Holiday. Chapter 4. Kaikoura - the marine animal paradise

Our happy camper life started right after we landed in Christchurch on Tuesday, which also means I haven't been able to do any blogging (sorry all fans ;)

Anyway, after a flight down to Christchurch we picked up the camper van which is going to be our home for the next 7 nights and headed up a bit north to amazing Kaikoura. This is probably the coolest town I've been to so far in New Zealand. It's right by the coast and it has incredible marine life which we started to explore as soon as we got there when we found this little hidden gem where fur seals hang out.

Seals is for some reason one of my favourite animals so this was one of the best experiences I've ever had! I've never seen a seal in my life before and here all of a sudden, in the woods there was a beautiful waterfall where a huge amount of cute fur seals were playing around in the water.

Sometimes it seems like they acknowledge us visitors by coming up close to see who we were, but the majority of time it only seemed like they were too busy playing with each other.

But we didn't have to enter the forest to be able to see seals - they are everywhere along the coastline, although they are pretty camouflaged when they are sunbathing on the rocks.

After our first night in the camper van we got up early to go to Kaikoura whale watching center where we had a safety briefing and a coffee before going on to the whale watching boat.

 

On this whale watching tour you can be unlucky and you may come back to the shore without have seen any marine life (but if that happens you get some of your money back I think!) or you can be incredibly lucky like us and see not only one, but two spermwhales! Nature is nature and the great thing about this whale watching is that humans doesn't take animals into a prison but let them live as they want to themselves.

Apart from the whales we saw 200 dolphins playing and swimming around together at one spot. I think I've seen one or two wild dolphins before in my life so this was pretty overwhelming and I could've watched them all for ages!

After a tour like that a lot of people go for a sushi with fish meat or fish & chips or something like that, which is something that I will never understand. How can people not realise how contradicting it is to go and admire marine animals and then go and eat animals and talk about how cool it was to see the animals of the sea. It really disgust me. Instead, why not go and have a vegan sushi? That's what we did anyway as we found this awesome sushi place in down town Kaikoura, where they had plenty of vegan sushi options for a good price and the staff was so friendly as well!