The tribulations of Turtle Island

After spending a couple of days in Kota Kinanbalo I had my first trip lined up. I was heading over to Turtle Island which is at the north peak of Malaysian Borneo.
I was taking an overnight bus to get there and headed of to the bus station a little bit past eight in the evening. Got to the ticket booth and there was a problem, apparently the bus I was supposed to be on had been cancelled but there was an express bus leaving in thirty minutes. I didn’t think much of it since I had to be in Sandakan to catch the ferry over to Turtle Island the following morning and bought a ticket. Big mistake, five hours later at two o’clock instead of eight I find myself in the middle of Sandakan. So what is a man to do? Well, I walked around the city for a while until I found a twenty four hour open café’ and then sat down and consumed a stupid amount of coffee and chatted to the taxi drivers for the next five hours. When I finally headed of to the office where the ferry was leaving to I could barely keep my eyes open but I stumbled in with my receipt for the ferry and accommodation on the island and said hello to the lady behind the counter. She looked at my receipt then looked at me and then said “You were supposed to have been here yesterday”. In a haze I grabbed the receipt, looked at it and sure enough she was right.
The problem with Turtle Island is that you have to book it quite far in advance and there’s only about twenty five people going each day (you stay overnight) so I was in big trouble. It was time to turn on the charm overdrive to eleven and do my best in my sleepy state so I nicely asked if there were any places available and the answer was no. My next question was if there had been any cancellation and the answer was also no. At this point I was pretty close to giving up but I decided to stay at the ferry terminal in case things changed. What happened, I fell asleep of course.
Two hours later, just as the boat out to the island was about to leave I was woken up by the counter lady shaking me like there's no tomorrow trying to wake me up. As it happens one of the persons who was supposed to be on the boat had not turned up and I was offered his place. Lady luck was smiling my way. Got on the boat and immediately fell asleep again and woke up when we got to shore.
The sight was quite impressive, the island was quite small but there were big tracks that looked like they had been made by a tractor running up and down the beaches. I had landed on Turtle Island.
After having lunch and walking around the island I crashed into bed again and woke up for the evening assembly. The turtles only come in at night time to lay their eggs and we were given instructions on how we should behave when we checked out the turtles.
Fifteen minutes later we stood around this huge turtle with a one point twenty meter long shell which had crawled up on the beach to lay her eggs. It was a great sight to behold, but it got better, after another twenty minutes the rangers of the island brought down a big container with about hundred and fifty small turtles who had been hatched the night before. It was absolutely amazing to see all these little critters trying to make their way into their water and I was scared to move because they were walking all over my sandals and you couldn’t see too well because of the dark.
In all my trip had gone from disaster to amazing and I was very, very happy!