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For months - everywhere we went in Sri Lanka - people kept telling us about the sea turtles. But we never saw any. The other night, with the almost-full moon rising just after 9pm, JoJo and I took a walk on 'our' beach and what I thought at first was a rock turned out to be this turtle.

From head to tail she's almost a meter long. We watched her as she clumsily plodded her way from the shoreline up to some palm trees. She's a fast swimmer but on land it's another story. She struggled on four or five steps at a time - and then she'd rest a bit. We hung out with her in the semi-darkness for a couple of hours, watching as she dug hole after hole in the sand. But we didn't actually see her lay any eggs - which is what she was there to do. We think of her visit as our going away present.