Ranau Abang

Early the next day, we set off for Rantau Abang, the next stop on our turtle watching mission. This time we were after the rare leatherback turtles. We had to take three local buses to get there (Cherating – Kemaman – Dungun – Rantan Abang). On the last leg, we were packed in tight and fearful of missing our stop, but the driver came through for us once again. When the dust settled, we stood facing the turtle information center.

There were basically two places to stay in Rantau Abang – Awang’s and Ismail’s. We chose Awang’s, and there were a lot of different rooms available. We chose something middle of the road for RM 20, but found it pretty dirty (the cheesy, dirty bed cover they used at some of the lower quality places and the crappy square foam pillow – it was times like these that Beth and I were truly thankful for our sleeping sheets that we always carried with us, to allow for a good night’s sleep.. though why couldn’t I remember that later in Phnom Penh….) and the toilet/shower combo was such that you had to straddle the toilet in order to take a shower – don’t try this at home please.

I felt a little like Mulder waiting for news of a leatherback turtle sighting… “we wanted to believe….”. The whole area existed because of turtle watching, and the turtle information centre had a lot of info on the plight of the leatherback turtle, and an interesting video. In reality, the chances of seeing a turtle laying eggs on the beach were quite low – only about 60 turtles laid eggs in the 6-month long season, although they did it multiple times.

We wanted to believe…. The best chance was actually watching them release baby turtles from the hatcheries, which was much easier to predict. We had shown up at prime time – August, a full moon, and clear skies, but after strolling up and down the beach for a couple of hours, we gave up and returned to our bungalow in hopes that someone would wake us up if they spotted a turtle. It didn’t’ happen! The next morning, we made the decision to leave rather than stay and risk dieing of boredom – there just wasn't a whole lot to do in Rantau Abang.