Kaikoura

Day 16- February 21st

After drying all of our stuff out, we drove on to Kaikoura. When we first got there it was boiling hot and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It certainly didn’t look very fun to spend a day in. We had a picnic lunch in the park, under one of the few trees, and then checked into our room at the Pacific Palms. It was very nice, and probably the most luxurious place we would stay on the trip. It even had a private bathroom. I the beach was right next to the road, and a sort of flat rocky place extending way out into the ocean. You could see the huge waves of the open ocean crashing off at the end. The tide came in quickly, so we hiked up the hill next to it.

We hiked along the top of the cliffs for a while. It was mostly green pasture, and might have been used for grazing sheep before. The hills and the beach below were very beautiful and sunny. It didn’t look quite so hot and forbidding as it had earlier in the day.

After a while we hiked back down to the beach. While my family went swimming, I climbed up a rock hill and took a panorama. It was starting to get dark, so we went back home and went to bed early. Our dolphin tour in the morning started at 5:20, so we had to get up at five.