Vivir en el momento: Weekend Away

Last weekend (yes I keep falling behind on my posts…) the volunteers had our “volunteer salida” to Monterrico – aka the beach! The plan was to leave around 1 pm on Friday afternoon, but sadly, with the earthquake in Japan and threat of tsunamis up and down the pacific coast, a few of us (after MUCH deliberation) decided to take things easy and head down there on Saturday morning. So, instead of the beach, Meghan, Erika, Thayer, Molly, Katie, and I spent Friday night chowing down on DELICIOUS stir fry (thanks for leaving behind your peanut sauce, Sam!) Que rico! After an extremely relaxing and wonderful night with some great friends, a bunch of us took a transport to Monterrico to join the festivities :).

After our wonderful direct (and only 2 hour) transport, we arrived in Monterrico around 10 am on Saturday morning and proceeded to: hang out on the beach, eat DELICIOUS food (read: WHOLE fried fish – SOOOOOOOOO rico!), go swimming in our hotel’s pool, attempt to avoid being eaten alive by mosquitos (thanks for my OFF wipes Eleanor!), annnnddddd release baby turtles into the wild!!

The beach at Monterrico

Our WHOLE fish dinner! DELISH (and we were all VERY proud of Nathan and how well he cleaned his plate!)

Me and mi tortuga!

Monterrico is kind of famous here in Guatemala for his turtle hatcheries where they help protect the turtles until they can be safely brought into the wild. Around sunset we wandered down the beach to find the hatchery and to race our very own tortugitas :). Fortunately, I made friends with the guy in charge so he let me, Nanna, and Thayer go into the hatchery with him to collect all the turtles that we were going to release. Apparently the turtles that we collected had hatched between 15-30 days before we released them. We grabbed a WHOLLLEEEEE bunch of the little guys and headed out onto the beach where there was a huge line of people waiting to collect them. After, we all stood behind a rope and our turtles raced! While I definitely thought mine was the cutest, he was NOT the fastest… Also, and quite unfortunately, only 1 in a few THOUSAND of those little guys ever makes it back to lay their own eggs…so here’s hoping that slow and steady wins the race on this one! Anyhoo, the rest of the weekend turned out to be incredibly relaxing and a good weekend away :)