Mirissa and the Whales

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Whales. Sri Lanka has lots of them. For part of the year the best places are off the northeast coast, at other times the west coast. Right now the best place is the south coast, offshore from the town of Mirissa to be exact. What sort of whales, you may ask? Only the biggest of them all, the blue whale. (I can't write or read that without hearing David Attenborough excitedly exclaiming "the blue whale!"). But not only blue whales, although that is the species for which Sri Lanka has become famous in whale-watching circles. There are also sperm whales, fin whales, sei whales, humpback whales, minke whales, pilot whales, killer whales, false killer whales, spinner dolphins, common dolphins, bottlenose dolphins, and more. It's a cetacean buffet.

To get to Mirissa I took a bus for three hours from Tissamaharama to Matara, and then another one for about an hour to Mirissa. I had found a place called Nature Inn on booking. com which cost 1100 LKR per night. To my mild surprise there were very many places advertised for around that price. It does seem like the south of Sri Lanka is the opposite of the north, with cheap accommodation (in the 1000 LKR range) being easy to find but restaurants being more expensive (the difference being something like 250 LKR for lunch in the north versus 350 or 400 in the south). Nature Inn was okay to stay at, not great but perfectly good. I spent the first night itching away like something was biting me all over but there were no bites and I was under a mosquito net. The next day I found the bed covered in ants. Just one of the many Bed Faunas I have encountered. There were also toque macaques in the garden every day; in the morning I wouldn't let them steal my breakfast so they stole one of my socks instead. Nature Inn also run their own whale-watching boat, or are an agent for one - sometimes in Sri Lanka it can be difficult to determine who owns what - which costs 2000 LKR for a trip. Their WIFI was down that day so I couldn't check reviews of their operation or of the many other whale-watch advertisers around the town, so I booked a trip on their boat for the next morning and hoped it was an ethical whale-watch and not a cowboy outfit.

The whale trip turned out to be fine with no harrassment of the whales as can happen in some places or with some operators. The owner of Nature Inn didn't own the boat as he had said, it was a company called Whale Horizon (or "Whale Horizen" according to their life jacket branding). The owner of Nature Inn was using an advertisement for a company called Mirissa Bay Watching to sell tickets for the other company, or something like that. It seemed complicated. There are several real companies with boats, and no doubt a hundred or more "companies" which are just names to sell tickets through for the real companies. Every hotel in town sells whale tours. All the boats go out at 7am for a few hours - I think just until they see whales rather than being for a specific time period. The trip I was on was back at the dock by about 10am. That was okay by me because I was frightfully seasick.

I like the idea of going out on boats to look for cetaceans and seabirds on the open ocean, but as soon as I'm out there I remember why I simultaneously hate it so much. I really am not a good sailor. What's worse is that I am such a bad sailor that nowadays even the knowledge that I am going out on a boat that day makes me start to feel sick in advance. It is rather inconvenient. Generally I'm alright when the boat is moving, it is when it stops and starts bobbing up and down that the bad seasickness comes in. And no matter how you try, once it starts to well up you have no choice but to hurl over the side. Then you feel fine for ten or twenty minutes before suddenly needing to vomit again, except this time you have nothing left to throw up so you're just stripping out the lining of your stomach instead. By then you're past caring about the animals, you just want to get off the boat, but you can't because you're in the middle of the ocean. There's not much of a worse feeling to have to endure.

I had brushed up on my Sri Lankan seabirds before the trip, making sure I knew the distinctions between the petrel species, which frigatebirds were which, the gulls and terns found there, and I had spent a lot of time looking at photos of boobies on the internet. I didn't need to do any of that because the only seabirds I saw close enough to ID were great crested terns. Some dolphin backs were seen briefly, not well enough for me to say what they were - and this particular company didn't seem interested in letting people know what things were beyond "dolphins" or "whales". I think some of the other companies, like Raja And The Whales (which is 6000 LKR per person), may be more professional in that regard.

After maybe two hours my stomach suddenly decided enough was enough, annoyingly right when the first whale was spotted. I couldn't see it from where I was - it was somewhere directly ahead because the people at the bow were pointing - and right then was when I needed to rush for the toilet to throw up. I came back feeling better, but the whale had gone and the boat was moving on. It wasn't long before more were seen luckily, with two or maybe three blue whales off the left of the boat. I thought there were three, one of the boat crew said two and they probably know better than me. Blue whales are so much better to see than sperm whales. Sperm whales just float at the surface, like big logs, and the only interesting bit is when they dive and the tail comes straight up in the air. With blue whales they are actually swimming along at the surface, rising and disappearing, spouting every time the blowhole breaks the surface, and then the tail comes up when they dive. They were pretty close to the boat, so despite sitting firmly in place to reduce the motion, I could see them clearly as they swam. A short while later we came across another two and I saw these just as clearly. Then I went and threw up again.

In 2006 I saw the world's smallest mammal in Thailand (Kitti's hog-nosed bat). It took me ten more years but now I have finally seen the world's biggest mammal.

I was going to leave Mirissa the next day for the Sinharaja rainforest where I could see a whole lot more different birds than in the dry-zone parks, but somewhat inconveniently a strike was called for that day on all private buses, tuktuks, and motorbike taxis, so I had to stay put for an extra night. Presumably the red government buses would still be running but there didn't appear to be any of those going through Mirissa. The strike wasn't about better pay or better hours or anything like that, it was because the government wanted to increase to 25,000 LKR the fine for certain very illegal activities, such as allowing a person with no licence to drive the bus, for driving the bus while drunk, for entering train crossings while a train is coming. You know, things that in most developed countries would likely result in some jail time.

On the strike day there were tuktuks everywhere as normal - apparently the only ones who actually followed the strike were those who didn't want to earn any money that day. The private buses weren't running, but I did see a couple of the red government buses pass through, presumably having been put on the route for the day. So I could have left that day after all. Never mind, at least I got to waste a day needlessly.

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