12,774 miles across the pacific where she visited Oregon and Indonesia before her signal was lost.

Here I am after running 3.2 miles: 

My 2,000 Pound Life: Sea Turtle Edition

Sea turtles have been recorded at weights up to 2,019 pounds which is roughly how much I weighed at the end of this 21 day cruise.

Women’s Work

Male sea turtles spend their entire lives floating around at sea while females do the grueling work on land of continuing the species.  Sound familiar, ladies?    

Sea Turtles at Risk: Returning to Your Childhood Home to Find it’s Been Torn Down

First, a few words about my childhood home in a suburb outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.  While it was smaller than most of the other surrounding homes, it had an enviable, unobstructed view of a prodigious canyon – home to two world-renowned ski resorts, Alta and Snowbird – from the back.  And when I wasn’t roaming the neighborhood knocking on doors, “can Allison play?” I would spend much of my time sitting on a built-in bench with a custom sewn long rectangular peach floral cushion – which opened and became the place I hid all my contraband – below my bumped out bedroom window gazing out at them.  Even after I’d gone away to college or moved across the country, that window seat and those mountains were the soft warm blanket that would wrap snuggly around me as if to say, “welcome home to the one place you know you’re safe and loved.” 

If I could have been administered an epidural hooked to a push button pump I pressed approximately every three seconds for more glorious drugs and covered the peach cushion in plastic, I would have given birth to my son right there. 

And that’s precisely what sea turtle moms do – they return home every 2 to 3 years to the exact beach where they were born, usually traveling thousands of miles to get there, to lay their eggs.  But what happens when you return home only to find that the safe place you grew up is gone?

A few years ago my childhood house was purchased by one of the six kids who grew up next door.  She and her husband tore it down to make way for something newer and gianter.  I didn’t react well to the news and vowed to never visit the old neighborhood again.  And so far I haven’t, except through Google Street View where it stands preserved and in harmony with my memories until an obliging little orange figure ready to guide you to your destination, with a tall arm-like appendage rising from the luggage rack topped with a round bomb looking devise, will eventually come through, capture a new image, and obliterate what’s left of my childhood with a refresh of my browser.

Sadly, this is often the case for sea turtle moms too.  Exhausted after a long perilous journey, they may find the beach of their birth no longer hospitable to nesting eggs due to climate change or human development or both.  I mean would you want to give birth in front of hundreds of sweaty, sunburned tourists snapping your photo to post on Instagram?

Perhaps the greatest danger to sea turtles, leading to swift and certain extinction if they aren’t able to evolve quickly, is the risk of rising temperatures.  While it’s fun to joke about a world with no men (I’d never have to fall into the toilet in the middle of the night again), if the climate is too high during incubation, all sea turtles will hatch as female and the species will be unable to reproduce. 

And Finally, Only 1 in a 1000 Sea Turtles Will Make it to Adulthood

When it came time to release the turtles we lined up behind a long rope on the beach where we were each handed a baby to name and love for a few brief moments before bidding him “good luck, little buddy” and releasing him to follow the light reflecting off the water into a place almost sure to kill him.  I felt sort of like I did when I put my Kindergartener on the school bus for the first time (I have a flair for the dramatic). 

I named this sweetest of babies “Doug” after my beloved dad who passed away from cancer in 2010.  Like his namesake who almost died of whooping cough as an infant, I choose to believe Sea Turtle Doug will beat the odds and one day I’ll be reunited with him off the shores of Hawaii where he’ll tell me grand tales of his adventures at sea. 

That’s what we all have to do with our human babies too.  Do our gosh darn best to give them a fighting chance and then let them go, believing they will be okay.  Willing them to be okay.

And while we decided on this excursion at the last minute, putting the least amount of thought and effort into it, it turned out to be the most meaningful of them all.  Our family together, honoring loved ones gone too soon, ushering in new life, and feeling hopeful even in the face of great odds.

Prof. Cruise gives this excursion an A+. 

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