Yesterday, we caught a jeepney from Maasin to Padre Burgos to try to find a boat to take us whale watching, which is the main reason that we came to Leyte. Luckily, we met a Philippino guy called Sol who was also trying to find a boat and managed to book one for just the three of us.
So, today we have been whale watching. And what a great day! We had a bit of a stressful start, trying to find a bus or jeepney to get us here for 7am (Philippinos don't do early) but finally managed to get there and onto the boat.
We went across the bay to the point where the whalesharks have been coming to eat and picked up some local fishermen in their little canoes to spot for us and then settled in to wait for something to appear.
9am came, no sight. 10am still no sight. 11am not a peep. 12pm still nothing.
By 2pm I had resigned myself to not seeing any whalesharks when we got a shout from one of our spotters. We had a mad scrabble into our snorkel gear and jumped in!...
And right in front of me was an enormous (and I do mean enormous) whaleshark. Light grey with pale speckles on it. Big wide mouth open and sucking in food. And heading straight for me! I managed to swim out of the way and the shark glided gently past me. It was so graceful and looked as though it were barely moving, just a gentle swish of its tail.
And then another one appeared! They were both about 8 metres long. Which is really big when you are swimming next to them. Our guide duckdived down next to one of them and then we really got a sense of scale! He wasn't even as tall as the whales tail, let alone the rest of the body.
We swam with them for about 10 minutes and then the spotters found another, bigger whale a bit further down the shore. We swam over, but all I got to see of that one was the tail because it swam so fast I couldn't keep up.
It was such a wonderful experience and left me with such a smile on my face. In fact, I haven't stopped smiling since. This is one day I will never forget.
Oh, and sorry, I didn't have an underwater camera so got no pics of the whales. oops.
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