Canterbury Tales

This past week I spent some time in the South Island, in Christchurch. One of the highlights was heading north up to Kaikoura, a place I'd never been to before. It's a coastal town, famous for its whale watching tours.

Waiopuka Beach

Waiopuka Beach (pictured above) is actually a whale cemetery. It's against the law to take whale bones off the beach if you do happen to find them and according to the sign, it's quite possible you may, as the bay was a whaling station back in the 1800s: the whales were hunted for oil and bone. As the sign says, its a reminder of what did go on and its nice to have the area preserved as an archaelogical site, and also to have the respect given to whales.

We headed down the road to the seal colony and walked across the rocks to spot them (from a distance) and then back in town had a late lunch (or was it an early dinner?) before driving the two plus hours back down to Christchurch.

Kaikoura made the news in more recent times for the terrible 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck on November 2016, just after midnight. I actually felt it up here in Auckland, still awake as I was flying out of town the next day, and couldn't get to sleep. It was just the slightest feeling of the earth moving, just a few seconds but was very odd and enough to make me wonder if I'd imagined it. I'd never felt an earthquake in Auckland before, although I'd felt plenty of jolts where I used to live in the lower North Island. This was different as it was so far away and wasn't anything close to being a jolt, but even so, I even turned on the radio to see if anything had happened. Sure enough, the reports began to soon come in. When I flew back home a few days later, I came via Wellington which had also suffered significant damage. In Kaikoura, it resulted in the town being cut off due to landslides but you can read more about that day and the after effects HERE.

At the seal colony

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