Wales, owls and more - exploring Christchurch & Kaikoura

After our detour inland and the unsuccessful job search, our journey continued to Christchurch. Here we first visited the Banks Peninsula, a peninsula located outside the city. In the small towns and beautiful bays, we felt almost like on vacation in Italy and so we treated ourselves to an 'ice cream cup' here. But the best thing happened to us on the car ride. We passed a little owl sitting on a roadside post.

The next day, we set out to see earthquake-damaged Christchurch. And here the destruction and ongoing construction work were really omnipresent. At every corner, you could see (partially) collapsed houses and there were construction sites and detours every 50 meters. Only in the Botanic Gardens and the adjacent Canterbury Museum, everything still seemed intact. In contrast, the '185 empty chairs' reminded us of the 185 victims who died in the 2011 earthquake. Since we had explored everything in 2 days and the city did not seem particularly inviting to us due to the extensive destruction, we left the region and looked forward to our next destination Kaikoura and the associated whale watching tour.

However, since Kaikoura was also hit by an earthquake a few months ago (we slept through this earthquake in Clive in December), this place greeted us with a power outage and several closed shops. Before our whale watching tour started, we drove to a seal colony and actually saw some seals lying on the rocks here. One might think it's getting boring by now.
When afternoon finally came and our whale watching tour was about to start, we were a bit excited and hoped that we would actually see whales. And after just 10 minutes at sea, the first whale was announced - a sperm whale. We could not believe our luck and when all passengers were finally allowed to get off, there was a big crowd. Nevertheless, everyone got a good spot and saw this magnificent creature, which raised its tail fin beautifully into the air when diving. But after a few minutes, the fun was over and the whale dived again for the next 20-30 minutes. So, all the spectators were loaded back onto the boat and the journey continued in search of another whale. And behold, the crew actually found another sperm whale. Just when we thought it couldn't get any better, the speaker announced that a blue whale had been sighted. And indeed, we were extremely lucky that day and there were actually two blue whales swimming around our boat. So, we also saw the largest living creature on earth. Since these animals have a different diving behavior than the sperm whales, we could only see part of their back here and no tail fin or anything like that, but based on the outlines in the water, we could imagine very well that these animals are many times larger than our boat. Afterwards, a third sperm whale actually swam past our boat and here we could see how thick these little creatures really are when they dive. The crowning end of our trip was a school of several hundred dolphins, swimming alongside the boat and jumping wildly in the water. Overjoyed and completely satisfied with our tour, we left Kaikoura 2 hours later, and as if the day couldn't get any better, we spent the night completely alone at a beautifully beautiful campground in the mountains.