Las Ballenas

I´m not really sure what to write about in this post, because my thoughts are disorganised. I guess I could write about:

- whale watching
- clothes shopping
- the next pueblo over
- motoconchos
- cheese

Let´s see how far I get.

On the Samana peninsula, where I live, the biggest tourist attraction between January and March is the whales. The whole population of the North Atlantic Humpback whales come to Samana bay to mate and breed every year. And though this is a huge event for tourists, many locals never see the whales, so the school makes a big effort to go every year. The scholarship students get sponsored to go, and a wonderful whale watching boat gives the school a discount so that students and parents can go at a discounted rate. We took various cars and a guagua to Samana, about 30 minutes drive away at 9am. From there, we got on a boat to go to Cayo Levantado, aka Bacardi Island because of the Bacardi ads filmed there in the 80s (trying to find a clip got me stuck in a 20 minute YouTube Bacardi commercial loop).

My colleagues Estacey, Estefaney and Estefaney´s daughter Samantha on the boat.

Surprisingly, the boat had lifejackets for all the kids.

Cayo Levantado

Cayo Levantado is a beautiful island about 3km squared. It now has a big hotel on it and facilities, so it´s not a exactly a deserted Carribean island, but the white sands and clear turqoise water make it well worth it.

Me and Laura, my daughter for the day.

My housemate Andrea with the kids.

The gorgeous Benneton ad that is our students

After 3 hours hanging out on Cayo Levantado, in which I managed to get pretty burnt (P20 suncream isn´t THAT water resistant I´ve learned...), we got picked up by the whale watching boat and went in search of whales. 

Watching for whales with Andrea

The Humpbacks don´t feed in these warm waters, so we didn´t see any of the cool feeding behaviours, but we did see some other stuff. First a juvenile whale kind of sidled up to the boat and just hung out there, relaxing on the top of the water. He/she was obviously interested in the boat and whenever he went under, he came up again on the other side. He basically did nothing except for lie on the top of the water, a resting position which is how they sleep. He was keeping an eye on us though. It was cool because we could see him up close, but also kind of boring afrer a while. We moved on. We could see spouts in the distance and some tails diving, there were definitely a lot of whales in the bay - 12,000 pass through every year. Eventually we found a mother and a baby. It was the first sighting of this baby, and he was the 18th this year. The baby breached (jumped up) more than a dozen times so we could see his whole body, and once the mother breached too. Kim, our guide, told us that the mother feeds her baby 200 litres of milk a day, and that it is thick like yoghurt. She pumps it out and the baby, swimming under her, catches it in his mouth. For 6 months the mother doesn´t eat, and while she loses up to a third of her body weight, baby puts on 100 pounds a day. 

I didn´t take any photos because I kind of feel there´s no point - I don´t want to miss anything by looking through my iPhone the whole time - but below is one taken by a student. It seems pretty far away, but it wasn´t really. Or maybe it was, but it didn´t seem it...

The whale watching group we went with, Whale Samana, have wonderful photos on their Facebook page and they took more amazing ones on our trip, but haven´t uploaded them yet.

All my typing has made me miss Zumba on the beach. Which is kind of a relief, because it´s very public and lots of men pull over just to watch us. It´s pretty embarrassing, even for an attention-seeking performer like myself.

Photo by Kiran Bourget Snyder