Shell Beach

The journey to Shell Beach starts before dawn and involves a boat through canals so narrow the mangrove roots drag against the hull, then a crossing of the open mouth of the Waini River where the chop is serious even in calm weather, then more canals, and finally the beach itself, which appears with no fanfare — a turn through a last thicket of mangroves and then ninety kilometres of Atlantic shore stretching in both directions to an empty horizon. No hotel. No road. No sign that this particular stretch of coastline has been organized for anyone’s arrival. The shells that gave the beach its name — billions of tiny bivalves compacted into the shoreline over millennia — make a sound underfoot that is somewhere between crunching snow and applause.

I went in June, which is nesting season for leatherback sea turtles, and I went for the turtles. This requires patience. You wait on the beach after dark, watching the surf line for a shape that is larger than you expect, moving with a slowness that has nothing to do with weakness. When she came up — a female leatherback, estimated by the ranger at 900 to 1,000 pounds — she moved through the soft sand above the tide line with a determination that seemed geological. She found her spot by some navigational logic encoded before humans existed and began to dig with her rear flippers, methodically, for thirty minutes, until she had excavated a chamber the size of a kitchen pot.

The eggs, white and slightly leathery, dropped in a slow cluster. The ranger counted quietly. One hundred and twelve. She covered them with such careful precision that when she was done the sand was almost unmarked. Then she turned and made her way back to the surf, slowly, heavily, until the Atlantic took her weight and she was gone. The whole thing had taken two hours and I had barely moved. The ranger — a young man from a nearby Arawak community who had been patrolling this beach every night for three months — said this was her second nest of the season. She would be back in ten days to lay again.

Shell Beach protects four species of sea turtle: leatherback, green, olive ridley, and hawksbill. It also sits at the edge of a coastal wetland complex that holds scarlet ibis, manatees in the river mouths, and colonies of wading birds so dense that when something startles them the sound is like a storm. The manatees I didn’t see — they surface briefly and quietly in the mangrove channels — but I spent an afternoon in a canoe watching them show themselves in the brown water, round backs breaking the surface for a breath and submerging again before I could be certain of what I’d seen.

The accommodation here is a simple ranger station with hammocks and a generator that runs for two hours at night. You eat what you brought or what the community cooks — which on my visit was fried fish so fresh it had been swimming four hours earlier, with cassava that the ranger’s mother had prepared and sent along in a covered pot. I slept better than I had in weeks, wind through the screen, the sound of the Atlantic a few hundred metres away through the dark.

When to go: Leatherback nesting peaks March through July, with June the most active month. Green and hawksbill turtles nest later, into August and September. The beach is accessible only by guided boat tour, arranged through eco-tourism operators in Georgetown or Charity. Allow at least two days — one day is not enough to guarantee a turtle encounter, and the journey itself deserves time.