Turtle Island
January 26th 2007 06:49
'Turtle Island' is an obscure-ish book I picked up about a year ago for two bucks. It's a book about Ascension Island, namely the study and research of the Green Turtles that emigrate there year after year. I imagine it would be classed as a travel book. I also imagine not that many people would've been falling over each other to read it, owing to the book's esoteric nature. Well, I last read about Ascension Island with this book, and it's something I've come to have an interest in so I thought - what the hell, it's only two bucks. A year and a bit later and I'm heading off to the beach in Bulli and I need to take some beach-reading with me, and this book looks all tropical and evocatively travel-ly so I thought I'd bring it along. It turned out to be quite a nice little read.
'Turtle Island' reads as a kind of travel diary, the author has been invited along to Ascension Island for a month-long stay by some university-based scientist-friends. They are travelling to the island in the hopes of proving or disproving some theories on the Green Turtles that flock to the island every year. Their main motivation is to discover where the Turtles go when they aren't laying eggs, and - if possible - why they come back to the same island every year, and how they navigate their way there. Thankfully, the Turtle-research parts of the book account for less than a third of the text. The author isn't a scientist, he is only there for the experience and to see the island, and so we only get a running commentary on the Turtle studies and the misadventures of the trio of scientists as they attempt to attach radio transmitters to the creatures.
The book is fairly brief, mostly made up of three or four-page chapters, each one dealing with a different aspect of life on the island - it's history, it's people, it's traditions, it's wildlife. Almost everything you could possibly want to known about Ascension is touched on within this book. For instance, we learn that Ascension is home to (according to the Guinness Book of Records) 'the worst golf course on the planet'. The author also makes several allusions to the island's similarity to the moon - mostly in it's remoteness and the lack of vegetation or landmarks on the bulk of the island. In fact, the island is so much like the moon that NASA test-ran their moonbuggy there! These are just two of many interesting little stories with which this book is jam-packed. Anyway, it's a freewheeling narrative that slowly builds a picture of the island's intriguing history piece-by-piece whilst the author relates to us his month-long stay amongst the other transient residents.
Written by an Italian Doctor, Sergio Ghione, and translated into English, the text is fairly straight-forward. It's never flowery or over-the-top, it's short and to the point and is reflective of it's author's broadness of mind, which seems to stem from the vast variety of places he has travelled to (he mentions a few varied and distant locales in passing). Incredibly informative and interspersed with the occasional moments of wry humour and Idiosynchratically-Italian observation, this is a book for anyone who ever had a passing interest in remote and colourful places seldom visited by tourists. The book also comes with a substantial reference section of weblinks that corresponds with each of the subjects discussed in the book's many chapters.
For more information on Ascension Island, check out this blog here
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