Jess Wanders Off

Kaikoura is SO beautiful.  I really enjoy the scenery here.  Unfortunately today was the day I left Kaikoura, but not before I did some whale watching.  Everyone should be SO proud of me — I was up at 6 AM!!!!  Can you believe it???  A miracle has been performed, ladies and gentlemen.  Yes, so I was there to check in right at 6:45 AM, and we headed out on the boat.  It was cold out on the sea.  The whale watching was slightly disappointing only because they kept going, over and over, “Kaikoura is the mecca of marine life!  You’ll see 8 different species of whale and 7 different species of dolphin and 26 different species of sea birds!”  Okay, well, I exaggerate, but they really did stress the abundance of wildlife in Kaikoura.  Guess what we saw?  ONE whale.  One stinking whale.  That was it.  So yeah, it was a little disappointing.

^^^^^^^^ If you’re too lazy to read my picture captions (just hover your cursor over the pic), that’s basically Noodle’s dorsal fin.  Noodle is the whale we saw.  Unusual name for a whale, but what can I say.  Noodle is a sperm whale, and we saw him twice.  I didn’t get very good photos of him, but here’s his tail:

So all in all, the trip seemed a little overpriced for what I got, but I know the habits of wildlife are extremely changeable and it’s not at all the tour’s fault, but still.  Sperm whale (that’s what Noodle is) are disappointing in general compared to orcas and humpbacks.  I saw orcas in the Pacific Northwest, and they are strikingly beautiful.  I saw humpbacks in Hawaii, and they’re EXTREMELY friendly — they’ll come straight up to the boat and will “perform” for you.  Very playful, like little puppies in the water.  Sperm whales are not only kind of ugly, but they’re NOT friendly.  They’re very standoffish.  They come to the surface for 2-5 minutes, then they’re gone.  Not only that but our tour guide said sperm whales have and do eat people.  Not really eat them, but swallow them whole.  Of course, she hastened to add that these sperm whales “know our intentions are not to harm them, and they’re very intelligent, so they treat us respectfully in return.”  Riiiight.  Later I heard her telling some guy who asked about sharks that, “No, no, really, the sharks don’t pose half a danger to divers out here as sperm whales do…..”  Nice.

Funny thing, about the name of the sperm whale, and I swear, if anything it points to the idiocy of men.  The early whalers were the ones who named the sperm whale, and they named it that because they would cut into these sperm whales’ heads and find a huge deposit of oil up there, just in front of the brain.  Now, the oil isn’t what you think of as oil (black and slick) — instead, it was white, glutinous stuff that looked like……do I really have to say it?  So these whalers (all men of course) took one look at that, scratch their heads, and go, “What a lot of semen!  These whales are big, though, so they must need it when they try to reproduce.”  Hence, the sperm whale.

Okay, three points to make here.  1)  It only takes one lucky little spermy, in humans, whales, whatever, to fertilize an egg.  Just because a whale’s huge, WHY would it need so much more sperm?  And 2)  What about the female sperm whales?  Why would THEY need the sperm?  Surely the whalers didn’t think ALL sperm whales were male?  Also, 3) If that WERE sperm in there, why the hell would it be in the whale’s HEAD? 

Alright, I could make a really sick joke here, but I’m not going to.

Anyway I thought the whole thing was pretty funny.  Guaranteed, if there were female whalers back then, they would have laughed that notion right off, and the sperm whale would have a much more sensible name like, “Black whale” or “Roundback whale” or “Toothed whale.”  SPERM whale.

So.  After the whale watch tour I caught a bus down to Christchurch.  Pleasant scenery but it started to pour as we neared the big city.  By the time we were in Christchurch, it was raining cats and dogs, and it was cooooooold.

Needless to say I didn’t do much sightseeing in Christchurch — pretty much grabbed my stuff and ran.  Luckily my hostel (Base Backpackers) wasn’t too far from where the bus dropped me off, so I only got drenched for 5 minutes.  Once at the hostel, I changed into dry clothes and wandered around.  This place is HUGE.  And it makes me feel like I’m back in college, or even high school — it feels very “institutional” here.  There’s like 4 floors of separate dorm rooms, an Internet lounge, a TV lounge, 2 kitchens, a balcony, a bar downstairs, etc.  I keep rounding different corners, afraid somebody’s going to stop me and ask to see my hall pass.

I didn’t do much in Christchurch.  Headed to the bar around 7 PM and that’s pretty much where I stayed.  I drank too much and slept too little, but it was fun.  I met some really nice people.  At our table was a group from Ireland, a guy from Wales, a girl from Australia, and another guy from Scotland.  They had these cheesy guys in the bar doing a juggling/weak joke routine, although they were pretty funny at times.  They also had a live band later.  One of the girls who works here is from Dallas!  Small world.  She went to ESD.  My friend Phil (from Ireland) won the bar’s paper-rock-scissors contest.  Very impressive.  Phil and I stayed up WAY too late (basically until sunrise).  What can I say.  I have a weakness for cute Irish boys who have excellent paper-rock-scissors technique.  At around 7 am I took a shower and then headed for the train station.

At 8 am our train left Christchurch for Greymouth, on the west coast.  It was a BEAUITFUL ride — the TranzAlpine is its name.  It’s supposed to be ranked as one of the top 5 train rides in the world, and I can totally see why.  Phenomenal mountain scenery.  I’m only sad that I didn’t get any good pictures of it.  I’ll try to buy some postcards or something.  My camera was acting weird, plus I was sort of nodding off at 20-minute intervals on the trip, thanks to my sleep deprivation.  Oh well.  Someday I’ll go back.

Once in Greymouth, a pretty but boring little town by the river, I caught a bus up north to Punakaiki, which was about a 35 minute ride.  The West Coast is very pretty, very similar to the Abel Tasman, except no white sand beaches here — they are a striking dark gray.

Once I got settled into my hostel in Punakaiki (called the Te Nikau retreat — absolutely BEAUTIFUL hostel, highly recommended) I read for awhile then went to sleep.  Sadly that’s all I did today — catch up on sleep!

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!

Well, arriving in New Zealand is basically like arriving home.  I feel completely at home in this country and felt that way within 5 minutes after the plane first touched down in Auckland.  My flight from Nadi (Fiji) to Auckland was about 3.5 hours, Auckland to Wellington 45 minutes, and Wellington to Nelson (a city on the top of the South Island) about 35 minutes.

I love Wellington, I can already tell.  Even though I only saw it through the windows of a plane and the airport, I really love the city.  Lots of big forested hills with houses on top overlooking the sea.  I’ve already added Wellington to my list of cities I want to live in some day.  I can’t wait to get back and explore it.

From Wellington to Nelson I flew on this tiny 22-seater plane.  It was a little baby Air New Zealand plane with two engines on either side that made a horrible noise.  The whole time it was chugging along it was like, “I think I can…I think I can.”  I can honestly say it was the cutest plane I’ve ever been on in my life.

Nelson was rainy when I first got in, but still very pretty.  It’s right on the water and has huge green mountains.  I arrived close to 7pm so I took a taxi to my hostel, The Green Monkey.  It’s a very clean hostel and the owners are very friendly.  Unfortunately my first night’s sleep there wasn’t great because there was a guy snoring like crazy in the room.  Not just any old light snoring either — more like the volume of the two engines on the baby plane.  So that was uncomfortable.  Oh well, it’s a hostel — you get what you pay for, right?

December 17th I headed to Abel Tasman National Park, about 2 hours from Nelson.  It’s breathtakingly spectacular.  All I can say is wow, wow, WOW and I hope I can upload some pictures soon — although my pictures don’t really do it justice.

I took a hike from Marahau (the town near the park) into the actual park, to a little campsite called Anchorage.  The hike was about 4 hours and not very strenuous, but beautiful.  The weather was PHENOMENAL — I couldn’t have asked for a better day.  The walk was magical, with huge leafy ferns shading your pathway from the sun.  I’m sure they filmed at least some of the Lord of the Rings here — they had to have, it’s just so magical, you really do feel like you’re in some fantasy world.  Or the ancient time of the dinosaurs, maybe.  Here’s a pic of the ferns — didn’t come out very well, I’m afraid, but you get the idea.

Anchorage is beautiful.  It’s a giant cove with wonderful white sand beaches and blue-green water.  Once I arrived, very footsore and weary, I plunged straight into the water — and promptly caught hypothermia.  Well, close.  It’s pretty cold water considering how warm the day is.  So instead I opted for the more lazy route — laying on the beach and working on my tan.

Camping in Anchorage was uncomfortable, as the huts didn’t have separate beds, but instead, one giant mattress that people laid their sleeping bags on side-by-side.  So I had to strap on my “Adventurous Jessicah” hat and suck it up and sleep elbow-to-nose mashed in between two perfect strangers.  I was terrified I’d accidently knee someone in the groin or smack them in the face or worse, roll over and kiss on them, thinking they were someone else.  Hah!  Luckily, that didn’t happen — to my knowledge anyway.

The next day I hung around Anchorage, chatting with some awesome German girls and a couple from Wales, as well as a couple from Los Angeles.  There are a lot of Germans travelling here.  It seems like around every corner is a German voice.

Around 1 I got picked up by a water taxi and taken back to Marahau.  All I can say is, WOW.  The guy that worked on the water taxi had the most beautiful blue eyes I have ever seen in my life.  I think he was at least part Maori, or at the very least very tan, because aside from the startling blue eyes he was very dark, with both his skin and his hair. 

At around 3 I got back in the bus heading toward Nelson.  I’ll stay in Nelson tonight, back at the Green Monkey hostel.  Hopefully the snoring guy has moved on!

Here are some more of those beautiful ferns for ya.  New Zealand’s full of these.

Tomorrow I catch an early morning bus to Kaikoura, where I will go whale-watching.

Just a reminder for everybody, feel free to leave comments.  I love comments 🙂

So Fiji is beautiful but it was a long haul getting here.  3 hours from DFW to Los Angeles, then around 11 hours from Los Angeles to Nadi, where I arrived just before dawn.  The flight in was lovely, as the sun was just rising and the sky was a gorgeous color.  No signs of a military coup, from what I could tell — although there WERE two houses on fire when I flew in.  Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

In Nadi I got a shuttle to the marina, passing through only one military roadblock where we were just waved through by the bored soldiers with semiautomatic weapons.  At the marina, I had to wait a few hours for my boat out to the Mamanuca Islands (where I’m staying).  They definitely operate on Fiji time here, and by that I mean, people do whatever the hell they want when they want and very much at their own pace.  The boat was supposed to leave at 7:30 AM, but I believe it was close to 9 when we finally set out.  I wasn’t complaining.  The weather was PERFECT, the guys working in the marina talkative and friendly to me (they were very open and honest about the coup) and we could all sit at a peaceful little cafe overlooking the harbor as we waited.

Once we got to the Mamanucas, I got dropped off at the island I’m staying at, which is Bounty Island — privately owned and all one big resort.  Very peaceful place with gorgeous white sand beaches, clear water with perfect temperatures, and a spectacular natural reef fringing the whole island.

 

I spent my days lazing around the pool or on the beach, and snorkelling over the reef.  That was the best part — the snorkelling.  I saw so many beautiful tropical fish that I’d only ever seen in an aquarium.  Angelfish were everywhere, as well as giant parrotfish with purplish bodies and lime green fins that spread out gracefully like wings as they swim.

There were also dark blue starfish, eels burrowed into the sand, and wonderful giraffe-spotted little fish that were very shy.  Shyest of all are the clownfish, and I’m really happy that I got a quick glimpse of one before it hid from me.  Little Nemo!  Clownfish are so cute.  They’re a lot smaller than you would think though.

The creepiest fish I saw were these translucent-looking swordfish-like guys that drifted near the surface.  I only saw two or three of these.  They were maybe 2 feet long and had long sword-like noses.  They didn’t appreciate me following them.

 

I took a bunch of pictures of the reef with my underwater camera.  I hope the pictures turn out well.  The colors of the reef were so vibrant, I really hope my pics come out.

I met some really great people in Fiji — a nice British girl, a Swedish boy, and a trio of hilarious Irish girls.  I loved the Irish girls’ accents.  They’re so singsong.  I want to go to Ireland now because of them.

 

Anyway that’s about it for Fiji.  Bye for now!

For a sneak peek at  my itinerary for Fiji & New Zealand:

 December 11-12:
 Flying to Nadi, Fiji
 
 December 13-15:
 Hanging out in the Mamanuca islands in Fiji while trying to avoid a military coup

December 15-18:
 Flying to NZ; Nelson & Abel Tasman Track

 December 19:
 Whale Watching in Kaikoura

 December 20:
 Christchurch

 December 21st & 22nd:
 Scenic Train to Greymouth, then Punakaiki (Pancake Rocks)

 December 23rd:
 Glacier Walk on Franz Josef Glacier

 December 24th:
 Christmas Eve in Wanaka

 December 25th:
 Christmas in Queenstown

 December 26th:
 Te Anau

 December 27th:
 Kayaking Trip in Milford Sound

 December 28th:
 Doubtful Sound Cruise

 December 29-31st:
 Queenstown & Surrounding Area; New Year’s Party!

 My hotel in Q’town:

January 1st and 2nd:
 Wellington; Fly home