Days 97-99 - Picton - Kaikoura
Trip Start
Nov 29, 2007
1
63
70
Trip End
Mar 27, 2008
Kaikoura,
New Zealand
Friday, February 29, 2008
I like Kaikoura, it is a small town and the town centre is basically just one street with shops, a small supermarket and a few bars, restaurants and take-away places. The Top 10 holiday park is situated fairly close to the town and I suggested to Dean that this would be a good place to have a night out, we haven't stepped foot inside a pub since we got to New Zealand. Sometimes this is because our campsite has been miles away from a pub but mainly it's just because we haven't been bothered. We are quite happy to sit around our camp having a few beers bought from the supermarket. The first thing we did when we got into town is to find the space-station here to swap our DVD's - we have enjoyed our DVD player and it gives us something to do on an evening.
Then we went to book into the Top 10 and set up camp. It is a lovely campsite with a swimming pool, games room and large TV room with a huge flat screen TV and Sky Movies. It is a friday and the campsite was already fairly full, a german family came and set up two tents in the space beside us. They had a small boy and knowing our DVD player can sometimes be heard when people are in tents close by, Dean offered to move the van so that they could put their car in between. The bloke who he spoke to was a bit off with him and refused to move the car but we moved our van up a bit anyway.
We set off into town to book a whale-watching tour which is the reason we came here in the first place. I have always wanted to see a real-life whale (not in a pool) and hopefully we will achieve this dream tomorrow as we are booked on the 1.15pm tour. It is a bit windy here and I hope it won't be cancelled on account of the weather. The coastline here is gorgeous, a rocky beach with mountains in the distance. On the way down here we had seen a seal on a rock, it was huge and Dean had stopped at the next picnic area to see if we could see any more. They were everywhere, sleeping on the rocks and I was thrilled to see them. They are so cute (New Zealand fur seals), they have furry coats and are three times as big as the seals I've seen in the UK. We sat on a big rock in the sunshine watching them for about half an hour and I was in heaven to see so many, they are absolutely gorgeous and are amusing to watch. We were fairly close to them and they don't seem to be afraid of people.
That evening, I tried to catch up with my diary a bit and we've finally found out how to work the radio (how long have we had the van?) I'm sure Dean would have worked it out except I had told him there wasn't one and he took me at my word and didn't bother looking at it. I had been reading the DVD/CD player manual and discovered that there was one, so now we can have music. We had some drinks, listened to the radio and went into the games room for half an hour to charge the camera up and play air-hockey. It was about 11pm when we got around to watching our DVD and the German's were already in bed. After, we decided to watch our sky-diving DVD another three times until we got a knock on our spaceship door. It was the German bloke complaining that we had kept him up all night with our music and television. "It's 1.30 in the morning," he complained. "We have had no sleep because of you." Oops, we didn't realise it was that late but it wasn't on very loud, we apologised anyway but giggled about it for another half an hour. We're always getting told off, it hasn't been the first time. Anyway, he should have moved his car instead of being a snotty git with us - serves him right.
The next morning we got up and had a big breakfast, Dean is getting good at cooking bacon and fried eggs on a gas barbeque, there is a knack to it. The weather is a little bit overcast but it's not blowing a gale so we are hopeful for our trip to go ahead. We got to the whale watch place with about forty minutes to spare and apparantly there is some swell out there on the sea but not enough to stop the trip. We were waiting around watching a DVD about whales and who should we see? The German family. Oh damn, hopefully they are not on the same trip as us. We tried to avoid them until the coach turned up to take us to the boat. They were not on our trip but the coach was full, there will be a lot of us on the boat. The boat is a large catamaran with seating on the lower deck and a viewing deck at the top.
The boat didn't sail very far when it stopped as there was a small group of dusky dolphins to watch. We also saw some albatrosses - they are huge with a massive wing span of up to 7m, it was lovely to see them. The boat tracks the whales but it doesn't use sonar as this intereferes with their hunting. They explained to us that the whales they are tracking are sperm whales and the reason they are here is that there is a very large, deep canyon in these waters which is good hunting ground for them. They are all male sperm whales as the females are smaller with less blubber and the water here is too cold for them. The whales stay under for 40-60 minutes hunting, and then they surface to breathe and re-oxygenate their blood. This is how they know roughly when they are going to surface, they know what time they went down. It took some time to track the whale, the captain kept stopping and putting like a big microphone into the water to listen to what it was doing. It makes a noise when it is hunting, they put it on the loudspeaker so we could all hear it, it makes a clicking noise, it's cute. When the whale is silent, they know it's getting ready to surface.
Eventually, he did surface and he was huge. I was thrilled to see a real, live whale. The boat was quite far away from it though so it was hard to get a good look at him or many good photo's because obviously he is under the water and we could only see parts of him when the waves moved. We could see him spouting and he stayed on the surface for about fifteen minutes. They pre-warned us when he was getting ready to dive so we could all get our camera's ready for the tail shot.
I thought they would take us back to shore then but they didn't, we set off to track another one that would be surfacing soon. This one seemed to be easier to find so we got to see two sperm whales and lots more albatrosses along the way. On the way back we saw a huge school of dusky dolphins, there must have been at least thirty of them. We didn't know which direction to look, they were everywhere. Some of them were jumping out of the water and some of them had calves with them, it was lovely to see. They stayed with the boat for about twenty minutes, it was brilliant.
It started to rain just as we got off the boat so we had been very lucky, the people waiting to get on the boat we had just exited most likely got drenched. We decided to treat ourselves to fish and chips on the way back to camp. We ordered blue cod and chips and took them back to the van to eat them with a big pile of bread and butter. I don't really like fish - I will have the odd battered cod but I have to be in the mood for it. That said, I have to say I will dream about that blue cod for years to come - it was absolutely delicious, definitely the best fish I have ever tasted. I went on about it for ages afterward which surprised Dean as it's so unlike me to go an about fish.
We didn't go out in the end, we stayed around the camp and charged the camera and mobile up some more in the TV room. We managed to get through the night without upsetting anyone.
