Book the Second: East Coast

As mentioned a while ago, I had an entire month off at Christmas since our office shut down completely. I was originally going to do a 10-day tour of the Top of the South, including some time in Abel Tasman National Park, Nelson, & Blenheim, but cut it down into the 4-day West Coast and 2-day East Coast vacations.

The second half was a rather short two-day trip up to Kaikoura, which calls itself the wildlife capital of New Zealand. It's a town of about 3,500 people and is all about the eco-tourism. The town feature whales, seals, dolphins, petrels, albatrosses, sea lions, and a few other species that I've missed.

I remember reading somewhere that the reason for this eco-diversity is the underwater geography off the coast. About 10km out from the town the continental shelf drops off, or something, to a depth of several kilometres. And there are ocean currents that mix cold water and warm water, which creates an abundance of algae / gross little crustaceans, which attracts more adorable marine predators such as dolphins and seals.

And that's today's coastal geography lesson from the Learning Crab.



(I Googled "Learning Crab" hoping to find some sort of adorable clipart image of a crab in a professor hat, but ended up with this. You can find out how to ride a unicycle here).

The Road to Kaikoura
I'm not going to say the drive to Kaikoura is boring, but these are the most interesting sights that I saw.



Cloud are neat!


Old SCHOOL Reserve? Or Old School RESERVE? You decide!


This beach was neat


Traffic jam in New Zealand (this is a common postcard, but I had to take the photo).





I misread the sign off the highway and thought I was driving to a town called Cleverly. Not the smartest thing I've ever done. Also, the town was 4 houses and an old railway platform.




So I eventually got to Kaikoura and toured the town centre. This took all of thirty minutes because there are only 3,500 people there. Along the coast there's a main strip, the focal point of which is a parking lot (featuring lots of RV parks) and the Tourism New Zealand i-Site. I also stopped in to check email at the Public Library - for a $2 donation you can usually use up to 1/2 hour.

I'm not joking when I say this is the busiest place in Kaikoura. I did find it hilarious that the parking rate was $0.50 an hour up to a maximum of $4.00 for 24 hours - particularly if you'd paid $22 or $30 a day to park in either Calgary or Toronto. I basically wandered down the strip and went into a few souvenir shops. I talked myself out of a really ugly $10 hat, then went next door and found a wicked one for only $6. Yay for winning! I also had fish & chips, which were only passable because I forgot to order no salt - whoops.


Whale Watch

Probably the biggest tourist attraction in Kaikoura is the Whale Watch encounter tour. The highlight of these tours is seeing a sperm whale, and I think this is the only tour provider who is registered with "DoC" - the Department of Conservation (and thus able to run this particular tour). As a side note, ecotourism operators in New Zealand need to register with DoC to run tours which could potentially disturb native habits of local wildlife.

So the Whale Watch tour is pretty expensive, costing a hefty $150 for a two-hour tour, but they guarantee that you see a sperm whale or you get 80% of your ticket price back. In addition, the boats were custom-designed for the tour and must have fewer than 50 passengers on board. Ample deck space ensures there's very little jockeying for photograph position with other passengers once on the boat. So with this in mind, I was expecting to see some wildlife and enjoy a sunny afternoon on a boat.

Now, I must say that patience is a definite virtue for these tours. I was on the "4:00pm" tour, but the boat didn't actually leave the dock until 5:00pm - which was rather annoying because this wasn't disclosed up front. At 4:00pm we watched an introductory video about boat safety, etc., then we boarded a bus and drove 20 minutes to the boat dock on the other side of town. I was clever enough to board the bus LAST, which meant that I was going to be first to exit the bus and get onto the tour boat. Unfortunately, they did the "old people and small children first" thing because they need to put kids in life jackets so I wasn't quite first. But yay for winning!




The review below summarizes the entire trip.


On Sea Sickness
The review above sums it up - the tour is wonderful despite people being sea sick. Unless, of course, you find vomit hilarious - in which case the trip is doublepluswinning. Let's break it down in detail:

A) When you buy a ticket at the i-Site, the agent informs you that people frequently get sea sick, so it's in your best interest to find a chemist and buy some Gravol or something
[at this point, I thought - OK, maybe I will get some Gravol. I'll check it out when I get to Whale Watch]

B) When you pick up your ticket at Whale Watch, the agents go through the whole spiel. "Are you prone to sea sickness? The waves are at a medium-high level."
[now I was thinking - hmmmm . . . I did get rather sea sick on the Channel crossing from Dover. But they did wake up at 5am to get on a bus, and the swells that day were something like 5 metres]

C) Then I went and bought a postcard in the Whale Watch Shop, and the lady at the counter informed me that they had Gravol if I was prone to sea-sickness.
[now I was thinking - wow, a lot of people must get sick on these trips. I did get a little nauseous on the Real Journeys tour of Milford Sound, but there we were dealing with 3 metres swells from the Tasman Sea. And I ended up fine, so I'll save the $10 and take my chances.

D) The boat ride consists of a 15-minute drive (float?) out to the open sea, then they stop and everybody gets out. The girl sitting beside me lasted about 5 minutes before she went for the barf bag. And this continued for two hours. And I'm really, really mean.



For the record, the swells on this trip were only about 1.5 metres - so I had no issues.

Fun-Ducation

What surprised me most about the tour was the educational value. They've put together a whole slide show / video / educational narrative that gives you all sorts of information on the wildlife we'll be seeing, in particular sperm whales. I'll try to keep it to the highlights (you can read the full Wikipedia article for yourself here). I will admit that the first thing I did when I logged onto the Internet was look up sperm whale and orca.

As a side note, if you Google "Sperm Whale" you get the following image.


Entry #3 is "vomit" - thanks, Futurama!

So anyway, here's what i learned about sperm whales on the trip:
- they're the world's largest carnivores, at something like 18 metres long
- sperm whales will dive for 45-60 minutes at a time, to a depth of 1-2km while hunting for their favourite food - giant and colossal squid
- because of this, they spend about 90% of their lives underwater, and are thus one of the world's most elusive marine mammals
- they have the world's largest gullets and can, and will, swallow dolphins whole
- I presume they can also swallow sailors whole, but I'll leave it to your imagination to make a Fleet Week joke

So, when you put together the above information, Whale Watch guarantees that you're going to see a sperm whale, which only spends about 10% of its life above water. To track them down, the tour operators employ a helicopter which scours the water for whale sightings and radios the information back to the boats (of which two are on the water at any given time). When they surface, they're there for about 15 minutes, so the boats have plenty of time to get out there and have a look once found. A whale surface at the very end of our trip.



The whale with the other boat - the whale was the length of our boats, and weighed considerably more.




Yes, I took this picture, but I'm not a superstar photographer. The captain is usually on the speaker and the approach to this photo is "ok, he's about to dive in 30 seconds . . . get your camera out . . . here he goes [click click click click click]. And all 52 passengers got the same photograph to impress their friends and family.


Other Wildlife

There was heaps of other wildlife on the tour, most notably dolphins and large seabirds such as petrels and albatrosses. Selection of pictures as follows - a mollymawk, Dusky Dolphin, Wandering Albatross (world's largest bird by wingspan), and a Hector's Dolphin - who was only about 1.5 metres long and SO CUTE!









Other Kaikoura
The only other things I did in Kaikoura were find a few signs and go see the New Zealand Fur Seal colony.


My pizza had wild rabbit on it. Delicious!


More clouds!


The drop-off, in question, was about a 6-foot drop behind those rocks.


Cafe encounter? Fun!


Kaikoura fur seals - not at all bothered by things like parking spaces, walkways or cars.








To mix things up on the way home, I took the inland route back through the Cantabrian Highlands. I might have passed two dozen farms and two towns on the way.

Book the First: West Coast

I decided to take a 4-day / 3-night trip to the West Coast, to enjoy some awesome South Island scenery and generally have no responsibility for a few days. I headed North from Christchurch on State Highway One, then cut across the Lewis Pass towards Westport. About 50m after I made the turn (this was the sort of two-turn, 250km trip that I enjoy so much), I say a sign with my three favourite words on it:

ALL DAY BREAKFAST



If I ever treated you to lunch while I worked at the other place, there’s a 100% chance that you know how I feel about all day breakfast. I have been trying, in vain, to find a place in Dunners that replicates the awesomeness that is the $6 breakfast at King’s Diner in Londontown. I had almost given up hope when I found this place. Sausages, eggs, toast, hash brown and BOTTOMLESS COFFEE (which is totally unheard of in New Zealand) for $10. Amazing, yes – but it gets better.



That’s right, not only does this diner serve my favourite meal, but they also collect hats. If you’ve ever seen me in a non-business setting, chances are pretty good that I was wearing a hat at the time – or I was about to put one on, or had just taken it off. One of my many hats. In fact, one of my new rules in life is to always buy a $6 hat.

Unfortunately, I had only brought two hats with me on this particular road trip (five in total made it up to Christchurch during my 28 day stay) and I wasn’t willing to part with either of them. But it was a really, really tough decision.

Anyway, at this point my vacation was scoring off the charts for Best.Vacation.Ever, and I was only two hours in. I think everyone’s aware that I’m not really the outdoorsy sort . . . which makes my relocation to New Zealand a bit hilarious in itself. But the cool thing about NZ is that it caters to all sorts. I’m basically interested in driving along, stopping and taking some scenic pictures, maybe do a 20-minute walk so I feel like I’m part of nature, then get back in the car and continue destroying the planet.

The drive through the Buller Gorge made me wish I knew how to kayak. The Buller river is really long, really wide, and generally pretty calm. Driving along the ridge that passes for a road, all I wanted to do was go float down the river on a kayak. Or inner tube.







At some point during the car, I stopped and got the urge to take a picture of my car next to the river. And that’s when I finally came up with a good name for my new car.



Lady Jane, a worthy successor to Shakira and Drusilla.

It takes about three hours to get from CHCH to Westport, which would have put me into Westport around 2pm if I kept driving. Instead, I decided to stop off at an old gold mining town and do one of the scenic 20-minute walks noted above. I parked the car, hopped over a stile, and carefully studied the park map to make sure I didn’t get lost and accidentally end up on the starting point of a 5-day walk. The Glee soundtrack pumping through my iPod, I wandered through the old gold route and got some good pictures. What can I say, I like to be one with nature.










Westport

I arrived in Westport at about 6pm, checked into my hostel (which was a cool, recently renovated turn-of-the-century house) and went for a wander down the town strip. In a nutshell, Westport feels like your 21st birthday party – if only two people showed up. With that in mind, the wander took all of two minutes, which amounted to looking for a restaurant and taking a picture of the mountains that overlook the town.









Also, there were hot boys from Grand Prairie at the hostel who didn’t like to wear shirts. There are pictures, but I still can’t figure out how to put camera phone pictures onto my PC.


Karamea

My choices for entertainment were either a brewery tour in Westport, or to drive up the coast to Karamea, which sits on the edge of Abel Tasman National Park. I opted for the latter, and was rewarded with a pretty awesome day. The drive out there was terrifying, but I left early enough that I didn’t have to deal with either camper vans or logging trucks. I also stopped in Hector on the way there, which is named after the world’s smallest, cutest, and most endangered dolphin.
The cool thing about the West Coast is it’s got a really variable climate. The southern bit is Fjordland, full of glaciers and fjords and stuff, but the northern bits near Karamea are tropical rainforest. Karamea led to the following observations.

Ooh, it's like Avatar or something.



Old mining towns often had bathhouses.



The end loop of the 5-day Abel Tasman walk, one of the Great Walks of New Zealand. I opted for the one-hour “circuit track” that loops around the end, and then found this gem. Three guesses as to which way I went.



Police stations can also be houses



Sheep make great domestic pets (yes, that’s a sheep house)




Nature is cool. The pictures below are rock formations that were carved by the river. The drive out there was about 35km on a dirt road, that was just wide enough for two cars to fit across. At the end there was about a two-hour return walk to see both caves. Pure awesome.







After a big day, I went back to Westport, had some fish & chips and spent the night chatting away with some rather interesting travellers at the hostel. Which was a bit surreal since that’s all hostellers do on the brochures.


This rarely actually happens in real life.


Greymouth

With a population of 16,000, Greymouth is the largest town on the West Coastal, and also boasts the only West Coast amenities like a McDonald’s, a Warehouse (Kiwi Zellers) and a Starbucks. In a fascinating display of Kiwi ingenuity, it is situations at the mouth of the Grey river. To get there, I drove along the coast, stopping off at Cape Foulwind, which was named because it’s downwind of a rather large NZ fur seal colony. I also had a decent hot dog – yum! I also stopped off at the Punakaikia rocks (“Pancake Rocks”) – and yes, my spelling is off – to take the obligatory tourist photos. This was probably the busiest place I’ve been in New Zealand.





Greymouth itself is very cute, and pretty much shuts down at 5pm. For entertainment, there’s the Monteith’s Brewery, a few mining / colonial museums, and a neat little pier leading out to the Tasman Sea. I managed a big win because hostel I stayed at had a hot tub. I know what you’re thinking – eww, gross, communal hot tub. Which was my first reaction, too.

But . . . the hostel was really clever in that they charge you $5 to use it for an hour. I checked the schedule, and it had only been used once that day – confirming my belief that most hostel stayers aren’t going to spring $5 for a soak. It also smelled of fresh chlorine, which was a good sign. Needless to say, I managed two hours in there of the sixteen hours total that I was in Greymouth.







I didn’t actually do anything in Greymouth other than eat, sleep and hot tub, as I left at 8am the next day for Arthur’s Pass way up in the mountains. I was rather keen to get back to Christchurch by late afternoon, because the fish and chip shop closes at 8pm (yes, that was actually my reason).






A kea, pretty much the most adorable parrot on the planet and a fantastic scrabble word.

Arthur’s Pass leads to Arthur’s Pass village, and I wandered around the town and did two separate 45-minute trails. I was a bit ashamed at my laziness when I met a family group spanning three generations. Roughing it fail.





I also saw my first live performance of a flugelhorn. But, apparently I didn't take a picture of it.

Oh, and I picked up some hitchhikers on their way back to Christchurch. I don’t normally do this, but they were really young, and their “Christchurch” sign looked sort of like this.

CHRISTCHurc

Obviously, they realized halfway through that they were running out of space. And so ends vacation the first.