102100 TRAVELTRAVEL ++ LEISURE LEISURE / JANUARY 2017 / JANUARY 2017
s undiscovered as Tonga remains to most people,
whale swimming is drawing a growing number of
visitors—from a few hundred annually in the early
1990s to more than 3,000 a year in the past decade.
That might not sound like a lot, but as with any other
tourism enterprise built around encounters with wildlife, whale-
swimming companies must balance a desire to spread the gospel of
conservation with the risk of intruding on the animals and disturbing
their habitats. Australia, the Dominican Republic, and Tahiti are among
the few countries besides Tonga that allow operators to put customers in
the water with humpbacks. To its credit, Tonga has regulations in place
to protect the whales—limits on lengths of swims, mandatory breaks
between encounters, prohibitions on harassing the whales, and caps on
the number of swimmers allowed and boat licenses issued—though these
are largely self-enforced.By 1966, when the International
Whaling Commission instituted a
worldwide moratorium on killing
humpbacks, only about 250 remained in
the area around Tonga, down from an
estimated original population of 10,000.
Nevertheless, subsistence whaling
persisted until the king ended it by decree
in 1978. By 2010, the local whale
population had rebounded to between
1,500 and 2,000, prompting some
Tongans to argue that the ban should be
lifted. At the moment, however, a reversal
seems unlikely, given the economic boon
of whale swimming and the publicHumpback whales’ ventral
pleats let their throats
expand to accommodate
water during fi lter-feeding.a