Fifty shades of gr.........een!

And that wasn't me on the ferry to South Island!!! In fact the 3 hour trip was relatively calm. Thank goodness!

But New Zealand is just so green! There is green everywhere, except where the broom has taken over and then it is bright yellow. There are views around every corner. When we arrived in Picton on the ferry we headed through the Marlborough area, more vineyard greens, and onto Kaikoura, surrounded by mountain greens and sea greens!

Kaikoura is another seaside town, and we went to the peninsula to see the seals  who were just lolling around on the rocks in the sun. Janet and I headed off in the opposite direction to everyone else and were watching some little chicks on a pond just above the beach before we realised that there was a baby seal in the pond playing! It had found a stick and was moving it from one side of the pond to another, then it decided to chase a leaf, and see if it could come up from under the water and get the leaf on its nose! We must have been there for about 20 minutes just watching it play. So cute!

This morning I braved the sea again and headed out to look for sperm whales. There is a shelf about 800 metres of the coast that drops by over 1,000 metres. Sperm whales can dive for about 40-60 minutes at a time so they can feed at great depths, and they come to Kaikoura for the giant squid! There is one particular whale that hangs around quite a lot, he is about 40 years old and has been named Taiki. As we headed out we just saw his tail as he dived down. After unsuccessfully looking for the some of the others we headed back to where Taiki had been spotted knowing that he would have to come up for breath, which sure enough he did. Rules of engagement are that the boat has to maintain a distance of 15 metres, but when we turned the engines off he came to check us out whilst he was re-oxygenating (and puffing through his blow hole!). After about 5 minutes he did one massive snort, flicked his tail and dived again! The crew were all excited that we had such a close encounter, even though they know that Taiki is not afraid of the boat, but at the end of the day he was such a huge whale and you only see such a small bit of him. At least I broke my "whale jinx" though!

Whilst looking for another whale we encountered quite a number of dolphins, zipping round and under our boat. They always look like they are having such fun, and are so fast it is almost impossible to photograph them!

Finally we were also to see a Wandering Albatross. Apparently it is the largest sea bird and quite rare to see so close to land. Quite a few on the boat were very fascinated. It was a big bird, what can I say?!