Whales watching and more dolphins

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We arrived in Kaikoura on the 21st for 3 days, to go whale watching. Kaikoura is not really a big town and the whale watching is its claim to fame. We stayed at another camping park in Kaikoura, but once we checked in we'd wish we'd gone somewhere else. The campground was really run down and not much effort was put into maintaining it. The garbage was collected and thrown in a trailor right beside the kitchen, so there was a nice collection of flies when we cooked. Our first day was spent waiting for the dryer to be free because the people how run the place used it all day. Its never taking me 5 hours to do 1 load of laundry before!

On our second morning we got more excitement then we expected though, Dave got up to go to the bathroom at 6am and was greeted by a police officer. It turned out that an English tourist had been attacked and assulted in the bathroom at the park. That's pretty scary especially considering I'd gotten up to go to the bathroom a couple hours before the attack happened. It was a pretty serious attack and there were cops interviewing all the men at the campground and there were CSI people working the scene as well. We went whale watching that morning and when we got back we packed our bags, got our money back for the night we weren't going to stay and left. We did find out later that they caught the guy who did and he is now facing a couple different criminal charges, so that's good at least. Dave doesn't let me go to the bathroom at night by myself anymore!

Anyways we did the whale watching that morning like I already said, the trip was almost 3 hrs and we saw 4 sperm whales. Although we saw 2 whales twice, the whales didn't do much they were justing sleeping and breathing most of the time. One whale did a deep dive and did the whole tall wave thing, but other then that the whales weren't very entertaining. We did see the tip of a fin of a shark as well, we didn't see enough to tell what type of shark it was. On the way back to shore we encountered 200+ Dusky Dolphins, these dolphins are the most acrobatic of them all and they do flips and jumps all the time. They were pretty cool we saw heaps of them playing and doing flips, they also like to swim upside down and slap their tail at the same time. If we hadn't see the dolphins the whale trip would have been a waste.

Like I said when we got back from the whales we packed up and left Kaikoura, we decided to go to Blenheim for the night. We spent the night in a pub so we had our own bathroom and didn't have to worry about walking to far to use it!

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Photos

Sperm Whale
This is the whale breathing, this was the most activity we got out of this whale. Pretty exciting.

Sperm Whale
This whale did a deep dive so we got to see its tail. Sperm whales can dive as deep as 3km and can hold their breath for up to 2hrs, so we didn't expect to see this guy anytime soon.

Dusky Dolphins
There were dolphins everywhere doing jumps and flips.

Dusky Dolphins
One of the jumps, a dusky dolphin will jump 5 times in the same spot.

Dusky Dolphins
Playing along side the boat.

Comments

[jules]

wow very jealous one thing i really want to do !!!