I was inspired by thisismylife's recent blogging challenge on @liketu, 'The 30 Pictures 30 Stories Challenge'.
Which was originally inspired by rubencress '30 day not-so ordinary ordinary items challenge'.
Both are great challenges to encourage daily posting on hive.
This challenge is pretty open-ended; please feel free to follow my formula, or thisismylife's or rubencress' challenge structures listed in their posts linked above š¼
The only stipulations are that you post one picture daily with a personal story for 30 days.
Write your story/anecdote to the best of your ability, and use the tag #30stories and/or the #notsoordinary tag if you're following rubencress' challenge. It is also advised to use the #challenge tag.
As I am a professional writer outside of hive blockchain and only dabble as an amateur photographer, I thought I'd follow thisismylife's challenge format to tell some stories and anecdotes about my strange life.
I first visited Akumal in 2017 when visiting the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.
Iāve read quite a few reviews about Akumal on trip advisor praising it for its quiet and chilled-out atmosphere, comparing it to Playa del carmen and extolling it as a much more serene, beautiful destination.
All I can say to this is maybe for the humans!
Akumal is a shallow bay where an active seagrass meadow grows which is frequented by mainly juvenile green turtles.
Iāve been scuba diving for many years now, and I have a certain (low level if Iām honest) capacity for breath hold and free diving. But as we walked down the beach clutching our masks, fins and snorkels we were accosted by a group of Mexican fellas attempting to snatch my expensive dive gear out of my hands,
āYou pay us for equipment.ā One guy shouted at me as the other tried his best to take my fins from me.
I have to admit that at this point I lost my rag and threw this smaller guy bodily into the sea which was only a few steps from where this was happening.
Two more guys circled me as to his credit my American friend who Iād only met a few days earlier pushed one of them away causing us to square off one on one.
The next thing we knew, a group of āmarine conservation peopleā[ rushed over from the main turtle information centre and informed us that we couldnāt swim in the bay without paying for a boat and this was what the touts were trying to explain to us.
I have travelled all over the world, and I have a pretty good bullshit radar which was going off like mad at this point.
I calmly explained to the āconservation operativeā that Iād just come from Tulum volunteering with civitatis who were operating night-time turtle breeding observations and site marking.
The general point of the āconservation operativeā in Akumal seemed to be that the beach was private and that we didnāt have the right to swim from the beach out to the reef.
So I calmly explained that you canāt own a stretch of sea and if we walked to the promontory and swam across the reef into the bay, there was no legal way they could stop us from enjoying the sea.
He admitted this was the case and then after we had entered the water we were hounded by boats for a time until they finally gave up.
My opinion as someone who has undergone many conservation projects, both scuba diving and on land in various marine environments, is that Akumal was (or at least at that time) a theme park for tourists to snorkel with the feeding green turtle.
Beyond the wider question of whether anyone should have been allowed on this beach/bay harassing the wildlife with their presence, or if there should have been a more controlled amount of people (because they were not controlling the number of boats in the bay when we were there), is moot in my mind.
What I experienced in Akumal, as an experienced diver, was harassment by some strange type of Mexican mafia who were making money exploiting the turtles and their habitat. As you can probably tell by the tone of this blog, it made me very angry at the time, and in the longer term, it has made me question the validity of any conservation project I become involved with these days.
I have become much more discerning in my research and choices.
Thanks for reading šæ
All photos and media design used in this post are my own.
Camera: Samsung S7 Smart Phone.
To check out my poetry performed to music please visit my YouTube channel Mainly Poetry.
