Gabriele from Italy, summer 2007
Swimming with a turtle, I can’t believe my eyes; there is a Caretta caretta just 3 metres from me... I arrived in Katelios 3 days ago and today Sam and Dan, two British volunteers, together with Elena invite me to go snorkelling in the sea. Not far from the coast, on a reef, we see a big turtle. The white barnacles are spots on her shell and she is slowly moving her flippers, in a music of movements, something like a piano theme. It is amazing, the fantastic welcome of the sea.
But let's start from the beginning! I come from Italy, more precisely from a mountain region of the North called Trentino. One day I see the notice of this group at my university. Just time for a quick reflection and I immediately send an email to Manuel. When the agreement is found, the problem with university and family is just a question of time...and I leave! After a long and quite adventurous trip on two ferry boats I join the other guys in Katelios, travelling with Wendy on a pick-up truck through Kefalonia in the night. So began my work period. The campsite is placed under olive trees. The other volunteers are searching unsuccessfully for a place with some shade and fresh air for their tents, it really is a mission impossible. In a place like Kefalonia the sun wins over everything! Anyway, when you find a place like that you can’t avoid smiling! After the first morning the work starts, the person responsible for all the camp activities tells you what to do and which is your role. You are given a rota, your timetable. Your day revolves around this piece of paper, and you must keep in mind that on every shift there is another person working with you, so you can’t leave him or her alone! This is the official part of the work, the worst one for me as I personally hate things such as timetables, but I quickly understand that it’s a necessity if you have to coordinate 15-20 people, mostly students, for a long period of time.
Now imagine a dinner with many young people in Kefalonia. Just after sunset, more or less at 9 o'clock, four of us start preparing their bags and leave the camp for the night patrol, with the good luck of the others. I can’t forget one moonlit night at Mounda cape, when I was waiting for my patrol to begin, and the beach phone rang. Elena told me there was a turtle on the beach. Edana said that I absolutely couldn’t miss that show, and we ran together to the other side of the beach. Lying on the sand we admired the end of the egg laying... I was speechless! Every early morning at sunrise we would go to the wonderful beaches of Koroni and Lefkas. Those are places where you can really understand what pure nature is. Under your canoe there is a show of blue tones that is impossible to describe. Many moments were wonderful for me: the first nest hatching, the call of Manuel and the run to Mounda, my first excavation of a nest, the eyes of 15 girls, two tourists that chose to get up at 6 in the morning to see the hatchlings... It was incredible to see the awe and wonder in their eyes when we saw the little tracks, and I asked them to help us measure the nest!
Of course during my 50 days in Kefalonia there has been far more than pure work. There were the lunches and the dinners with the other volunteers for examples, when Kate used to put sweetcorn in my Italian Amatriciana and “kill my sauce”. And what about the dinner with Manuel and Giulia in Argostoli, waiting for a turtle to be sent to Athens, and our super barmaid coming from Rome (fantastic angel for the turtle people!) and her fantastic cocktails under the sun of the afternoon and the thinking beer of the evening? I think there are so many flavours from that period, I could write a book!
And that is my advice to you: go there, go to Katelios, know the turtle people and work with them.