Whale Watching and Salt Mining

(From notes written Friday, January 9th and Saturday, January 10th)


As mentioned in yesterday’s entry, the town of Guerrero Negro has three skills: salt mining, whale watching and taco manufacturing.

The salt mining is a huge operation wherein they pump salt water into a series of flat, shallow pools to dry in the heat of the sun, leaving the salt. It helps that the area gets only about an inch of rain a year. Our whale-watching tour guide, Mario, gave us a few more fun facts about the salt mining: The company is owned 51% by the Mexican government and 49% by Mitsubishi Motors, and of the 15,000 people living in Gro. Negro, 2,000 of them work for the salt company, living in a separate community than the rest of the town, sending their children to separate (better) schools and shopping in separate (less expensive) stores. Jobs at the salt company tend to be hereditary and coveted, so it’s hard to get in if you don’t have family there already.

Friday night we went out to the edge of some of the salt flats and photographed the sunset, and the garbage that piles up around the edges of the pools, and Saturday on the whale watching tour we got a chance to see some of the salt barges up close. There were two of them moored out in the lagoon, with no one but seagulls and pelicans standing sentry.

The whale watching tour was amazing. We went out in a panga—a 23-foot flat-bottomed boat that started to seem pitifully small as the gray whales approached. At first the motor kept cutting out and we saw nothing as we stared out into Scammon’s Lagoon (Laguna Ojo de Liebre), but eventually we made it out far enough and began to encounter whales. We followed a pair for a while, cameras clicking.

At one point a whale surfaced just yards off the side of the boat, right behind where I was sitting. It blew and I jumped, then it glided back under water and disappeared under the boat. Gray whales are massive. Way bigger than me. Way bigger than the boat.

After getting our fill of whales, the boat operators took us speeding along the shore, where pelicans and other birds were hanging out on the massive dunes. They seemed uninterested in us.

Between our two cameras, Rob and I went through a couple hundred pictures before getting the ones you see here. Whales, it turns out, are not interested in posing.



Buenos Jessie!