Itsamia

Nobody told me what to expect. The man who drove me from Fomboni on the back of his motorcycle — an hour and a half on a road that was partly concrete, partly gravel, and partly optimism — said only that I would see turtles, and that I should bring a torch with a red filter. I did not have a red filter. He found a piece of cellophane somewhere in his pocket and wrapped it around the torch with a rubber band, which worked adequately. We arrived at the beach as the light was failing and sat on a log at the edge of the vegetation to wait. The sea was black. The beach was darker than I expected — volcanic sand mixed with paler sand, the texture of something ground over centuries.

The first turtle came out of the water around nine o’clock. She moved with the deliberate, exhausted determination of something obeying an instruction older than thought — hauling herself up the beach on her flippers, stopping, resting, moving again. She weighed perhaps a hundred and fifty kilos. She was a green turtle, a Chelonia mydas, a fact I kept repeating to myself as if naming things could contain them. She chose a spot above the tide line, dug her nest chamber with her rear flippers in a motion that looked mechanical and ancient at once, and began to lay. We crouched at a distance, in red light, not speaking. My guide had his hand on my arm, lightly, to keep me still.

The thing about the Itsamia beach is that she was not alone. Over the course of that night I counted eleven turtles on the beach at various stages — some arriving from the sea, some in the slow trance of laying, one already making her way back into the surf with a heaviness that looked like grief but was only biology. The community of Itsamia has been protecting this beach for decades, running a conservation project that has made it one of the most important green turtle nesting sites in the western Indian Ocean. There are no resort hotels here, no organized turtle-watching tours with branded headlamps, no gift shops. There is a village, a beach, and an agreement between people and animals that has held long enough to matter.

I slept that night in a room in the village, on a mat, with a mosquito net that was mostly effective. In the morning the beach was empty and the tide had smoothed over everything — the tracks, the nest sites, all of it — leaving the sand clean and blank as if nothing had happened. But something had happened. That is the sensation Itsamia leaves you with: of having been present at something that continues with or without you, as it has for millions of years, and of being grateful for the brief intersection.

When to go: Nesting season runs from July through October, with the peak usually in August and September. Outside this window the turtles are mostly absent, though the beach and village are worth visiting for snorkelling and the community itself. The access road from Fomboni is rough — a motorcycle or sturdy 4WD is the practical choice. Ask in Fomboni for someone who knows the way; the conservation community at Itsamia welcomes respectful visitors.