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.
Excellent photography and narration, as usual. I especially appreciated the google screen shots. :)
ReplyDelete(Also, awesome score on the $6 hat - major win.)