This post is brought to you by Nina (motion) pictures.
We decided to do a weekend trip to Kaikoura, a village North of Christchurch, renowned for its crayfish. “Kaikoura” means “Eating crayfish”. So that was one of our objectives of the trip.
The weather was absolutely stunning. When we woke up around half nine it was already in the twenties, so we just packed sunscreen, a hat and lots of food and drove off.
(that is not entirely true of course. Thomas: “What is in your bag? Why is it so big and heavy??”)
Technically, Kaikoura is a mere 183 km away over Highway#1. Practically, this is NZ and Highway#1 is just a one lane country road, some very curvy stretches, and we took the tourist detour. I love it how in NZ they put up signs “Tourists turn right” without saying exactly why (although I guess it is obvious). You could interpret it differently.
Gore Bay, on the tourist roadIn Kaikoura we checked into our hostel (“backpackers”) and went for the peninsula walk, spotting some seals and lots of birds. We got really excited about a penguin that turned out not to be a penguin, but it was cool nonetheless.
oystercatcher guarding its nest
"penguin"After the walk we were pretty tired and hungry and we set out to find a restaurant that the “organic NZ” book had recommended. We weren’t exactly sure about its name (“Healslops? Heaslops? Heasleslopes? Hillslopes?”) and as it turned out its location was a mystery as well. We finally had fushnchups in the local pub.
Kiwi christmas, bikinis and christmas trees
Sunday we had booked a dolphin tour. Dolphin encounter lady: “May I ask how you heard about us?” Nina: “Lonely Planet”, Thomas: “the Swedish tourist who died last week”.
Anyway, no one seemed much deterred in swimming with dolphins but we opted for watching only. Call me silly, I’m not much into spiritual up-close face-to-face feel-the-energy animal encounters and we figured we would see more of their acrobatics from the boat anyway.
It all started bad in the bus:
“Hello everybody!!!”
“ …. hello ….”
“How are you feeling?!”
“ ….. great ….”
“Isn’t this a lovely day to watch some dolphins?!?!”
“ ….. yeah …..”
“ARE YOU EXCITED?!?!?!”
“ ….. yeah ……”
However, although I still don’t believe in dolphin magic and their spiritual healing powers and all the other hippie-nonsense, it was a magical tour. After some 25 minutes we got to a group of 400-500 dolphins, which seemed like thousands and thousands of dolphins. It was amazing. They were everywhere. They did all their tricky jumps and backflips and splashing and backward somersaults, they swam circles around individual snorkelers, they swam with the boat (making use of the pressure wave) and we could see them from very very close, and there were baby dolphins (“think a rugby ball with a tail”), some of whom tried to do some jumping as well which was so cute! You could see them wriggling and flipping to get enough energy to jump out of the water.
Because it was difficult to take good pictures I made lots of videos, and here is an montage of that. If anyone ever gets to NZ, this is totally worth the money. Although there are not always this many dolphins, the group in the early morning got to swim with only 20 or so, but they were very interactive according to our guide. The tour operator is apparently also very involved in sea life protection and the dolphins weren’t harmed in any way for the making of this video.
You can also hear me squealing, and our Scottish tour guide speaking. And, listen for “the soothing noise” of thousand dolphins breathing …
