I’m sure I’ve mentioned in another blogpost how we don’t like taking paid tours – usually we find out where the tours go, and then do our own self tour BUT in the case of whale watching, we were forced to go on a tour. Todd & I have both been on whale watching tours before, mostly in Maui with the humpback whales, while watching them do their thing. But in Baja, we had the opportunity to pet them on this tour! RIGHT?! How cool would that be?
Excited for whales!
The lagoon area near the salt mine is where the gray whales breed and birth, due to the warm water temperature and higher salt content of the water. When the baby is born, the momma has to push baby up to the surface to get them breathing through blow hole, so with the higher salt content the water it is more buoyant and makes it easier for her to push the baby up to the surface. Our boat ride out and through the lagoon, allowed us to cross paths with a tugboat pulling a barge of salt to the export dock – this was pretty cool, but i’ve lost the pictures, bummer.
With the gray whales, they don’t have teeth, but they have these things in their mouths that are like filters (it kind of looks like hay actually) and that’s how they eat. For the babies though, with the narrow shape of head and face, there is no nipple to latch on too, so to feed the baby, the momma flips on her side and squishes her fin to her body and squirts thick milk (like yogurt) into the babies mouth. Gray whales have 2 separate blow holes, one above their eyes and the other a few feet back. When the whales pop up vertically in the water and sort of spin, they are trying to see what’s going on, on the surface. It didn’t take long for us to spot the whale momma’s and babies. It was cool watching the momma’s “push” their babies towards the small tour boats – probably showing off their new baby’s, so we could pet them. We took pictures, but deleted most of them, since they are constantly moving and they didn’t turn out, so check out the video’s we got instead: Whales whales whales
On the way back to shore, we saw some seals sunning themselves: Screeching seals
Although Guerrero Negro is not the prettiest town and we didn’t think it had much to offer, both the salt tour and the whale watching were probably 2 of the top 10 highlights of this trip for us!