Call me Ishmael

The past week’s had a bit of a maritime theme. After leaving Christchurch I headed up to Kaikoura, a nice little seaside town which is New Zealand’s whale watching capital. And watch I have, from the shore, by boat and by plane, and it’s been fantastic. I’ve always believed Giant Things are Cool, so have always liked whales and was glad to finally see some in person. The minute the bus arrived in town we got to see our first two, a Southern Right Whale mother and calf were hanging around just off the shore near town until the baby’s old enough to head out into the open ocean. So pretty much every day you could see them swimming, spouting, feeding or breaching.



Headed out that same afternoon on the boat trip which was really good. I was glad to discover I’m not prone to seasickness, which I’ve never put to the test before, although the woman beside me wasn’t so lucky and I don’t think she quite got her money’s worth on that trip. I did though, we got to see about 10 Giant Sperm Whales, 4 quite close up, a few seals, a few albatross flying (it’s cool watching them run across the water to take off – I thought they made that up in The Rescuers movie) and on the way back passed through a pod of about 300 Dusky Dolphins, so they were completely surrounding the boat, swimming underneath, jumping out beside it and even somersaulting.

The next day I went for a walk around the peninsula, where there’s a seal colony, so got to see lots of sleepy fur seals onshore for a bit of a rest. And was subjected to much shrieking and a few fly-bys from 100s of angry seagulls, who also had a breeding colony out there and were nesting at the time, and that didn’t really add to my already low opinion of them.



Also went up on a flightseeing trip to spot some whales from the air, because you are pretty much limited to seeing just their back and tail from the boat, so that was really good to get a full view of them and see them in perspective against some of the whale-watching boats. We see another 10 whales or so, a few of them swimming together in formation, but the view of the coast alone would have been worth the cost, it’s a really spectacular place with snow-capped mountains running almost to the sea.



There was a really great bunch of people at the hostel too, it was a small little house (with a fantastic view) and because there weren’t many of us there and we all got on so well it seemed like we‘d known each other for ages. We had a great roast dinner one night, which never seemed to go completely to plan but was the most fun I’ve had in ages. There was plenty of wine, 2 courses of roast chicken (with just a hint of melted plastic but we’re sure we got rid of most of it), plenty of dessert, good music, probably some pretty terrible singing and what I thought was at least reasonable table drumming to accompany PC’s (my French room-mate) guitar playing. The next day we were all a bit subdued, and while Amy and Yannik had to leave us to head to Fiji, the lucky buggers, we managed to entertain ourselves with vacuuming (which is apparently just about the most fun you can have, or so Gemma told us anyway and she seemed to be enjoying herself, bless her), we watched a few videos, and then found PC had cooked us all dinner so we had another great night. In all I was only there for a few days but felt so at home was just as sad to leave there as I was Wanaka, where I’d been for weeks. But we’ll all be catching up again at Gemma’s wedding, which we’ve been invited to or will quite probably come to us if we can’t make it to Scotland, which is very convenient.

Sine then I’ve caught the ferry across from the South Island to Wellington, which is quite a nice city really, but is far too windy, and I can’t say I’m crazy about the earthquakes either, even though there’s only been one so far I could even feel (it was barely anything, just like being near a big truck driving or train driving past, but still pretty freaky). Heading up to Napier tomorrow, which ironically is most famous for being devastated by an earthquake years ago and got a bunch of nice new buildings because of it. It should be nice just as long as they’ve got all that out of their system now and don’t feel the need for any more urban renewal while I’m there.