Kaikoura- wildlife viewing

Whale watching- waiting for whales!
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On the way from Christchurch to Kaikoura we stopped at Hanmer Springs. There they had nice natural hot springs, so thought we should stop to warm up a little. We thought it was closed because they seemed to be doing quite a lot of construction work around it, but they were open so we were pleased about that. The first hurdle was getting changed and walking along the cold pathways to the hot baths and not freezing to death! It was nice once you get in there, the temperatures range from 25 up to 40 and because I like my hot baths we started off at 36 and worked our way up to the hottest, being the 40 degree one. Once we got in there, after 5 minutes we got so hot we had to get out because we were overheating. What a pair of wimps! Think that one was hot enough and once you have done the hottest you can't really go back down so we got changed and went after we had lunch in a little cafe nearby. The road to Kaikoura seemed to take us ages because it was small windy roads so 70km seemed to take us about 2 hours! Wished we had gone on the other route if we would have known, but it prob would have taken about the same length of time so didn't matter too much in the end. We checked into our hostel, the Adelpi Lodge which was quite nice and had some cheap (and tasty!) fish and chips for dinner!

Big sperm whale!
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The following day we were hoping to do some Whale Watching. We were hoping to go at 10.30, they didn't have any places the day before but when we phoned in the morning to book for the afternoon there had been some cancellations for the morning so that was lucky. The tour was really good, we got to see 2 massive sperm whales (not as big as the blue whale but still pretty impressive) so got some good pics of them. There was a school of dolphins on the way up, which was really cool- we weren't quite close enough to get good pics but it was still lovely to see them. Oh I do love dolphins! The marine birds were quite impressive too, we saw a massive albatross which has a wings span of 2.8 metres which is quite hard to imagine but they are pretty big! I took a photo but even with that you can't quite work out the size. We were lucky to get it done on the day we did it because the wind was meant to be picking up to 25 knots so glad we did it then. There are lots of other activities you can do there, like doing a helicopter flight over the whales, which is meant to be quite good because you can see the size of the whales against the boat and also swimming with dolphins which I would also love to do but maybe if we come back again in the summer!

Saw 2 sperm whales, whale watching, good hostel and bought mum a tree!