What a huge change in the terrain as we headed further south!
We arrived in Kaikoura around 12:30 and grabbed some lunch at one of the Fish and Chip shops. We had booked a Whale Watching tour at 1:30. This was the most expensive tour we have done, but neither of us had ever seen a whale before and we figured it be an amazing experience.
No messing around with the lemon slices, Caro just brought in her own bottle:
The tour lasted a few hours and we really lucked out. As we were leaving the marina we saw a couple seals and then quickly came across a few dolphins. It was pretty cool to see dolphins playing and swimming in the wild. The company operates 5 ships in the area and also have a couple helicopters in their fleet and have about a 90% success rate for sighting whales. This time of year the Sperm Whale is in the Kaikoura area (they're actually there pretty much year round). These whales dive for about 40 to 50 minutes, then surface for about 8 minutes to catch their breath, rest and digest their food, then they dive again. So there isn't a very big window to see them, but the Whale Watch team have it under control. We cruised around for another half hour or so and found one just after it surfaced. We were were able to see it for a few minutes before it dived again:
An Albatross:
Diving back down for more food:
After this we started cruising around the area some more and came across a very large pod of dolphins, somewhere between 100 to 200 of them! This was amazing!! These dolphins really made the trip for us, if we only saw the whale I don't think we would have felt like we got our money's worth. This was a pod of Dusky Dolphins, which are only found in a few areas in the Southern Hemisphere. They really loved the attention and were constantly swimming alongside our boat and flipping out of the water, sometimes 5 or 6 of them would jump out at the same time!
After the Whale Watching tour we checked out another seal colony along the Kaikoura Peninsula. We found a few seals lazing in afternoon sun:
(Sleeping, not dead...)
On the way back we stopped by for another look at the seals, this one was finally awake:
From here we drove another couple hours down into Christchurch. We checked into our hostel, got changed and went out for our New Year's Dinner. We didn't find very much in the area, but settled on a nice Italian place for some pasta. Then we walked into Cathedral Square to watch the fireworks at midnight.
Happy New Year!!
