Dolphin Encounter - Big Adventure Day 2

Just off the Kaikoura peninsula is the Hikurangi Trench, a 1000m deep sea trench where warm and cold currents meet. This results in nutrient-rich water rising up from the trench, and this attracts abundant marine wildlife.

Which means several species of dolphin. And several species of whale. And seals, and penguins, and albatrosses (albatrossi?), and...you get the picture.

I felt pretty rotten that morning (did my usual trick of going a greenish tinge) but the task of putting on the wetsuit distracted me. We had sleeveless body suit, jacket with a delightful strap that went between the legs, hood and socks. The sizing was a little odd - I had to have a size 10 body suit and a size 16 jacket. Even the wetsuit man was confused.

After shoe-horning ourselves into our gear, we settled down in a room for an informative video. This told us about dolphin table manners and dating etiquette and things. And how to attract their attention and play with them.

Following the video we piled into a coach and headed off to the boat. There was a pod of about 400 dolphins in the bay, so we quickly located those and got ready for our swim. The pod was a mix of common dolphins and dusky dolphins, swimming and socialising together which is unusual. Putting on my flippers, goggles and snorkel I got ready to utilise my new dolphin speed-dating skills and got into the water.

Tip number 1: Sing to the dolphins to catch their attention.

Other people sang sensible things like 'Three Blind Mice', or hummed random notes (apart from one guy who seemed to speak fluent dolphin and just squawked a lot). I couldn't think of anything to hum, so I just said 'Helloooo dolphins' over and over again.

Unfortunately, sound travels quite well underwater, so everyone else could hear me. They all laughed. But I was surrounded by dolphins for the majority of the time, so they can all get lost.

Tip number 2: Play with the dolphins by spinning round in circles with them.

This was great fun. The dolphins would swim straight at you, in a bizarre underwater game of chicken, then at the last moment turn and swim round you. If you span round in the water in the same direction as them they would continue to swim round in circles - this was their way of playing with us. This could last for up to a couple of minutes if you managed to get a particularly playful dolphin.

Tip number 3: Don't touch the dolphins, as you will put them off coming near humans.

This was harder than expected, as the dolphins got so close I could easily have reached out and touched one. But dolphins are actually pretty massive and so strong and powerful that when you are confronted with one 15cm from your face the last thing you want to do is make it angry.

Tip number 4: Act as dolphin-like as possible.

I am not good at pretending to be a dolphin. Even with my long history of butterfly swimming. I mainly flail.

I know it is the cliche to say swimming with dolphins is 'the best thing I've ever done', but I'm just gunna have to be cliched and say it: this was the best experience of my life. I'm no word smith and can't come up with a poetic sentence to explain how amazing it was, so you'll all just have to enter the following words into a thesaurus and make your own up:

• Fantastic
• Awe-inspiring
• Humbling
• Beautiful

The dolphins were really friendly, inquisitive and playful, and I couldn't recommend the dolphin encounter at Kaikoura more.

We swam for about 40mins then clambered back into the boat to our towels and dry clothes. After that the boat followed the pod for a while, enabling us to get millions of photos to bore everyone back home. The dusky dolphins are the species that do the various acrobatic back flips and mid-air spins, and they love to show off:

At one point the skipper sped up and the dolphins raced the boat - they like doing this because the boat creates a wave in front of it that lets the dolphins swim even faster than they normally do. I videoed this, and it will be appearing on this blog shortly.

Eventually we had to leave the dolphins and head back to shore. After showering and getting lunch we ambled (no fast walking after expending all our energy in the sea) along the peninsula to the Point Kean Car Park. This may seem like an odd tourist attraction, but the car park is home to a fur seal colony. Apparently the males like the car park, and the females like the rocks nearby.

Here is one geezer hiding under a bush:

On the way back to town we stopped off at Kaikoura Seafood BBQ for a snack.

This looks like a burger van that you get at Bonfire Night and any other council-run events, but instead of selling hotdogs and cheeseburgers it sells super-fresh seafood platters, grilled crayfish, garlic prawns, scallops etc. We decided to try a paua fritter.

Paua, or Haliotis iris, is a sea snail unique to New Zealand waters. The shells are highly prized by the Maori (they are taonga - treasure) as they have whorls of irridescent blues, greens and silvers when polished. There are many laws governing the use of paua: for example, each diver is allowed to catch ten paua per day, and only by free diving - it is illegal to use scuba equipment. The Maori people own the right to harvest paua, and can grant permission to people. Also, you cannot take an unprocessed paua shell out of New Zealand - only the polished form of the shell.

After our snack we headed back to the hostel to psych ourselves up for the enormous meal that awaited us - we were going for crayfish at a restaurant, as it is the local delicacy. We decided to flash the banks our cash and get a seafood platter, which consisted of half a crayfish each, crumbed fish fillets, calamari, scallops, prawns, mussels, salad and garlic bread, for a mere £35 each. But it was so good, and I'm glad we spent the little bit extra to try the crayfish.

With (very) full tummies we went back to the hostel to sleep, as the days excursions had worn us out somewhat. To finish up, here are two more cloud+mountain+water pictures: