A Whale of a Time
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2007
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259
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Trip End
Oct 08, 2008
Hermanus,
Western Cape,
South Africa
Monday, September 22, 2008
So, we're in Hermanus. If you mention this place to other travellers, about half will look at you with a blank stare as though you have just named a town in Siberia, whereas the other half are going there, too. Hermanus is where one goes to watch whales. Every year in the spring they come to Walker Bay to calve, due to the relative safeness of this enclosed piece of water, and they stay and play until it's safe to brave the great, wide, ocean. This, to me, seems much bigger than the great, wide, world, so I give the whales props. While you may be lucky enough to see a humpback, the bay is much more popular among Southern Right Whales (so named because whalers decided they were the "right" whales to hunt, not because of any special sidedness, as I had always wondered)
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. Our traipse down the Cliff Path showed us about a dozen of these behemoths playing in the water. They weren't breaching (apparently it's more common in some areas than others and also during certain weather), but several were playing with their fins and doing something like tail-slapping. I say that the charts called it sailing, but Travis insists that is only for boats. Because they didn't slap their tails, they just stuck them up in the air! Our hostel, Hermanus Backpackers, was rather in between the New Harbor and the Old Harbor, and it led right down to the Cliff Walk. If you go all the way down the walk, it's 1.5 hours. We almost went all the way, but we decided we'd seen enough whales for the day. The best place for whale spotting is definitely in the Old Harbor, but it's really, really best past downtown. We found some great rocky outcroppings to sit on and watch the whales play much closer than they were when we were in town. Still further down the coast we found a mother playing with her calf, who enjoyed laying on his back with his fins sticking out of the water. It was quite cute. And rather unbelieveable that a baby was that big. Most of the time our whale viewing was limited to a head that we could distinguish just under the water. While this is very neat to see, it makes a totally uninteresting photo. Not that we could get great photos anyway, what with our telephoto being gone
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. Next time, said we, and in the meantime we'll just enjoy watching these gentle giants play in the water. Hermanus is only recently become a tourist spot. The locals always knew that the whale came to play every year, but they didn't realize that they could capitalize on it until maybe the last decade. Now, of course, everything in town is all about whales, with whale loving culminating in the Whale Festival. The whale festival is a three-day extravaganza every September, and we were just so lucky to be there on the first day of the festival. And the rain decided to hold off, giving the cutting southern wind a chance to get at us for a minute. We decided that the whale festival was less about whales than about shopping and going green (but whales do want you to be green so they can live). And the sea rescue people would put you in a boat for 24 hours if you wanted to take a survival test/lesson. I wanted to, but Travis said that I wouldn't like it. Anyway, we didn't have time, as we were leaving in maybe 16 hours.
Anyway, even with one good day and two blustery days, Hermanus was a nice little spot to break and engage in that great exercise in patience: whale watching. But in Hermanus the likelihood that your efforts at whale-spotting will meet with success is quite high, and the secret is still well-kept enough that it wasn't crowded at all on the water's edge. Besides, these big beasties are way cool.
Erin
