India is renowned as a great place for all kinds of wildlife and there are plenty of tours and trips available to give you the opportunity of seeing it for yourself. However if there is one area which I think is poorly provided for, it's pelagic trips.
It's true that I've only been to Goa and Kerela, so perhaps the situation is better elsewhere, but I've found it very difficult to find anything that remotely resembles a dolphin or whale watching trip, let alone a pelagic birding trip and it's exceedingly difficult to even find out much information about which species are out there.
I mean this is the Arabian Sea, the north western part of the Indian Ocean, so surely there must be something good out there? I'm sure that there is, but it's like getting blood out of a stone to find out anything about it, and trying to get to the edge of the continental shelf here seems to be as unlikely as getting into space.
However, from a previous visit last year, I do know that there are Indian Ocean humpbacked dolphins in the Fort Kochi area, and today we enjoyed watching them with a couple of pints at the Hotel Seagull, right on the waterfront.
In my previous post about these animals I discussed the uncertainty surrounding the range of the different species of humpbacked dolphins in the Indian Ocean, but these are most likely Indian Ocean rather than Indo-Pacific humpbacked dolphins, based on range and colour. Nice to see from the hotel bar!
