There’s a point, winding along the route from the western coastal city of Mangalore to Kasaragod, when everything changes. The incessant horn-honking on the roads – previously clotted with trucks, cars, buses, motorbikes and tuk-tuks – abruptly ceases, replaced by the sound of waves and a scene of golden sands, perching egrets and teetering sandpipers.

This natural beauty is something most visitors to India don’t see. The beaches of Goa and southern Kerala hold the reputations as India’s coastal beauties of choice, but in between them, these sands at the northern edge of Kerala are only just starting to find their place in the sun, driven by a new eco-appreciation.

It’s on this beach that I meet Praveen Kumar, the secretary of Neithal, an NGO that runs the rough-around-the-edges Turtle Conservation Hatchery. We walk across the sands to a wooden pen where a tub houses two large Olive Ridley sea turtles, a threatened species. "They’re 40 years old," says Kumar. "They can’t go back to the sea because they can’t dive. They each lost an arm after getting caught in fishing nets." Next he leads me to a wooden pen with a more optimistic story. Here, sand covers dozens of turtle eggs until they hatch a month or two later. "We pay fishermen a small fee for gathering any eggs they may find," says Kumar, the goal being to prevent people and animals from taking the eggs for food, giving the hatchlings a fighting chance to survive to maturity. After the eggs hatch, Neithal releases the turtles onto the sand at about 5am. Almost 24,000 turtles have been released here in the past 15 years. If you’re lucky enough to be around when they’re released, you’ll watch them crawl across the sand into the ocean.