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Published: October 2nd 2007
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Time for another road trip, this time heading northwards. I had a free ticket on the Whale Watch boat in Kaikoura, so thought it could be combined with a Blenheim/Picton visit over my weekend. As astute readers will know, I do not take to the charms of the sea with any readiness. I like the sea, so long as she keeps her place. I'm sure the sea likes me too, just not when I'm on her. But this time I had a secret weapon to avert succumbing to the dreaded seasickness... Air Waves chewing gum! It appears that a combination of the "Menthol and Eucalyptus Vapour Release" and the simple constant chewing action keeps the motion sickness at bay. Well, to an extent anyway. Boldly disregarding the packet's warning that excessive use may have a laxative effect, I kept my mouth full of the stuff the whole time I was on the boat and managed to not throw up all over everybody. But I still felt pretty awful. Still, worth it to see a whale I guess.
I've always wanted to go on a whale watch at Kaikoura but the hefty price tag involved meant that it was always a
distant want. I've been out on the albatross boat several times and at $80 a go I deem it quite an acceptable payment for the rewards, but to pay $130 to see whales is a bit much. However, free is an entirely different kettle of fish (so to speak). So that fair morning me and Robyn rocked on up to the Whale Watch building and secured our places on the boat.
There are about fifty people per boat, and some quick head-sums told us that Whale Watch was making a packet. $130 per person, fifty people per boat, four boats per day, an average of fifty percent of the boats going out (due to weather etc cancelling some trips): that's over $90,000 per week!! Even allowing for petrol, boat maintenance, DoC permits and so on, that works out as a lot of profit. There was a dreary commentary on board of the sort that made it all too clear the guy had repeated it one too many hundred times. Even the attempts at humour were monotone, rolled out in such a way that they received little more than an embarrassed smile or two from the customers. When he said
"I hope no-one was expecting to come out here and see lots of whales, because one or two is considered a good day", you could almost hear the surrounding punters thinking "What? You could have told us that before we spent $130 coming out". In the event we saw five whales. There isn't really a whole lot to see when whale watching from a boat. The back of the sperm whale is visible at the surface with waves breaking over it. It lies there for a while looking remarkably similar to a big log or some other piece of large flotsam. Then it dives, the tail comes up in an admittedly-photogenic manner, and its gone. We were hoping for some extras on the set, maybe some killer whales or a pod of long-finned pilot whales, but there were just the sperm whales and a very few distant seabirds. Deciding that I would prefer to sit and watch than stand and take photos and then throw up, I left the photography to Robyn and her iron stomach.
Apart for whales the purpose of this road trip was, of course, to find some new birds. There were two species in particular
I was after, the first being a pair of red-necked phalaropes at Lake Grassmere and the other a black kite near Blenheim. They are the only ones of their kind in New Zealand. The phalaropes got lost during their migration through Asia and ended up by the salt-works at Grassmere where they decided to stay. The kite was blown across the Tasman Sea from Australia and set up house in a valley in the wine region. They all must have liked Marlborough a lot because they've been there for quite a number of years now. There has to be something about the area that's worth hanging around for, because there's yet another only-one-in-New-Zealand bird that's been living for a few years at nearby French Pass in the Marlborough Sounds, a brown booby (that's a type of tropical gannet). French Pass is over three hours from Picton though, so we didn't have any time to spare for that one.
Lake Grassmere is just south of Blenheim. There are massive mountains of dirty salt waiting to be processed and huge ponds of seawater slowly evaporating in the sun, turned the bright pink of flamingoes by masses of brine shrimp churning in
the water. All the way at the end of the road round the ponds is a lagoon where the waders congregate. Or perhaps I should say where the waders congregate when I'm not around. There were pied stilts and banded dotterels and wrybills but no phalaropes. A return trip on the way back down to Christchurch the next day also failed. I'd seen the species already in Thailand but it would have been nice to see the New Zealand ones. I know they're still there too because someone else saw one a couple of days later. Anyway, we headed onwards to Blenheim and sought out the Waihopai Valley Road where the black kite lives. And of course he wasn't there. Stupid birds.
The next morning we returned to the kite site. Robyn couldn't care less about unusual distant birds that look just like regular distant birds, so she left me at the side of the road with my binoculars and went to look at the American spy base that is further along the same road. Now you may reasonably expect that a spy base would be somewhat covert, somewhat hidden and unobtrusive. But you would be forgetting that this
is an AMERICAN spy base! The winery at the start of the road has even renamed itself the Spy Valley Winery. The base looks from afar like two glistening white golf balls lost by some careless giant golf-player. From up close they look just the same except bigger. Robyn was a little nervous about taking photos, especially because the sign outside said they had the right to search the boat of any trespassers. When she returned she was amazed to discover that I had actually found the kite. Never having seen one before I hadn't been overly confident of my ability to separate it from the hundreds of harriers that live in the same area but it turned out to be readily distinguishable, so that was good for me.
With the kite taken care of, we journeyed on up to Picton. Most people go to Picton to catch the ferry across to the North Island; we went there just to go to the aquarium. Its only a little aquarium but its quite good. Not for the entry price it has, but if it was halved then certainly it would be fine (and we got in for free anyway, so
no complaints there). It probably gets a lot of tourists while they're waiting for the ferries. The highlight for most would probably be the pickled giant squid but unfortunately it wasn't preserved well enough and is slowly disintegrating in its murky display case. I liked the 'rock pool' set up inside a wooden dinghy and the fat polystyrene killer whale hanging from the roof. Robyn liked the eels and turtles.
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Peter
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prices
It is sad how everything always has to be so overpriced. Whenever we travel in the western world we find the same problem. Like visiting caves in Australia. Why pay hugs bucks to look inside a dark hole? Same thing in Thailand for nothing. Anyhow, money is a great motivator and without it lots of these places would have gone down.