Wednesday, October 9, 2013

October 9, 2013 - Turtle Farm, Hell in a Handbasket

Today may have been the only day we didn't swim in the sea. We did swim, but it was in a man-made lagoon at the Cayman Turtle Farm
TURTLE!

IGUANA!


This crab was hiding in a sinkhole-like cave just off the nature walk at the Turtle Farm. It was roughly the size of my head. 

CRAB!


My first arboreal wild iguana. In the states we have squirrels, in Cayman they have young iguana.  




These little guys are about as common as the iguana. If iguana are squirrels then these are chipmunks. I thought I understood that they were called "lime lizards" but I apparently misheard "lion" lizards. I've found them online as curly tailed lizards for obvious reasons. (Okay I can also find three images on the vast interwebs where they call them "lime lizards" and Esther swears that's what they are called too. Now I'm not sure of anything. I am a man without an anchor to reality, adrift in a sea of uncertainty.)




Back to the turtles...

JACKI WITH TURTLE!

ESTHER WITH TURTLE!

JACKI AND ESTHER! (No turtle)


We hung around for the nurse shark feeding over at the Pool of Things That Can Bite You. In my mind, a nurse shark is about three feet long and has teeth made of blunt spork pieces. The two nurse sharks they had at the farm were about as big as me and could literally suck the skin off your hand. So... new thing to be terrified of everytime I enter the water: getting my hand-skin sucked off.


This is the only picture I took of this guy that you could not see his butt crack.

YUMMY HAND SKIN!


This is Cayman's largest rodent, the agouti. If Iguana are squirrels and lime/lion/curly tail lizards are chipmunks then the agouti is bigfoot because I never saw one in the wild. I'm not convinced this little dude isn't animatronic.

Like a capybara but without the dignity, grace and nobility. Also smaller.


This one little turtle made a mad dash for freedom on the man-made beach at the man-made lagoon. He crashed around and delighted some small children. An attendant brought him some water to make sure he didn't overheat and then he turned around and returned to the water of the lagoon, defeated, plotting his next prison break all the while. It's really hard to effectively flee for open waters when you have no thumbs or fingers or actual feet to speak of.


Esther dreams of (blue) turtles


And then, as I've been told I would do all my life, we went to Hell. According to Jacki, she used to hide in the rock formations wearing only flip-flops when she was a kid to the delight of tourists. WHAT THE HELL, JACKI?? 


Quick shout-out to my homeschoolers and unschoolers...




And lastly, the best picture of the whole trip.





These and a few other pics from the day can be found climbing pointy rocks in their flip-flops right here.

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