Feeding The Dolphins

We were up at sparrow's this morning because the sign at the dolphin feeding spot said the dolphins would be fed from 7 to 8am. What they meant was the dolphins would be fed at 8am, but you could look at the dolphins for the hour prior to that. If they showed up - they are wild dolphins, afterall, and don't know how to read things like tourist information and signs (which are incorrect anyway).

My kids quickly lost interest in staring at the big, lazy fish and began burying each other in the sand. Here's the thing - when dolphins aren't jumping through hoops and stuff, they're pretty boring. These ones weren't even talking, like Flipper, they just lay there in the shallow water waiting, like us, for the ladies in the kiosk to start selling fish.

Interesting thing the people 'protecting' the dolphins do is insist everyone wash their hands in a bucket of disinfectant before going to stand in the shallow water - so I assume all forms of foot fungus are a-ok.

Despite this sanitizing of hands, you're not allowed to actually touch the dolphins - that would incur a $300 on the spot fine, as the nice ladies at the kiosk kept telling people. And while the good people at the Important Dolphin Inspectors Organisation Treasuring Sanitation (IDIOTS) seem very careful for everyone not to pass on any germs, I do have to wonder if the disinfectant on the people feeding them the fish won't cause more damage than the odd bit of leftover pee over-sprayed on someone's hand - especially as some of the boats anchored around the little beach would have been pumping their raw sewerage straight into the river the dolphins were in. But what do I know? I'm not one of the IDIOTS, I'm just a banker.

And because we did this last year I also knew you had to ignore the IDIOTS at the kiosk saying they weren't taking money off people yet and there was no need to line up. You damn well better line up, we found out last year, or you're quickly at the wrong end of a long line of backpackers.

Me taking one of a series of useless photos of my daughter feeding a dolphin
 because I didn't check the settings and all the shots were over exposed

Master6, being allergic to fish and chip-off-the-old-block paranoid, opted out. Miss3 was disgusted with dolphins, because they ate fish. She was also disgusted to learn that fish ate fish ("eww"). I think she sees it as some form of cannibalism. Because I lined up for 35 minutes, leaving the watching of children to Karen and Luke, my Miss7 was first of well over fifty people to feed a dolphin from her disinfected hand.

And she loved it. Best $5 we've spent this holiday (can you believe that - $5 - what a bargain). And if the tone of this post has been a little on the negative side, it was pre-coffee and because of the aforementioned sloppy signage we were up an hour before we had to be. The ladies at the kiosk and the ones in the water were actually nice though (if misinformed/ignorant of the importance of early queuing).

So a big thank you to all the IDIOTS who helped make this happen :)