What do you do when a dead washes up onto the shore? You run and tell all of your friends of course! Then they pile into vans and rush down to see this amazingly large rotting carcass. What happens next? The entire town of Jeffrey's Bay gathers together to stare (and smell) a dead beached whale.

This was the before dinner excitement on Wed. The whale had been dead for quite some time and washed up on the shore. It wasn't hard to find because every car on the street was going in the same direction, plus you could smell the creature from far away. We get there and seriously more than half the town was there or coming and going. It was rather humorous because one of the teenagers that had a little too much to drink came up and started screaming at us (in Afrikaans) "You must help me push the whale back out! It's moving, it's still alive!" Then we tried to explain to him that it was moving because of the waves and that the whale was certainly dead, but he didn't believe us. So then he took it upon himself to push the whale back out to the ocean and when no one helped him he came back yelling "Now it's dead because we didn't push out to the water!" Then he ran and body slammed the whale and we were totally ready for him to fall into it.

We smelled like dead whale for the rest of the day. Oh ya, I touched it. I only had enough nerve to poke it though So I don't know how morbid or disgusting this is, but I thought I would share this story because it entertained me for a while so I hope it entertains you...

And one more thing, that night we ate tuna for dinner.