Gulf of Mannar

We awoke at 630, and we still hadn’t heard anything from the guy who was going to be taking us on the dolphin trip today...as we only had today to do it we were starting to get a little anxious that we may miss our chance to do it. By 7 o’clock we were speaking to the owner of the guesthouse about arranging it with another person, but it was almost as if he could hear us saying this as he turned up just after this conversation. He apologised for not responding to our messages as he was night fishing- even though I sent him 3 messages throughout the day yesterday...? A little annoyed at the shocking communication we eventually got onto the boat with 2 crew members, (because in Sri Lanka they have to have double the number of staff to do a job) and set off for the trip, making a stop off at a very unofficial looking office to pay for the park tickets of $9. The sea was a little rough and our driver was hitting pretty much every wave hard! Tom was sat on the right of the boat and I was on the left. Each wave splashed Tom with water, so he was soaked whilst I remained nice and dry! We eventually saw in the distance a few boats and our driver told us that this is where the dolphins were, and then we started to be able to see all the splashes that the dolphins were making and I got very excited to see them up close! Before long our boat was in the area where a pod of 10,000 spinner dolphins were!! 10,000!!! Different groups of dolphins would surface, play around and then dive back down to get more food so we didn’t move our boat too much we just waited for dolphins to come to us, which wasn’t exactly difficult with so many around. It’s difficult to put it into words how incredible the experience was. Tom and I both sat at the front of the boat with our legs in the water as dolphins swam just feet away from us, we could almost touch them they were that close.

We stayed for around 2 hours, having seen a crazy amount of dolphin before heading back to our place. We were pretty hungry so decided to take the push-bikes that the guesthouse allowed us to take for free and went on the hunt to find some food. We found some little snacks and I even grabbed some instant noodles to have back at the place and we had a stupid argument over literally nothing....perhaps we had spent too much time together coupled with some early starts, so we decided to have a few hours separate and have some solo time to ourselves on the beach. I went across to a deserted beach which was cut off by the incoming sea, so had to walk through deep water to get to it I chilled here for a bit reading my book which I was eager to finish before heading to India. After a few hours we come back together, showered and got ready and made our way into town in Greta. However, Greta was struggling as she didn’t have much fuel left at all. We found the fuel station and literally as we were pulling in the engine cut out! Talk about perfect timing and place to run out of fuel! We filled up on fuel and went deeper into the town where we found a local restaurant. We both got a Kottu, which was great and then we made our way back where we chilled out and packed our stuff up to leave tomorrow.Read more