NDBT

Alternate title; or better yet, don’t call me, I’ll call you!

2 other things I forgot to mention earlier. A) watched black sheep. Oh so fabulous. and B) I BEAT OUR DRIVER at our Stray bus driving game. (it’s like bug – it involves spotting small orange camper-vans before the driver). Years of practice my friends…

So – I just got back from whale watching in Kaikoura and I am on such an absolute high, it is unbelievable. We saw 2 sperm whales, tons and tons of dusky dolphins, which are the most acrobatic of any dolphin species, common dolphin, white fronted terns, cape petrels, mollymawks albatross (there were 2 species of these… umm…. Salvins and black browed I think were the ones we saw), giant petrel, and westland petrel, I don’t think we saw any shearwaters, and GIBSON’S WANDERING ALBATROSS!!!! The largest bird in the world. I’ve wanted to see one my whole life and we saw about 5. They’re huge! And so, so gorgeous. Yay! 🙂

The sperm whales were very cool. Sperm whales are the 4th largest whale in the world and the largest of the toothed or Odontoceti whales. They’re the ones that get into fights with giant squids. They’re found here because quite close to Kaikoura is the Kaikoura trench. Basically the sea floor goes from 300 ft to 4000 ft deep quite quickly. We saw two; Rua and Big Nick. Lots of spouting, and we watched them both dive, so we could see their tails quite well.

Then we saw a huge pod of dusky dolphins. We saw them doing head slapping, tail slapping, back flips, leaps, upside down leaps. Saw some calves. And I was right on the bow of the boat, and tons of them came up to do bow-riding, so they were about a meter below me – I could practically touch them when they jumped up to breathe. Very pretty, stripey dolphins, although not as colorful as the Hector’s. They were more entertaining, though.

I’ll post photos as soon as I can.  Tomorrow up to Picton, then to Wellington by the inter-island ferry.
Also – I’m reading Dexter in the Dark (finally!!! I’ve been waiting forever) and I am absolutely loving it so far. Three cheers for darkly funny serial killers. “I’m not schizophrenic – we’re both sure of that.”

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.