Swimming with Whale Shark

Port of Djibouti...heading towards the fishing port to catch our boat ride

Evidently one of the things the Bay of Goubet off of Djibouti is famous for is Whale Sharks…there are stories on the web that say that it’s the best place to swim with them and the question is not if we can see one but how many.

Yep! These are the ships that ward off the Somali Pirates of the gulf of Aden

After seeing the two fascinating lakes, the only thing left on my agenda for Djibouti was swimming with the Whale Sharks. Mike also wanted to do it so we booked a boat ride to the Bay of Goubet along with a 3rd person who was a pilot with the French Navy. He seemed like a really laid back guy but we made sure not to quiz him a lot on details about his job.

We set out early in the morning sailing from the fishing port of Djibouti city towards the bay. A little over an hour later close to the Devil Island we turned off the engine and waited for the famous dorsal fin of the shark to show up. Within about 10mins I noticed the famous fin with white spots sticking out of the water and called out to the guide who jumped in as then asked us to jump in with our snorkeling gear.

Blurry image of the shark tail in the top left of the picture

After jumping in I had expected to swim a little bit before spotting the shark …little did I expect that as soon as I opened my eyes under water I was greeted with the sight of the Whale Shark a foot or so away from me. In fact it just swam right across me as I stared in awe. I got a sight of it for about 30 seconds and then it dove straight back into the depths of the ocean never to be seen again. We got back on the boat excited to have seen one but with the expectation of seeing some more. After spending the next hour and a half trying in vain to spot another one, we decided to take a break and head to the shore to snorkel in the coral reef.

All of the underwater pics were courtesy of Mike

Now, I had been snorkeling once before in the Pacific waters off the coast of Costa Rica but the corals here were far better. The arrays of fish were dazzling and the corals were almost sticking out of the water which allowed me to observe the spectacular colors of the corals and the fish in bright sunlight and clear shallow water.

After snorkeling for a while we went back to the deeper waters to spot the sharks but our luck did not change over the next couple of hours. The boat man suggested that the reason the sharks were probably not coming to the surface was due to the stronger than usual winds blowing from the Red Sea that day.

We anchored off another coral reef to snorkel a little bit before returning back to Djibouti with a feeling of the glass being half empty. The fleeting feeling of swimming with the shark was exhilarating but it was too short to completely satiate me. Snorkeling among the corals was awesome though and now that I look back I get a feeling it was not that bad at all especially considering that most of the other boats that day did not encounter a single shark.

Having checked off all the 3 things me (and Mike) had planned to do in Djibouti, we were almost done with our plan for Djibouti but we both still had one more day to go before our flights left Djibouti which was incidentally the same outbound flight.

Back at my hotel we brainstormed a little and soon decided to head west from Djibouti city a little further away from Lake Assal to a region where there was supposed to be a forest. This area was called the Foret du Day and was the only national park in Djibouti and reputedly had some awesome hiking terrain. After seeing how barren the country was I was really looking forward to the supposedly forested area.

Getting back to my hotel on this Marche Central street with the Hamoudi Mosque in the background

The one problem with going there was that we had enough of the guide and wanted a different experience so decided to do it ourselves. A related issue now was that like most places in Djibouti this place was also accessible only by a 4WD. So the search began in earnest to find someone who could rent us his 4WD. While we were sitting in the hotel lobby, I just randomly decided to quiz around if anyone had a 4WD and would be willing to rent out the car for a day. Fortunately for us, the owner of the hotel mentioned that he had it and after a little haggling we had agreed on a price for his vehicle as well as him to drive us there.

With the plans for the next day pretty well set we went back to the awesome Ethiopian place with a view of the streets to have a very fulfilling meal.