Whale watching

The day has come to see my beloved humpies again!! :)

Breakfast wasn't available in time so we schnaffled the chocolate croissants we had bought the night before - amazing, mainly because they had a bucket load of chocolate in each!

At 8:30am we went to the meeting point for our tour ($30) and were put on a bus and driven north for an hour to Puerto Lopez.

After a bit of a wait we got on a boat with about 15 other people and headed out to sea. Barely 5 minutes later I noticed a footprint and we had found our first whales very close to shore: a mum-calf pair. We scampered along the very slippery sides to sit on the front of the boat and had some good sightings. Another boat joined us after five minutes so we went back into the main part of the boat and headed out to sea.

The sea was choppy making it bumpy and hard to spot the whales. However unlike murky Montanita, it was gloriously sunny here. After about half an hour we came across a group of at least 7 whales, possibly a competitive group but not really fast enough. There was head raising, grunting and a fair bit of jostling. We stayed with them for quite a while and they didn't seem bothered to have us right up beside them.

I think the driver then got confused as we headed towards a pod of 4 and stopped as they were heading right for us! Cue some fin waving and slapping before they dove beneath us and headed on their way. They split into two pairs and we followed one before then racing back to the larger group which was a very wet and bouncy ride on the front! Sadly we then had to head back. We made a short stop at a wavy beach near the port, supposedly for snorkelling. It didn't look very likely to have much to see, but we dove in along with a few others. Visibility was nil so we quickly got out as everybody else onboard was enjoying watermelon and banana cake!

We then headed back to port and after a bit of a wait got the bus about 3pm back to Montanita to some loud reggaeton tunes - overtaking anything in sight but stopping briefly to let a huge tarantula cross the road!

After a quick shower we joined a fellow Brit, Andrea, from the tour for a drink then had some street Mexican for dinner. Anna went out for some drinks to celebrate Andrea's 50th birthday but I stayed in the hotel - I was shattered and my bum needed some rest after all the boat bouncing! She stumbled in, hardly drunk after 1am, and apparently there isn't as much of a party scene as we'd been led to believe. She forgot to put on bug lotion and woke up with 24 huge bites on her right leg (and only a couple on her left!).

Whilst the boat driving wasn't as good as I'm used to in terms of tracking the whales, I was pleased that we were the only boat with the whales and the crew acted considerately. In such conditions and after reading several blogs I had very low expectations of seeing much so we were very lucky to have spent so much time with so many whales - amazing day!!!Read more