kaikoura

Location: Kaikoura

Baskets Left: 3

i almost pulled it off people of the web wide world... i almost got rid of these maori flax baskets (the containers of all the mystic knowledge of the maori people!) while looking at the whales of kaikoura. if only my boss ms. rhonwyn could hear the good news! for the first time since it started this whole museum quest has been going alright. i haven't even seen any signs of whiro, the maori god of darkness, catching back up with me either.

since things had been going so well i figured little harm could come of my taking 30 minutes to explore (i know that while in christchurch i felt i needed to rush, but nothing bad happened when i got stopped for a bit, and i'd had something close to success this morning).


again i have to say kaikoura's whole mountains meeting the ocean thing is amazing! that and these pebble beaches they have here make the best sounds when the waves roll up and down them. if you don't believe me people of the innerweb it is highly worth the trip to check it out!

kaikoura isn't a huge place. it's sort of between town and village. they've got one main road that has most of the note worthy stuff on it.


at the highway end (furthest from whale watch) is the town's ocean front park. it's got a weird but cool concrete thing. i'm not sure what purpose the thing served, but it had a lot of steps (for not good reason) that were fun to run up and down for a couple minutes.

kaikoura kinda reminded me of drumheller. not because it had dinosaurs mind you, but rather because of how everywhere in town there are whales and dolphins (the same way drum has dinosaurs everywhere!).

half the buildings had cool murals and paintings on them of cetaceans. as whales are some of my favourite living critters i wasn't complaining.
i only have time to post the better ones. for ever mural i'm posting there was another 2 or 3 to choose from.

most depicted toothed whales (dolphins being simply mini toothed whales makes this statement true), but there was one baleen whale pic that i thought was really cool. it was the head of a humpback done life sized. you don't get an idea of how big it is compared to me from this pic, but it was huge let me assure you.

though i couldn't really get a pic of me beside this guy for the size comparison i did manage one funny photo...

i had the point of view of a whale for a second!

get it?!? ;p

i did manage to get a size comparison photo with the coolest of the murals. a life sized portrait of two adult sperm whales!

there were the same animals i'd gone to see in the morning, and it gives you an idea of how massive they were. i only saw their backs to boot! their lower jaw bone is longer than i am!!!

also just like drumheller and its dinosaurs, kaikoura has tons of whale and dolphin statues around town.

i really liked the dusky dolphin one.

the whale tails around town were abundant (sadly i could only find this one picture of them, but there were some others. i might post them once i find them on my puter). someone around town seemed to probably just make a living making statue whale tails and...

lobsters. or sorry the kiwis call them crayfish for some reason. i thought crayfish were freshwater?

anyways kaikoura has tons of lobster/crayfish in its waters, and thus like all good natural based tourist locations this is mimicked by a proportionate number of large statues of the critters in question!

(again i could only find the pics of this one crayfish statue. i know there was one more at least).

where budget limits large versions of the critter than there's always smaller artsy renditions.

the statue of kaikoura i'll remember most was this giant metal barracuda. not because it was the coolest necessarily. though don't get me wrong people of the innerweb i do really like it...

i'll remember it cause i didn't notice it at first...

walking along taking in the sights and town, what should i see when i casually look up...

the shiny metallic jaws of DEATH!!!

so like so many other times in my life i booked it out of there!

oh well it was just as well. i need to push on in the quest. i was about to the hit the end of the south island, and from there push on to the north island. land of new zealand's native dinosaurs...

to be continued...

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