Sunny Kaikoura

The crashing waves lulled us to sleep last night and we awoke to discover the Seaward Kaikoura Range abutting our Kaikoura campground. What a gift, this sunny warm day.

Breakfast is...orange food (cheese, carrots, oranges, sweet potatoes) + green.

After work it was time for a walk into town. First stop, the local bookshop, where the proprietor told us her parents had lost their home in the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes. They're rebuilding while they live in their bache in Duvauchelle on the the Banks Peninsula quite near Akaroa. The great sadness in her story was hearing how many older adults got sick and even died from the stress of the earthquakes.

Kaikoura has a real main street.

It's adjacent to the glorious shoreline.

At Kaikoura— name meaning “feast of crayfish” in Maori—mountains meet the sea, their roots reaching deep into the Pacific. The sea floor drops off sharply less than a mile (1.6 kilometers) from shore, forming a wall of the Kaikoura Canyon. This abyss is part of an enormous geologic complex whose trenches plunge as deep as 22,000 feet (6,705 meters) beneath the sea. The silt on the canyon floor periodically flows, carrying sea mud and its inhabitants on a migration through the complex.

Few places in the world are home to such a variety of easily spottable wildlife: whales, dolphins, NZ fur seals, penguins, shearwaters, petrels and wandering albatross all live in the area or pass by.

These rocks create a cacophonous sound when the breaking waves move them.

Listen (trouble viewing click here)...

We never buy coffees out in Chicago. I guess we're making up for that.

 

Apropos of yesterday's post, 100,000 sheep relocated to greener pastures due to lack of rain. Even the weekend's heavy rains couldn't dent the region's 14-month drought.

Our search for SPICE thwarted by a winter-closed Thai resto, wrong hours for Indian food, and a closed-for-a-holiday sushi place, this turned out to be a delicious fourth choice.

Tarahiki for lunch

 Via...http://www.leefishusa.com/products/tarakihi

 

Art made a new kitty-napping friend at the campsite. Is she drinking in the sun or what?