How Moko the dolphin gave humans a master class in saving stranded whales

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Title – How Moko the dolphin gave humans a master class in saving stranded whales
Source – The Times
Date – 13th March 2008

So you might justifiably ask the question, what has this story got to do with Gap Year and Independent Travel and well the link is a tentative one… it took place in New Zealand, somewhere very popular on the backpackers trail… I think that really is the best I could come up with, but I make no apology for including it.

In this blog I look mostly at news stories that may affect travellers to all parts of the world or have a message that we can learn from, by their nature these stories are often sad or bad news, so every so often we have to remind ourselves the world is still an amazing place, with amazing stories and still in many ways a complete mystery to even the brightest minds.

We know about so much in the world, we can identify the individual DNA of every individual on the planet from every other individual’s, we can manipulate nature for constructive and destructive purposes, but we still have a long long way to go. Take the biggest animal on the planet, the blue whale, still we know very little about this animal, it’s habits and breeding cycle and where they actually go for long periods of their lives when they disappear from our radar; still we discover new species and not just tiny insects, but even mammals in Borneo (cat), Papua(frogs, birds, plants, butterflies and much more) and Mongolia (long-eared jerboa); still we learn more about the incredible adaptations nature has managed through evolution, to allow species to survive where really they should have given up millions of years ago.

We should not forget that evolution is not something that happened, it is something that is happening, so we have many more delights to look forward to, things change, sometime for the worse but also sometimes for the better. Countries that were closed open and countries that were open close. Anyone who travels will have heard the story that starts “I went there some years ago before the tourists were going…” the stories which suggest that you have missed the boat by leaving it so long to go. I have to admit to starting many a story the same way, but I try and convince people that different is not bad, different can be good and sometimes different is just different. When I visited Angkor Wat in Cambodia, that country had only recently opened its doors and mass tourism had not really kicked in. Talking to someone who visited in 2007, it sounds like it is more like a scene from Tiananmen Square in Beijing on the weekend than Indiana Jones as I remember it. So what did they think? They were blown away and their stories made me want to go back all over again. Was my experience better than theirs? No just different, both of us know exactly how lucky we were to get a chance to see this truly magnificent construction.

So back to Moko… myths and fairytales abound about dolphin rescue and they must be on the top ten list of everyone’s favourite animals, but this story is for me as amazing as they come. Travel is about new discovery; about new experiences; about learning from others; and about learning from ourselves. If anyone thinks they know it all then explain this to me, when the travel bore tells you they know everything ask them to explain this story. Maybe most importantly remember that is makes life more interesting when some things remain unexplained and with an air of mystery and the world is full of unexplained cultures and experiences to discover.

If we can take one thing from this story, one parallel, it is that communication is relative. Can Dolphins and Whales communicate? Nothing we know suggests they can, but do they need to 'talk' to communicate? I spent 2 weeks riding through the Mongolian Steppe a few years ago with just a Mongolian guide for company. He spoke no English and my Mongolian even now stretches to 5 words, of which many are commands for a horse (go, stop, greeting, thank you and bear…), But when I tell stories of that trip, I recount all the conversations we had and the many things I learned from my guide, so language is clearly not the solution to communication, certainly you can do without language, what you can’t do without is tolerance, appreciation of others and respect.
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