Kaikoura, or how I call it, paradise

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Done with hiking... a new chapter would start now.

I met Marta on South Bay in Kaikoura. She is a student from the Otago university and she is doing her Phd on sperm whales in Kaikoura. I was there to help her out on the boat for one week.
We couldn't go out on the sea very often because it was too windy for our little boat. During the whole week we just went out 2 times.
On our first trip we didn't have any expectations. We didn't know if there were any whales around yet. But we were really lucky and could find one after only an hour! It was Hopbrocker. An old whale that was already known by the researchers up there. It was so exciting! Whenever the sperm whales dive down, they lift their tail up and just swim straight down. They can stay under water for more than an hour. All they do down there is foraging. Their goal is to get as big as possible to get the females.
Once they are under water we have to track them down. We have a sounding machine that picks up the clicking they make while foraging. With this technique we can find out where the whale is going to show up at the surface. Once it was up there, we followed it with our little boat (called Grampus) until it dived down again.
On our way to get to the whale we had seen a lot of seals playing in the waves and also one dolphin. There were a lot of sea birds too and once we had a royal albatros flying straight towards us. At the last second it turned and flew so close to close to our boat that I could have touched it. So ipressive animals. I love them but I think that I had never been that scared of a bird. Royal albatrosses get very large, up to 3 meters when they pull out their wings. So way larger than our little Grampus...
On our second trip we saw the same whale again. It seemed like there was no other whale around at that time. That day we also saw two blue sharks. We passed right next to them with our boat. They are so majestic animals.
On our way back to the harbour, Marta let me drive the boat. She had explained me everything and I was now ready to take over the command. When there were only a few miles left, 3 pods of dolphins appeared and swam right towards us. Marta took over the driving so that I have a better look at them. All the dolphins were jumoing around the boat, in the front, in the back and everywhere one the sides. I was standing in the front of the boat, holding on to a rope, nearly falling into the sea, watching them play and laughing as they jumped around my hands when I put them into the water. I couldn't stop grinning for a few hours after that. I was just so happy.
On the days where we didn't go out on the sea, I just went for walks. There were always a lot of baby sea lions playing at the edge of the peninsula. Reallh funny to look at.

So this was all the good stuff, now the bad stuff:
On my first day, I broke the neighbour's fence while I was driving backwards... ups
And the second thing is that one day my tire just broke when we were going to buy some ice cream. So we had to hitchhike back to the cottage and the next day I went to the mechanic and spent a lot of money on a new tyre... woooo...

But in the end, I loved Kaikoura and all the animals you could see at sea. I would definetly go back!

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