This small fishing-harbour beach is famous (or notorious) as a place to snorkel with sea turtles. Apparently the turtles were originally attracted by the scraps of fish being thrown in the water from the fisherman's fish cleaning table on the beach. Now, there's a guy who sits on the dock banging a piece of wood on the dock, pretending to "call the turtles". He then feeds the turtles with fish scraps and demands tips from the tourists. Sometimes he jumps in the water, grabs a turtle and puts it in the snorkeling tourists' laps for photos. All of this is right next to the signs saying not to feed or touch the turtles. Starting at about 10 in the morning the tour buses show up, unloading people from the cruise ships on turtle snorkeling tours. Basically, many people see it as a blatantly unethical shit-show, but the authorities don't seem to bother doing anything about it (imagine if this was happening in Hawaii). On the other hand, the turtles come here willingly and are free to leave if they are feeling harassed. We walked here from our hotel a couple of times (later in the afternoon when most of the tourists had left). It's an interesting place to visit later in the day, but a bit of a madhouse during peak tour times. We swam over here twice from our hotel. It's about a kilometer snorkel along the shoreline from the Marazul Resort.
Along the way, the sand was full of garden eel colonies, which are hard to take pictures of since they retreat into their burrows if you get close.
We reached the dock area. There were about 5 large and small turtles swimming around. The bigger ones were very obese (obviously from eating the fish scraps over a long period of time). Their shells looked like beach balls, which looked pretty bad to me, but it didn't seem to be bothering them. I don't know what kind of health issues it might be causing them. We had to stay away from the area on one side of the dock where all the people from the snorkel tours were crowded around, flailing their arms and legs into each other. I don't know why the snorkel tour companies won't give their customers fins, instead having them all frantically try to tread water.
