Swimming with whales (finally!)

Today, finally I managed to have my chance to do the one thing that most people visit Tonga for- swimming with humpback whales! Each year, hundreds of whales travel from the Antarctica and shelter in the tropical waters around Tonga to give birth, and this makes the island one of only a few places in the world where it's possible to swim with these majestic creatures. Needless to say it's a pretty awesome experience.

Organising the trip had proved to be more difficult than I expected: I had a slot on Saturday booked and confirmed several times through my hostel owner, but on the Friday evening he told me that he hadn't actually ever booked it for me, which was incredibly unhelpful! Instead, I asked him to rearrange for next week, but just before I headed off this morning the tour operators called my guesthouse to let me know that they were cancelling the trips till next week due to high winds. One of the other girls was also booked to go out the same day with a different operator (we hadn't planned very well!) so I got in touch and found out that her tour was still running. Not only that, but if I could get to the dock in half an hour, they had space for me. I was becoming more and more worried that I was going to end up missing my chance to swim with whales at all, so I made a panicked journey through rush hour traffic, and with the help of our favourite taxi driver I made it just in the nick of time!

The set up on the boat is fairly simple: everyone who's swimming gets a wetsuit, flippers and snorkel and as soon as whales come into sight you have to suit up as quickly as possible and jump into the water. It feels a bit like a military operation, with people shouting 'go, go, go!' at you as you yank on your snorkel and jump in and out of the sea over and over. You have to try and stay behind your guide at all times, to stop you getting close enough to the whales to put yourself in danger or upsetting the whales too much, but this wasn't always so easy to do in the chaos! 







We got lucky and managed to see about ten whales from the boat, and we were able to swim with four. Some of the whales had babies and didn't seem to like the boat too much, so we stayed away, but there was a pair of juveniles who kept coming back to see us again and again.

Overall it was an amzing day- I didn't take any pictures of the whales because I was mainly just enjoying the moment- and I'm so glad I finally got the chance to experience the swimming!



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