In the morning, we woke up, played a little on the jump pillow, said goodbye to a cute praying mantis we found in our RV, and booked our whale watching tour.
While it took longer than the available whale flights, and risked sea sickness, we decided being closer to the action would be better. After about a 30 minute ride along beautiful coastline, we stopped for the Captain to check for whales. They communicate with the planes, but also put a listening device into the water to listen for the whale's clicks. We moved a couple of times to get closer. As we did so, we got to see birds, specifically the albatross, which checked off another to-do from C-man's list.
When the Captain could no longer hear the sonar clicks, he declared the whale was coming up.
About 5 minutes later, there Taiki was. An impressive sperm whale, breaching to digest his food for almost 10 minutes.
And then they announced he was about to go down. With a flip and a whip, his tail flipped into the air, and down he went for another 45 minutes. We learned so much about the sperm whale, that it made the whole adventure all that much more impressive.
After seeing Taiki, we moved on to see seals. It was cool, but after having seen the seal pups playing the night before, I was impatient to move on to the Dusky Dolphins. Eventually, we did. And boy, was it worth it.
With about 800 in a pod, they were everywhere - leaping and jumping and swimming and fishing.
I was in love.
Eventually, we had to move on. So we said our goodbyes to the dolphins, and made our way back along even more beautiful coastline.
Finally, our trip was over, and we headed out to lunch. Beerman had the crayfish - the one last very New Zealand food he hadn't eaten yet.
Afterward, we look at some local shops. And then found a geocache as we made our way back to our RV.
Kaiakoura was definitely a memorable and beautiful place for us to stop, and I'm really thankful we made the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment