| Whale Watching Samaná Bay, January 2003
Both Habiba and I have been planning to make this trip to see the whales for quite some time, and this year we actually did it.
Samaná We flew to Santo Domingo from St. Thomas and stayed the first two nights at the Palacio Hotel in the old section of Santo Domingo known as the Zona Colonial. The hotel was the former residence of Buenaventura Baez, who was President of the Dominican Republic several times during the 19th century, and has been recently renovated and tastefully decorated.
Hotel Palacio The hotel was oozing with colonial charm and the staff is friendly and helpful. Our room was unique in that it is the only hotel in Santo Domingo, maybe the world that has an old stone well right in the room. It exists from colonial days. There’s light inside so you can see down to the bottom and the top and is covered to with glass, apparently to prevent anyone from falling in.
The Well We spent the first two days in the capital touring the historic walled off Zona and spent a good deal of time at the Fortress of Santo Domingo.
Fotaleza Ozama We also asked around about transportation to Samaná. There is scheduled air and bus service from Santo Domingo, but we were more interested in taking a taxi so that we could travel at our leisure and see the countryside. Asking around, we got a range of prices and met several taxi drivers all of whom ready and willing to drive us to Samaná some three or four hours away. Then we met Felipe. “I’m from Samaná,” he said. “My mother is in the military there. She’s a master Sergeant.” “He’s the man,” went through both our minds at the same time and we arranged with Felipe to leave the first thing next morning. Arriving at Samaná, we checked into a hotel and then we went with Felipe to meet his family. They were lovely people and. like many Domincans. they had a beautiful garden, something Habiba and I are very interested in. Samaná is tranquil and beautiful. Fresh fruit and seafood are abundant and the peopel are friendly. There are more coconut palms on the Samaná Peninsulan than I've ever seen in my life.
Then we took a drive to the eastern shore of the peninsula to a beach called Las Terrenas, where we walked down the beach to the end where a small river emptied into the sea. Then back to the hotel dinner and a night’s sleep.
Las Terrenas The next day we met Felipe, who had stayed in Samaná at his mother’s house and he took us to a place a few miles away from the center of Samaná where we hired a small outboard-powered boat, locally called a yola, with captain and crew to take us to see the whales.
Frederico It turns out that Felipe, despite being born and growing
up in the seaside town of Samaná, had never been to sea before.
The boat was small and the seas were rough, five and six foot waves,
but Felipe wasn’t afraid. Actually he had a ball.
Felipe, Gerald, Martine and Frederico The captain and crew knew there stuff and it wasn’t long before we were looking face to face with real live humpback whales.
The ancestors of whales were land mammals that evolved about 100 million years ago. About 50 million years later they returned to the sea, where they developed a smooth hairless skin to facilitate movement in the water, underneath which is a layer of blubber that can be as much as two feet thick which helps maintain the body temperature of these warm-blooded mammals and can provide nutrition in times when food is scarce. Legs became fins and a powerful tail developed that moves up and down instead of side to side like fish and that serves to propel these giants through the water at respectable speeds. Their nasal passages are on the top of their head so that they can swim and breath at the same time while on the surface.
Whales also possess a highly developed brain and nervous system. Their brains are bigger, have more convolutions or wrinkles, thus more surface area and have a higher brain weight to body weight ratio than humans. Every year, during the months of January February and March, the humpback whale comes to the Bay of Samaná in the Dominican Republic and to the Silver Banks located just north of the island in order to reproduce in the warm shallow waters there. They spend the rest of the year in one of five areas of the North Atlantic: the Gulf of Maine, the Gulf of San Lorenzo, Terranova, Labrador, Greenland and Iceland. The ones that travel the furthest from the Caribbean, those that summer in Iceland, travel about 3,000 miles beginning in November and average about six knots. Humpback whales average about 45 feet long and live for about 40-50 years and are presently in danger of extinction. The Dominican Republic is a non-whaling nation and the Dominican government protects the species while in their waters |
