Jess Wanders Off

 

 

Well, I’m here in Kaikoura, which is spectacular.  Prettier than Nelson, in my opinion, but that’s because I like the rugged mountains here.  They still have a faint dusting of snow on their caps, even though it’s this close to Christmas.  The water here is beautiful, almost as beautiful as in Abel Tasman.

 

 

To get to Kaikoura, I took the 8:30 am (that’s difficult for Jessicah) bus from Nelson.  We pased through Renwick and Blenheim, pretty little towns right in the heart of New Zealand’s wine country, which was interesting.  The scenery was gorgeous between Nelson and Blenheim, with huge forests filled with imported Douglas firs, and also valleys with dairy farms.  After Blenheim, though, the scenery wasn’t that great, mostly dry hills.  Once we rolled into Kaikoura, that’s when the huge mountains started showing up.

We passed a seal colony heading into Kaikoura, and it was really great to see them.  They were New Zealand fur seals, dark brown.  Most of them were young and quite smaller than the adults.  They lounged around on the rocks and some of them bounced up and down trying to get from one place to the other.  Seals are so clumsy and cute.

Unfortunately my 3:30 whale-watching boat trip out of Kaikoura was cancelled due to “rough seas,” so I had to reschedule for 6:45 am tomorrow morning.  Yikes.  Let’s hope I can function that early in the morning.  I really, really hope we see some whales tomorrow.  I was really disappointed we had to cancel this afternoon.  The good news is one girl that was here last week said she saw orcas.  If we could see orcas tomorrow morning, that would make up for the disappointment of having it be cancelled today.

 

 

So instead, I took a long walk out to Kaikoura’s own resident seal colony, but it wasn’t as hopping as the one we passed on the way in.  There were only 2 fat adults sunbathing themselves on the rocks.  They were pretty cute though.  One yawned really big and then sneezed, which was funny.  The other one took his fins and crossed them over his chest so that he looked like a seal mummy (he was lying on his back).  Seals are funny.

 

 

It was about 1 hour and 45 minutes round trip from the seal colony.  Along the way, I saw some beautiful purple-blue flowers that I guess are the New Zealand equivalent of Texas’ bluebonnets.  Very pretty.

 

 

Talk to you all tomorrow!

 

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 2:35 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.