There are few times when you as a tourist can honestly say you have been privileged to witness one of the great dramatic moments in nature.

At those rare times you feel as if you're part of a National Geographic special, when you get to see what few others have seen, face to face.

Eventually, if you are lucky enough to experience such times, you will be struck dumb by the beauty of the world around us.

For me, one such time was under a full midnight moon on a beach in Mozambique some years ago, when I watched a group of tiny baby loggerhead turtle hatchlings make their comic, yet desperately serious, hobbling, fumbling dash across 200m of what could have been hostile sand to the comparative safety of the Indian Ocean waves.

'Only one in a thousand eggs is likely to survive'

And that wheel of privilege came full circle again recently - one cloudy, moonless night on a beach in northern KwaZulu-Natal.

It was almost as though she was crying: a sticky, mucus-like substance flowed from the corners of her eyes as the big leatherback turtle mother struggled to cover the nest she had just made.

The mother was in a trance now, having deposited about 100 smooth, completely round, eggs about a metre below the surface of the sandy KwaZulu Natal beach.

Cry she well might, because the chances of more than one or two of this clutch of eggs ever making it to adulthood are worse than slim. Our guide, Bheki Myeni, told us that just one in a thousand leatherback-turtle eggs survive.

On the beach and sand dunes north of Cape Vidal this muggy summer night, we saw the evidence of the desperate odds these beautiful, peaceful creatures face in their struggle for survival.

A ripple of clapping broke out from among us

More than half a dozen leatherback and loggerhead turtle nests had already been disturbed, tracked down through the sense of smell by ruthless predators such as honey badgers. Shells lay broken open, scattered round in groups, flecks of white on the brown sand.

Between November and January, the leatherbacks - which spend all their lives in the sea and come ashore only to lay - and their small cousins, the loggerhead turtles, come back to the beaches of northern KwaZuluNatal and neighbouring Mozambique.

After a life lived thousands of kilometres away they return, unerringly, to the beaches where they were hatched and from which they originally beat the odds.

During the breeding period, said the other guide, Jeff Asherwood, the mothers will come ashore a number of times, each time laying the clutch of about 100 eggs. It's a case of safety in numbers: the more eggs the mothers lay, the better the chances of some eggs making it through to hatchling stage.

The beach is part of the Cape Vidal Nature Reserve, where the management rules of Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife dictate that there is no human interference in the processes of nature, which means nothing is done to protect the onshore turtle nests.

Asherwood said that further south, in the St Lucia area, concerned and conservation-minded residents have erected fences around identified nests to give the eggs the best possible chance of hatching.

The wildlife authorities are also very strict about the number of people who can go on turtle-viewing tours and the rules they must abide by.

Asherwood and Myeni run Euro-Zulu Safaris, a tour outfit based in St Lucia on the Elephant Coast of northern KZN. Between November and February the company operates turtle tours along the beach. The early part of the season offers the chance to see the turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs, while January and February bring the possibility of encountering the hatchlings as they head out on their perilous life journey.

Both men have had to complete the KZN guide tests and must comply with the viewing rules. These include causing minimal disturbance to the turtles.

We travelled first in a 4x4 along the beach north of Cape Vidal, for 11km, which is the limit for special tour vehicles.

Then we dismounted and headed off on foot. Although Asherwood and Myeni both carried flashlights and headband-mounted torches, they turned them on for only a few seconds at a time. Myeni explained that this was so that the turtles coming ashore would not be traumatised. He said that if they were spooked or disoriented - because they navigate with reference to light, even to minute amounts reflecting off the waves on a dark night - they might go back to the sea and not lay.

Asherwood warned us, as we left, that a turtle sighting was not guaranteed - hence the company's promise to refund 20 percent of the tour charge if the evening's expedition was not successful.

We walked, in itself a strangely numbing experience in the dark, with no signs of habitation or stars because of the cloud above. But we saw nothing. Returning to the vehicle, despondency began to set in as we wound back along the beach towards Cape Vidal.

Then Myeni braked suddenly. Across the front of the vehicle was a wide, tractor-like track heading up the beach. As we waited, Myeni headed up the dune for confirmation: yes, a leatherback, looking around for a place to dig her nest.

But we couldn't follow straight away, because, Myeni said, they had to be sure the turtle was actually going to dig and go ahead and lay. Asherwood explained that, once the laying process had begun, the turtle would sink into a trance-like state in which the lights and cameras would not bother her.

Even when the two guides signalled that the process had started, we were initially kept behind the magnificent creature, keeping the light behind her. We watched, fascinated, as she deposited her precious cargo of eggs down her egg tube into the soft sand. All perfectly spherical and perfectly white.

Then, once the eggs were laid, the mother began the laborious task of covering up the nest and then laying false trails to try and put off predators. It was exhausting to watch her and she was quite clearly struggling, as moving her 600kg body must have consumed vast amounts of energy.

Once the laying was complete, she headed back to sea, now out of her trance and appearing confused. She was gently guided towards the waves by the judicious use of the light from our guides' torches and lanterns. As the waves crashed over her, she suddenly seemed more energised and, tossing up great spouts of water with her massive flippers, pushed herself off the beach, gathering speed for her run through the surf.

A ripple of clapping broke out from among us spectators. Thank you. Thank you for allowing us to be part of your world. Thank you for reminding us that this sort of world exists and that we need to fight tooth and nail to keep it that way for our children's children and beyond...

• This article was originally published on page 0 of Saturday Star on January 28, 2005