Thursday, August 03, 2006
Where Are These Whales Then?
South Africa is of course famous for numerous land mammals, but it is also one of the best places in the world (so they say) for watching another group of mammals from the land. Several species can be sighted from the coast but it is the Southern Right Whale which is most commonly seen, and for once we have arrived bang in the middle of whale season. The self appointed capital of the whale watching coastline is the town of Hermanus, which has a 'Whale Crier' who walks around telling the tourists where the recent sightings have been. It was a nice little town, we stayed in a great guesthouse, and were directed to an excellent fish & chip shop, BUT over the course of a week and about 5 or 6 different towns it was the only place where we DIDN'T see any whales!!But other than that we seemed to see whales everywhere. On the first evening that we arrived on the coast we stopped in a layby to get a bag from the back of the car and realised that there were several whales out in the bay. After that (and the complete lack of them in Hermanus) we just seemed to find them everywhere, find a small village or deserted layby pull up the car and there they were, sometimes only a few metres from the shore. Our best whale encounter was even closer than this, but that you'll have to wait until the next installment for that.
A few days after Hermanus we drove to a national park called De Hoop (which is pronounced more like De Whip), this was really in the middle of nowhere and was completely inaccessible without a car. We thought we'd seen the last of 50km drives down dirt roads back in Australia, but no, South Africa has plenty and to make it more fun it seems impossible to tell from the maps which roads are unsealed! It was well worth it though, as we stood on the sand dunes there were only about half a dozen other people around but there were at least 30 or 40 whales within 1/4 mile of the beach.
You'll be pleased to know that we actually got some reasonable whale pictures over the course of a few days. We've even got a few of the whales breaching. Not fully airborne unfortunately, but these whales grow to a length of 15 metres and a weight of 45 tons, so even halfway out of the water is an impressive feat!!
![[Valid RSS]](http://roundtheworld.mm.st/img/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}