Posts Tagged ‘adventure4ever.com’

Come Away with Caretta Caretta from Adventure4ever on Vimeo.

It does not happen very often that you see Loggerhead ( Caretta Caretta) Sea Turtles in Turkey anymore. After a Gulet Cruise with friends, Jillian Nico and I were hanging out At the Kas Camping when Nico spotted this old Turtle while snorkeling. Exited he called us over and Jillian picked up her Canon G10 with the underwater housing. Given the fact that I did not expect to get any good photo’s without proper experiece on the camera, I decided to try a movie. Here is the result: a gracefull Turtle gently gliding through the water. What a super wildlife experience!

Well my ear is well and truly buggered, but I will be buggered if I am going to pass on a dive with a dolphin. So I brave the stinging salt water that runs into my throat while I pass the 10 meter mark. The dive is not much deeper and a perforation of the eardrum does not actually suffer from the dive, because there is no imbalance of the pressure. Anyway I am sure it is not recommended, but so far… 10 days later when I write this I have no earpain.

The instructions from Gearge the Dolphin trainer of the Dolphin Academy are clear: let her Annie, the dolphin come to you, and don’t start reaching out right away. If you stick to that, she will hang around.

And hanging around she did. For a full 30 minutes she races over the reef like a dog of his leash, to come back to us and play for a while. Soon Annie becomes cuddely with most of the divers, interacting with most of us.

I can immagine how much swimming with a dolphin must mean for autistic children, because by the time I surface I almost feel sane again .  Although Anne Marie of Habitat seems to think I should go for 2 more sessions , to even come close to sanity.

Even though Annie was captured in the wild in Central America, she was trained in a record 6 weeks and goes out to open sea regularly, without wanting to disappear. Dolphins are very intelligent underwater mammals, so I guess if she wanted to get away, she would have done it a long time ago. In the meantime she has convinced me that she is having a good time playing around with landbased mammals of a dive. After diving with an Elephant this is the next best thing I have experiences and I am glad that I decided to withstand the ear trauma.

Annie comes to Jillian for a cuddle

This morning TV brought the first images of the devastating powerful earthquake in Italy’s Abruzzo mountains. Epi centre is the town of l’Aquila where Jillian and I spent a full week covering the regions beauty for Dutch travel magazines. The main story was just about to go to press, but developments in the coming hours as the news breaks, will tell us about the state of the emergency situation there. There are no reports at this time about the destruction of other villages that litter the mountains.

The City of l'Aquila in the Abruzzo of Italy before the Earthquake

The Piazza del Duomo, before the Earthquake struck l'Aquila in the Abruzzo Mountains of Italy

200 Kilometers south of l’Aquila we visited Pasetta, a colourful mountain man who is the grandson of the last wolfhunter of the Abruzzo. Based in the medieval village of Barrea he runs a camping La Genziana. When we called him this morning to check after his health he answered: “Everything is OK here, there is no damage in Barrea. I was doing a pipi this morning when the tremour started, It is not uncommon so I went back to bed.”

Pasetta, grandson of the last wolf hunter of the Abruzzo mountains in Italy