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Monday just past was the Labour Day public holiday; like Easter in Blighty, the long weekend heralds the start of the summer season for many.
We went a couple of hours drive up the road to Kaikoura, an old Maori settlement and later whaling town. It's now a seaside town with smelly fish-and-chip shops, a couple of holiday parks, lots of beach, a few other bars and restaurants, a boat ramp, a railway station... pretty much what you'd expect (though, in a departure from the English norm, no amusement arcades). Nodding at its counterparts back in the Old World, a number of the streets are named after other seaside towns... we noticed Scarborough, Torquay, Brighton and Whitby, to name but a few.
It also has whales. Well, the town itself doesn't (unless you count the whalebone foundations of its oldest house), but a couple of miles offshore is an underwater canyon where whales feed, which a local operator regularly takes fare-paying tourists out to witness. Unfortunately for us, we didn't get to see any! There had been a big quake in the Kermadec islands (1000 miles to the NE) the day before we arrived; the whales were spooked and not in their usual haunts. The tour operators - who offer an 80% money-back guarantee if you don't see a whale on their trips - were cancelling sailings left right and centre, including the one we had booked on. Better luck next time!
We also saw a train. This might not strike you as odd, until I point out that the line from Christchurch to Picton (top end of South Island, connects with the Wellington ferry) only runs one passenger train daily in either direction. There is a platform, but no ticket office or refreshments room; all the adjoining station building is now used by the whale tour operators. There's no station sign, departure board or other source of information; you might think this made it a local train service for local people, but it's targetted firmly at tourists. Anyway. There's a wonderful custom speed bump (pictured) on the approach road, which has been renamed (brace yourselves) ... Whaleway Station Road. (While you're reeling from that, I'll observe that it took us some time to realise why, in amidst the Rugby World Cup paraphernalia, there was a higher-than-expected proportion of Welsh flags.)
There was still plenty of wildlife for us to see. The peninsula is a nesting ground for sea birds, which I'm sure were up to no good, looking like they were plotting something.
South Island remains mountainous as ever. Living in Christchurch there's a stark reminder - in many parts of the city you can either look up to the old calderas of Banks Peninsula, or to the Southern Alps some fifty miles distant - but Kaikoura is where the Alps really start to meet the sea. We were staying in a B&B not 200m from the sea, yet the mountains are really just outside the back door (pictured). There is a set of limestone caves nearby, which were beautiful but fiendishly difficult to get a good photo of.
We did get a hot tip to head a few miles further up the coast to find some seals, and it was golden. Heralded by this unusual warning sign and some particularly three-dimensional road and railway gyrations (but still, we note, the lack of railway fencing typical of most of NZ) is a notable colony of fur seals.
More seals were to come, as we went for a walk over the peninsula ridge back in Kaikoura, and returned via the waterside passing some bird nesting sites and another seal colony. There are cliffs in places, but they're passable when the tide is low. What we hadn't bargained for, but ought really not to have been surprised by, was the seal asleep on a rock, concealed from view until I scrambled up a boulder and found myself a couple of metres from a hitherto-sleeping seal (not the one pictured). It (he?) looked up at me; I rather apologetically exclaimed "Oh! Sorry, old chap!" and carried on my way; when I looked back he had put his head down again, so I hope he thinks I was just a strange upright bipedal humanoid dream...
Full set of 19 photos.
We went a couple of hours drive up the road to Kaikoura, an old Maori settlement and later whaling town. It's now a seaside town with smelly fish-and-chip shops, a couple of holiday parks, lots of beach, a few other bars and restaurants, a boat ramp, a railway station... pretty much what you'd expect (though, in a departure from the English norm, no amusement arcades). Nodding at its counterparts back in the Old World, a number of the streets are named after other seaside towns... we noticed Scarborough, Torquay, Brighton and Whitby, to name but a few.It also has whales. Well, the town itself doesn't (unless you count the whalebone foundations of its oldest house), but a couple of miles offshore is an underwater canyon where whales feed, which a local operator regularly takes fare-paying tourists out to witness. Unfortunately for us, we didn't get to see any! There had been a big quake in the Kermadec islands (1000 miles to the NE) the day before we arrived; the whales were spooked and not in their usual haunts. The tour operators - who offer an 80% money-back guarantee if you don't see a whale on their trips - were cancelling sailings left right and centre, including the one we had booked on. Better luck next time!
There was still plenty of wildlife for us to see. The peninsula is a nesting ground for sea birds, which I'm sure were up to no good, looking like they were plotting something.
South Island remains mountainous as ever. Living in Christchurch there's a stark reminder - in many parts of the city you can either look up to the old calderas of Banks Peninsula, or to the Southern Alps some fifty miles distant - but Kaikoura is where the Alps really start to meet the sea. We were staying in a B&B not 200m from the sea, yet the mountains are really just outside the back door (pictured). There is a set of limestone caves nearby, which were beautiful but fiendishly difficult to get a good photo of.We did get a hot tip to head a few miles further up the coast to find some seals, and it was golden. Heralded by this unusual warning sign and some particularly three-dimensional road and railway gyrations (but still, we note, the lack of railway fencing typical of most of NZ) is a notable colony of fur seals.More seals were to come, as we went for a walk over the peninsula ridge back in Kaikoura, and returned via the waterside passing some bird nesting sites and another seal colony. There are cliffs in places, but they're passable when the tide is low. What we hadn't bargained for, but ought really not to have been surprised by, was the seal asleep on a rock, concealed from view until I scrambled up a boulder and found myself a couple of metres from a hitherto-sleeping seal (not the one pictured). It (he?) looked up at me; I rather apologetically exclaimed "Oh! Sorry, old chap!" and carried on my way; when I looked back he had put his head down again, so I hope he thinks I was just a strange upright bipedal humanoid dream...Full set of 19 photos.