Deetlefs travels

 We woke up to clear skies and a freezing morning. As we were not Traveling today we had a lazy morning.  At around 10am we all went for a shower and then went for a scenic drive up the mountain behind  Akaroa town. The view was amazingly beautiful.  We then made our way back down to the lighthouse and into town where we had coffee and brunch at L’Escargot Rouge. There is very much a French Colonial vibe in town - it feels like you are in a different world! At 1:30pm our 2 hour harbour nature cruise on the Black Cat boat started. We decided to sit on the top open deck which had beautiful views as we  cruised around the harbour and made our way to the open sea. We saw some fur seals, white-flipperend blue penguins and a Hectors dolphin. It was quite chilly on the water so the crew kindly handed out blankets to everyone.  Once we got back to the jetty we decided to go for drinks and an early dinner at Harbar Beachbar. It’s a quant little pub right on the wate...

We woke up to sound of birds chirping in the bush around our camp site. It was a crisp 4 degrees so we decided to lie in until it warmed up a bit.  After we all had a shower we made our way to Amberley where we stopped at Countdown to get some bread, milk and cool drinks.  We then made our way to Christchurch where we stopped at Burnsco and Brent caught up with some of his work buddies. We filled the van with diesel and took the winding road over the mountains to Akaroa.  We went for a walk through town and decided to have an early dinner at La Thai restaurant.  It was so cold along the waterfront that I stopped to buy a warm beanie as I just could not warm up! The sun was disappearing behind the mountains quite early so we made our way to the Top 10 holiday park where we’ve parked up for the night.   

Our day started with the most amazing sunrise over Kaikoura harbour. After breakfast we made our way into town where we hopped on the Kaikoura Whale Watch boat.  We were off to a bit of a choppy start so we all had to stay seated inside the boat until we got to where they expected to see some whales.  About an hour into our trip we got to see a sperm whale. He gave us a beautiful show - every now and again blowing water out of his blowhole for about 5 minutes and then he gave us a beautiful show of his tail as he took a dive.  Sperm whales only surface for around 10 minutes and then dive to the deep waters where they spend about 40 minutes before they come back up to the surface.   Our skipper, Mallory decided she would take us on a dolphin hunt and then return to see if we can spot the whale again when he next surfaced.  We were lucky to see quite a few fur seals playing in the water and we also got to see a school of Dusky dolphins. The dolphins were very play...

We woke up to a chilly morning next to Spring Creek so we took our time before we ventured out into cold. Brent fed the stale bread we had to the eels in the creek. They are so tame they come right up onto the bank of the water. I decided to pop down and have a look and gave them some biscuits but one of them decided that my shoe laces looked very appetising!  We started making our way to the Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre but then Brent spotted the Makana Chocolate Factory so we made that our first stop of the day. We each got a chocolate fix and continued to Omaka.  We spent several hours working our way through the WW1 and WW2 displays. The props for the WW1 display were done by Peter Jackson. They’ve continued along the same theme for the WW2 display where each exhibit tells the real life story of a soldier. The displays ended with a 3D reenactment of a war scene where you sit inside a bomb shelter in Germany with fighter planes attacking the city.  While we were look...

We had an early start to the day so we could be at the pier at 9:30 to board the Mail Boat cruise on Pelorus Sound. The boat had 48 passengers for the trip, which was more than what we expected but made for a really good trip.  The crew consisted of 2 ladies - one was the skipper and the other was the deck hand/mail lady. The commentary throughout the cruise was very interesting and quite entertaining as the skipper had a really good sense of humour.  On Monday’s the ship does the eastern bays and we did various stops along the way to drop off and pick up mail before the 1st stop where we could hop off to explore the coast and forest at Jacobs Bay. We spent half an hour on shore before we boarded again to continue the mail run.  The sounds are truly magnificent. We saw hundreds of jelly fish all throughout the Sounds and at Jacobs Bay there was some type of seaweed that washed out on the rocks that was the greenest of green! For lunch we stopped at Te Rawa bay which has a...