North bit of the south island
I’m getting a little behind on updates due to lack of proper internet, but here we go:
In “christchurch 2″ I mentioned some stuff that now have photos, here they are:
I rejoined the Kiwi bus, and headed anticlockwise round the coast of the south island, to Kaikoura, on the way there was swimming in a river, I dared to stick my big toe in, and didn’t venture further, but there were pleanty doing silly things, I took photographic evenence, and used the opertunity to practice photography of such subjects:
In Kaikoura I was very torn between 2 activities: whale watching and seal swimming, the interesting point here is that the seal swimming was a third of the price of the whale watching, in the end i went for the whale watching, but I may end up doing seal swimming later. The whales — sperm whales — where very interesting, but due ot reasons involving distance and other factors, photography wasn’t all that productive. we saw 3 whales, they come up to the surface, and sit there snorting for 5 minutes, then dive down to fish, then come back up and start snorting again. There is some very deep water very close to land in where we were, and that’s why the whales were there, they like diving really deep. there is a spot of seabed 1KM off shore that is 900 meters deep, I’ll let you folks work out the gradients involved there, sufice to say the idea of that gives me the hebejebees.
Up the east coast to nelson and then annoyingly back the best part of 2 hours drive out to the south of the Abel Tasman National park, I had the chance to go on another kayaking trip. The scenery was utterly stunning and a great time was had. naturally water and cameras don’t mix too well, but none the less i got some good shots. interestingly I noticed that the best views were from the beach looking out.
Back to the bus, heading down the coast some scenery was found:
A good deal of rain followed, this is only to be expected given that it’s the west coast. At a place refered to as the Poo Pub (due to it’s unfortunate locality in relation to Lake Mahinapua) we stayed a night — the accomodation was a a bunch of sheds behind a pub, this was all well and good as they were quite luxurius sheds, except for the dampness, at the next hostel I had to totaly empty my bag to dry everything, I have never seen anything like it. I woke up in the middle of the night, roled over, and found cold damp patches, and it was too warm to use the heaters. The pub was run by a bloke in his (I believe) 80’s (see photos), and a dambed good party was held there (for those that liked parties anyway) it was fancy dress and the theme was “pimps and prostitutes”. I took an early night while most of the rest of the bus proceded to get pissed out of thier skulls and make royal tits of them selves (literally in some cases). I stuck around for a little while to get some photos, but frankly found the environment so oppressive and socially clostrophobic that I had to take breaks from it.
For future reference, the over nigt stops were: Kaikoura, Nelsonx2, Westport, Lake Mahinapua