Travel – Kaikoura, New Zealand

For the recent long weekend, we decided to take a road trip to our good friends in Christchurch, via the coastal route passed Kaikoura. We spent a night in this quaint seaside village, and had a wonderful time exploring what it had to offer.

Travelling New Zealand is one of our favourite things to do, and Kaikoura was superb!

This was the first time we had driven along the coastal State Highway 1 through to Kaikoura from Nelson, since the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2016 that ravaged this area.

Ruptures occurred on multiple faults and this earthquake has been described as the “most complex earthquake ever studied.”

So it was very interesting, and heart wrenching, to see all the work that has been done to recover the road and train tracks that run parallel to the coastline.

We had done a trip this way a few months earlier, where we visited the seal colonies breeding ground in the pools at the bottom of a beautiful waterfall. However, this is sadly no longer there due to the earthquake.

It just goes to show the power of mother nature and this complex earth. We went through one ‘stop-go’, otherwise the rest of the road was fine.

It is such a beautiful drive and reminds me so so much of the midlands in my home country – Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa. It’s like a mountainous midlands, right next to the sea! Absolutely beautiful!

Kaikoura Seal Colony

When we got to Kaikoura we had some lunch, rehydrated and headed out to  Point Kean Viewpoint to take a walk to the Kaikoura Seal Colony. It was the most glorious day, blue skies and sunshine! The perfect conditions for a lovely little adventure to the seals. 

This particular peninsula is where the entire sea bed lifted a remarkable 5.5 meters along a 20 kilometre stretch of the Kaikoura coastline. This alone shows how immensely powerful this earthquake was.

Many volunteers, at the time, rushed to help save the saline that had been jolted out of water – absolutely crazy! 

We walked along this uplifted bed, and spotted a few birds and lots of seaweed/kelp. Our adventure took us further along the coast across a little pebble beach, to the seal colony settled amongst the chalk-like white rocks. 

Nick got up and close with the sweetest baby seal, however I kept my distance – I’m a bit of a ‘scaredy-cat’ when it comes to some wild animals – bizarre, I know,  since I grew up on a farm in Africa!

And when big mamma seal came bouncing in my direction – whoah! I was gone in a second! Nick laughed!!!

On the way back we headed up the hill to the Peninsula Walkway to absorb the incredible view. While up there we spotted the boats scurrying along the water to reach the pod of (we think) we Orca’s.

So beautiful! It was such a great experience, and the views from up there, on this perfect day were nothing short of spectacular!

For dinner we headed to the Strawberry Tree pub for drinks and dinner and it was fantastic! Such amazing food – we throughly enjoyed the haloumi fries and big salads! They were absolutely delicious!

We stayed the night at a lodge/hostel – ummm, yeah won’t go into detail there. In the morning we had breakfast, coffee and continued our road trip to Christchurch. 

I do hope you enjoyed this post full of photographs and moments captured of our adventure day in Kaikoura.