Swimming with Dolphins

There are times, especially overseas it seems, when it really hits you where you are at a particular moment - and how you can't believe that you're there at that moment. I remember walking through the siq at Petra for the first time with my good friend Faith and she kept saying, "I can't believe that I'm here. I can't believe that I'm here." And I knew exactly what she meant. I've been lucky, really lucky, to have had more than a few of those moments; although, to be fair, it's also a product of a lot of hard work and a lot of smart decisions - and also the courage/idiocy of saying, quite often, "sure, why the hell not, I can go there." As great as the Zanzibar trip was, the truly transcendent moment was swimming with dolphins out in the open ocean. It may have meant so much to me simply because it's not normally something that I would do. As a historian I am much more likely to gravitate to museums or ruins. On this trip I made a concerted effort to do other things, and this led me to the dolphins. It was one of the choices for outside activities at the aptly named Dolphin Bay Resort where I stayed (more on that later). According to the schedule the dolphin tour was a half-day event, although it was also very inexpensive. My thinking was that I would hop on a big boat and that we'd spend two hours tracking down the dolphins - and nothing could be further from the truth, happily.

The boat was tiny and we stumbled across a group of dolphins in around ten minutes. The guide told me to put on my snorkel and fins - and was in the midst of explaining that there were good and bad dolphins - when he suddenly yelled, "Into the water." That was all the preparation, but I figured that he knew what he was talking about, so I dropped off the side. A few seconds later a dozen or so dolphins, including babies, swam right beneath me. And then they were gone. I popped up, the guide told me to climb back into the boat (which required me taking off my fins), and off we went chansing the dolphins. I put back on the fins, just in time to follow his directions to jump back into the water. This was repeated four times, and every time the dolphins swam right next to me, seemingly oblivious to the large clumsy oaf right above them. The last time four of them came so close to me that I reached out my hand and came within six inches of touching the dorsal fin of the nearest one.

After that the guide took advantage of the fact that the tide was in to drop me off at the beach of the resort, and I rushed in to change before he came back to pick me up to go check out colobus monkeys. The entire event took maybe an hour, and since I was rushing on to do something else it almost seemed unreal. Of course, it's also something that I came back to in my mind again and again for the rest of the week. I don't know if I can truly do it justice even now. Maybe I need even more distance from it to truly put it into words. All I know is that it has clearly and firmly moved into my top ten all-time favorite moments.