May 22, 2013
Today was a travel day with a surprise! We moved on from Kaikoura to Nelson. Along the way, we stopped for this short hike up to a waterfall. At the top were hundreds of baby seal pups all playing in the water. They were curious and came over to us and said hello. Of course, they are wild animals and we didn’t touch them but they were very close to us and we loved getting pictures with them!
The rest of the day was spent traveling to Nelson. It was very interesting watching the topography change from a rocky, mountainous tropical area along the coastline to the rolling hills and vineyards near Nelson. Part of what we’re studying is how people use the different landscapes for tourism and I have to say that New Zealand is quite diverse, but it’s all extremely beautiful!
We are exploring Nelson the next couple of days. Tomorrow is a service project day at the bird sanctuary. We don’t know our project yet, but I’m hoping the rain stays away tomorrow since it poured this afternoon. Right now we are staying in a hotel with free wifi and all of us are clamoring to use it! I’m finally having a chance to upload photos between my devices so I can post some pictures on this blog, and I added captions to my photos on Facebook!
I’ve realized after the fact that I’ve forgotten to blog about a couple things in the past few days:
- On Friday (May 17th in NZ), there was a 4.2 magnitude earthquake in Christchurch. I FELT IT! We were standing on a bridge listening to Jason, and I thought it was a truck driving by because there was a lot of construction vehicles around. It was 6km in depth.
- Apparently, Dramamine makes you extremely drowsy. I did not realize that. Yesterday, when we were supposed to go swimming with the dolphins, they encouraged us to take some just in case because the Pacific Ocean is very choppy. But after the trip, I could NOT keep my eyes open and I didn’t know why I was that tired. Lessons learned.
- Interesting fact: McDonalds wanted to come to Kaikoura but they decided not to because they refused to sort their trash and recyclables–it would have created as much trash as 150 homes do in a week– and they could not put a big or tall sign up (to be seen from the highway). The City Council Scheme did not allow for this under the Resource Management Act. Cool, huh? They protected their town from extreme pollution.