Kayaking Kaikoura

After getting the tires changed out on our camper van back in Christchurch, Tim and I drove north up the east coast of the South Island to Kaikoura, a town known for its sealife.

Our first Kaikoura adventure: kayaking!

We picked a lovely day to head out on the water, sunny and not too cold.

Pre-kayaking on-shore prep:

The kayaking was lovely... peaceful waters, lots of wildlife. It was our first time using a kayak with a rudder:

We headed over to a rocky outcropping to see if we could catch sight of some of the New Zealand fur seals...

Found some! These two jumped in the water, curious about the kayaks:

Gah, just look at that scenery behind the seals!

After those seals got bored with us, we putzed around a bit in the bay and found some more, cold chillin' on the rocks.

Tim loves posing with seals:

Next: dolphins!

We happened upon a pod of Dusky dolphins! They swam circles around us, popping up occasionally:

We thought it was pretty exciting to see them zipping around us, including right under our kayaks, but our guide seemed a little disappointed because they can be pretty acrobatic. But I still found it cool when they swam right under our kayaks:

Here's some terrible video we shot with the GoPro. Sticking your hand in that water was damn cold!!

After the dolphins got bored with us, our guide insisted on taking the perfect action shot of us in front of the mountains. Perfect meaning in sync with our paddles. It took a few shots to get it right ;-)

Here it is in motion:

Pretty gorgeous scenery:

Our guide also insisted on a "triumph" pose photo, too:

And then we kayaked back, in our uncoordinated fashion:

Good times:

We had also been promised penguins... we finally saw this one lone guy, who kinda looked like a duck floating there:

And that was that... a lovely morning in Kaikoura!

New Zealand!

A week ago Tim and I returned from a 2-week stint on New Zealand's beautiful South Island. All I can say it: amazing.  Scenery, scenery, scenery.  Everywhere you look, amazing scenery.  Picture the scenery from the Lord of the Rings: huge snow capped mountains, beautiful blue lakes, fern-filled rainforests, sheer-walled fiords, big old glaciers, rolling hills, giant gorges, more waterfalls than you've ever seen, winery after winery, miles and miles of grazing land (minus all the elves and dwarves and stuff, plus more sheep).

While we were there, we rented a campervan (RV for us Americans) and toured around the island, generally following Colleen and Steve's itinerary of sight-seeing, hiking, pie-eating, etc., but with a few additional adventures of our own.

It was a lot of driving, and, since it was New Zealand's autumn (May 1 is the transition from summer to winter seasons, tourism-wise), we had some chilly nights huddled together in the campervan, but it was so, so worth it.  Expect lots of landscape photos over the next few weeks- I'm still sifting through them to find the gems, of which there are many.

Anyway, here's Tim drinking his morning coffee in our campervan (rented from Kiwi campers, whom we have mixed feelings about for reasons to be described in a later post!) after our first night sleeping in it.  We had arrived in New Zealand (Christchurch, specifically) mid-morning after a long red-eye from Singapore, waited in the customs line for approximately forever (they are quite thorough there!), then spent some time renting the van and stocking up on food and stuff, and then we were crashing hard, so we didn't make it very far on our first day.  We ended up camping at the Peel Forest Department of Conservation (DOC) campground, which was lovely.