New Zealand - Kaikoura

Day 38 - Wednesday, February 29

I know what all of you are thinking:  Rob, what are you doing in Kaikoura, you said you were doing the Zephyr pass, which ends in Christchurch, and doesn't go to Kaikoura.  Actually, I'm fairly certain no one is thinking that. But if you were obsessively keeping tabs on me, the KEX pass I bought starts in Auckland and ends in Christchurch, which means it would miss one stop on the main circuit, Kaikoura, an old whaling town on the northeast coast of the south island. Kaikoura is considered one of the best spots in the world for whale watching because it is so close to the antarctic and the ocean floor drops off to extreme depths just off the coast, making it home to a lot of whales, particularly sperm whales. It is probably more famous among KEX passengers for the ability to swim with hundreds of dolphins. So I decided to go check it out, and I was able to add Kaikoura to my pass for $20 and then just had to figure out a way to get back to Christchurch for my flight to Australia.

Unfortunately, Kaikoura is quite far from Queenstown. So basically I spent all day Wednesday on a bus. We got on the bus in Queenstown at 8am and got off the bus at the hostel in Kaikoura at 8pm. Here's a couple of pictures from a hill on the Kaikoura peninsula right after we arrived looking back towards the mainland: 

From New Zealand - Queenstown, Milford Sound & Kaikoura

 Day 39 - Thursday, March 1

Dolphin Swim Take 2 - As you may recall, I tried to do a dolphin swim during my first couple of days in New Zealand up in the Bay of Islands, but we ended up not being able to get in the water due to the rough seas. Read about it here. So after hearing really good things about the dolphin swim in Kaikoura, I decided to give it a try.  Apparently just after sunrise is when they are most active, so it is the best time to swim with them. So the folks at Encounter Kaikoura offer a swim that requires meeting at their shop at 530am. I woke up at 430 to give me time to get down there by 530 (it's a bit of a walk). Just as I was about to leave the hostel, the wind picked up and it started raining pretty hard - obviously not good. We walked down there in the rain anyway only to be told that it had been cancelled. But when I got to the counter, they did have one slot left for the next morning at 530, which would be the last possible chance for me to do it because I was flying to Australia later that next day.

It rained most of the rest of the day, but it stopped briefly for a while and I headed to the end of the peninsula where there was a seal colony. Unfortunately not very many seals were out, but I did come across this guy taking  a nap on some seaweed, and I don't think he was all that thrilled when I accidentally woke him up from his slumber.

From New Zealand - Queenstown, Milford Sound & Kaikoura

From New Zealand - Queenstown, Milford Sound & Kaikoura

Day 40 - Friday, March 2

Dolphin Swim Take 3 - I was up at 430 again to try once more to swim with dolphins. This time when we got down to the shop, they warned us that the seas were still very rough from the storm, but the swim was going forward. We actually got on the boats before sunrise and got to watch the sunrise as we headed out to look for the dolphins. It was the prettiest sunrise I've ever seen. Granted, I could probably count on two hands the number of sunrises I've seen. As most of you probably already know, I'm not exactly a morning person. The pictures don't do it justice.

From New Zealand - Queenstown, Milford Sound & Kaikoura

From New Zealand - Queenstown, Milford Sound & Kaikoura

The dolphins in Kaikoura are generally found in groups of 100-500 that are referred to as superpods. We found a group of about 150-200 and jumped into the very cold water (~60 F). It was an amazing experience. Unlike swimming with dolphins in like Sea World or something, these dolphins are completely wild, but dolphins are naturally curious and playful, so even though they are never fed or otherwise enticed to swim around with people, they just like doing it. It was a really awesome experience. Dolphins were all around us, swimming at us, swimming by us, swimming in circles around us. It was amazing. I could literally reach out and touch them. And they were so interactive. It's really hard to describe what a cool experience it was. Definitely one of the highlights of my trip. After about 45 mins in the water, at which point my hands and feet started to feel a bit numb, we got back on the boat and then took some pictures from the boat. Unlike the bottlenose dolphins in the bay of islands and that are more common in US, and which can be quite large, these were dusky dolphins, which are a bit smaller and tend to be a bit more acrobatic. So they do a lot of jumping around in the water. While I still suffered from an inadequate camera and poor photography skills, I did manage to get a couple photos with the dolphins jumping out of the water:

From New Zealand - Queenstown, Milford Sound & Kaikoura

From New Zealand - Queenstown, Milford Sound & Kaikoura

It was hard to capture in the pictures how many dolphins were out there because at any one point, only like a 1/3 would be at the surface, and with so many of them, they were spread out over a fairly large area, but there's a couple of photos in the picasa album where if you look at it full size you can see how many little dorsal fins there are in the water. On the way back, we had gorgeous views of the snowy peaks that are just west of the Kaikoura peninsula:

From New Zealand - Queenstown, Milford Sound & Kaikoura

Between the sunrise and the dolphins it was an amazing morning! Almost enough to turn me into a morning person. Almost.

After the swim, I grabbed a bus to Christchurch, which was still in a complete state of disrepair after a massive earthquake in February 2011 destroyed a large part of the city and killed a lot of people. What used to be the main downtown area was a total ghost town. It was kind of eerie. After checking out what was left of the city for a bit, I grabbed another bus to the airport and flew over to Melbourne. I finally got checked into my hostel at about 1am Melbourne time (3am New Zealand time). After the 23-hour day, even the top bunk of a dorm bed felt mighty nice.