The Voss Dufour World Tour

They are my favorite animal. Graceful, acrobatic, powerful, awe inspiring, thunderous, gentle, caring and entertaining to say the least.

The photos above do these animals no justice. None.

I continued my tour of New England during my couple months home and headed out of Plymouth, MA for a Whale Watch with my parents and close family friend. I don’t think I can ever go on another whale watch ever. It was, hands down, the most amazing whale watch–leaps and bounds, literally, beyond what you would dream for a whale watch to be.

As we approached the tip of Provincetown after 60-90 mins of ferrying out of the Plymouth Harbor, a couple whale blowspouts were spotted off the boat’s bow, about 2 miles away. I thought, “here we go. People seeing stuff, perhaps a whale blow, perhaps not and it’s so far away……….. I hope we can get closer.” And it was a bit choppy out, making it even more difficult to scan the horizon for whale activity.

The naturalist on board began her spiel about how Humpback Whales have baleen for teeth, explaining their eating, mating and travel habits. Her speech began to be interrupted by shouts of “tail at 10″ or “blow at 2.” (In an attempt to get everyone on the same page about describing the locations of whale sightings, you had to think of the ship as a clock and then describe the location as the “hour”.)

Then before our eyes, a whale breeched (the best way to describe this is to think of the whale throwing itself out of the water) with a resounding crash as it landed.

I cried.

Seriously. I lack the words to describe how humbling an experience it is to watch whales show a fluke (tail fin), let alone breech for you to see. Mother Nature never fails to impress me and I hold such awe for these creatures.

And so began our acrobatic display of New England’s Large-winged animals. We were lucky and followed a pair of whales, most likely a mother and calf (!!!) for 90 minutes that pretty much went something like this:

Whale fluke, the other whale’s fluke, pause, whale spout, pause, other whale’s spout, pause, pause, pause—where are they??–breech, pause, breech. For NINETY minutes straight. I hope the caps can express my amazement at this show of acrobatics.

“We cannot live for ourselves alone.” –Herman Melville

On our trip, James and I each had special roles. Mine specifically did not involve technology. But I am proud to say that I dabbled a bit today with uploading things, our blog admin tools as well as a healthy dose of patience and my efforts have paid off!

I proudly present video from our time in Australia, feeding the kangaroos!

Better late than never!

We couldn’t help but go back for more entertainment at the Uluwatu temple. Once again the monkeys did not disappoint. This time they stole the camera of an unsuspecting woman. We even watched the whole approach as the monkey ran up to her from behind, jumped onto her,  stole the camera and ran off onto the roof of a nearby building.  No worries tho as a group of 4 small kids quickly ran over as soon as they heard her shrieks and rescued her camera. And shriek she did! (In the photo, she is the woman in a blue sarong facing the building, arms out to her side, facing a temple looking building.)

Personally I think the kids and monkeys are in cahoots with each other.

1. Monkey steals object (camera, hat, glasses) from tourist and runs off.
2. Tourist screams.
3. Kids run over with a bag full of monkey treats (food, candy, peanuts, fruit) and offer it to the monkey in exchange for item.
4. Kid then retrieves item and returns it to the tourist in exchange for the price of whatever candy the monkey chose, which is usually  never the first offering.