Early Friday morning I set out with Hanna (the Swedish girl I
met in Columbo), Mary, and Racheal (Michael’s wife) for a whale watching
tour. Mary and Hanna were up to the
Trincomalee hospital to do some work, but they took Friday morning off to play
tourist with me. We set sail on the Indian
Ocean to see the biggest mammals ever to exist (including dinosaurs). Our tour guide was a nice young Sri Lankan woman,
who had studied marine biology in the UK.
She was very knowledgeable, which made for a great trip. She gave us lots of tips on how to identify
the whales, and other facts about fish and dolphins. I was very impressed with her knowledge and
it definitely made the trip so much more interesting.
Our first animal spotting was a large group of spinner
dolphins. They came alongside the boat,
jumping into the air, being very playful.
It was a really cool sight to see.
Our guide said there must have been a school of 250 dolphins, but we saw
about 30 or 40. The reason the dolphins
are called spinner dolphins, is that they jump into the air, and spin around,
sometimes spinning up to 7 times. The
best way to see how many times a dolphin spins is by filming them and playing
it back in slow motion, as they move extremely fast. We were told the dolphins jump for many
reasons: one is that they are trying to knock off sucker fish. By spinning around it knocks the sucker fish
unconscious and they fall off. The other
reason is that it is fun.
After taking some photos and watching the dolphins we headed
out to find some whales. We were told the most commonly seen whales include
sperm whales and blue whales. The blue
whale is the largest and most commonly seen. It is an average 30 meters long, weighs 140 tones,
its heart is the size of a small car, a small child could crawl through its arteries,
and its tail is about 3 meters wide. The
whales off the coast of Sri Lanka are unique to other whales found throughout
the world, because they do not seem to migrate and scientists are not sure why
(until recently, scientists have not been able to study these whales due to the
civil war).
We went out 20 km from the shore, and waited for the whales
to appear. Our guide and the boat man
were very skilled in being able to spot the water spouting up from the
ocean. We saw one or perhaps two whales
during our time out to sea. Unfortunately
we did not see one dive only swimming at the top layer of the waters, which
means we did not see the tail above the water.
However we did have one swim beneath our boat. It was pretty incredible.
After the whale
watching tour I spend the day at the fancy hotel the tour was based out
of. I worked on my tan and relaxed by
the ocean. In the later afternoon I
started my walk back to my hotel (about 10 km away). I met a lot of very friendly Sri Lankan
men. I am very much a celebrity here
with my blonde hair and fair skin. Everyone
is my best friend and wants to speak English to me. Children ran along the beach wanting to shake
my hand and have their picture taken; men would shout at me s “hello, how are
you? Were you from”?
At the end of my walk I sat and watched a group of fishermen
drag in their net. It was not a very
fruitful catch, they may have caught about 20 fish (at most). One of the fishermen talked to me for a
little while before I set off again.
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