Kaikoura Fur Seals

Tuesday, January 14th, was a long travel day for us. Red Carpet Tours was taking us farther south to be in place to visit Mt. Sunday the next day. A slightly faster route leaving Nelson would be to stay inland, but I am grateful that our tour bus driver took the eastern coastal route instead. This allowed us a couple of stops along the Kaikoura Coast.

Even before we reached the coast, the scenery was spectacular.

The sun lifted, the day warmed, and the scenery continued outstanding. It reminded us over and over of the Pacific Northwest.

As we traveled, we played a game. Our tour guide, Josh, asked us Tolkien trivia questions in a range of difficulty levels. He asked about 30 questions over a few hours. I knew the answer to about 4 of them. Here I was, thinking I was a fan…. But a couple of the members of our tour group knew the answers to everything. The two with the greatest knowledge were Jessica and Vidush, and they won prizes. They also became our captains for the even bigger quiz game, which would be played the next day on the bus.

We stopped for coffee and I let Pedro stand in line for us while I ran around outside and stretched my legs.

We hopped on the bus for a short drive to an overlook spot over some rocks and a fur seal nursery. I have never seen so many baby seals in my life. It was loads of fun to stand and watch.

I retrieved this from a New Zealand Whale Watch website: “Fur Seals spend several days out at sea feeding (foraging trips may range from 1 – 8 days) and then come ashore to “haul-out” areas for a day or so to rest and suckle their pups. People may assume that they are sun-bathing when lying on the rocks, however they are merely resting. The seals have a thick fur coat, underneath this they have a thick layer of blubber. These keep them well insulted at sea but when they come ashore to rest, they are vulnerable to overheating so are forced periodically to enter the water to cool down.”

In the still images, it looks like the seals are not moving much. However, there was activity in every direction due to the baby seals playing, trying to find their mom, and swimming in a pool. In the background, the sea waves crashed, the wind blew, and the Red-billed Gulls constantly screamed. The videos show all of that.

Then I spotted a tiny seal playing by herself, trying to chew the stem of a plant, right below me.

After we got all the “Awwwww’s” out of our system, we hopped onto the bus once more, to go find lunch. We stopped in the town of Kaikoura where Josh told us we could get crayfish, a local specialty. That sounded good to Pedro and me so we went directly to the Craypot, and ordered 1/2 crayfish and some chowder.

Oh! I keep forgetting to mention. New Zealand restaurants serve fries with everything, and tons of them. We call them french fries, but they are chips, or hot chips, in New Zealand and you get heaps and heaps of them, whether you want them or not. Interestingly, the general population of New Zealand is not obese, but we can’t imagine why not, if they are eating all those deep fried potatoes.

It’s a good thing we ordered only 1/2 a crayfish, because that thing was larger than a New England lobster. Wowzers! In parts of the US, crayfish (or crawdads or crawfish) are very common, but they are the size of shrimp. This enormous beast blew our minds. But it was delicious and we ate every morsel of flesh we could find, using the shell crackers the restaurant provided. The chowder was also excellent and we left happy and sated.

There was still time before the bus left, so we crossed a little pedestrian bridge and went out to the beach once more. I was delighted with the smooth polished stones.

Then we returned to the bus and in a happy haze, completed our journey to Christchurch.

Bird count: None! The day before I had collected multiple shots of male, female, and juvenile House Sparrows. Today I got great shots of a Great Cormorant and a Black Backed Gull, and a Red-billed Gull, and all of those are already collected. New Zealand bird total stands at 17.