Kaikoura Peninsula Walk

 

Woke up to fog and headed out from camp to do the Kaikoura Peninsula Walk. We walked past the Albatross Experience office a d the Monterey Cypress Beach and then turned right onto Tom's Track.  

We climbed up the hill following the tsunami evacuation route to get to the other side of the peninsula.

Soon the sun came out and we followed the South Bay Beach

To the South Bay Recreation Preserve with its Maori gateway.

Here we ran into a woman who was looking for a great egret that had been seen here recently, but no luck today.

The Kaikoura shoreline has these interesting rock terraces that I wondered if they had been created by the 2016 earthquake but it turns out to be a combination of tectonic upheavals and erosion that precedes the earthquake.  

We came across this interesting (and lurid?) clematis growing along the path:

The trail then climbed up into the headlands with views all over the coast.  At one viewpoint people were looking out on whales spouting off in the distance.

Volunteers here have built an artificial Hutton's shearwater colony.  The only 2 remaining colonies are located here on the Kaikoura Peninsula.  They transported chicks from those colonies here starting in 2005.  At first there was a lot of losses. due to predation from cats so they installed a predator proof fence after which survival improved.  Since 2010 the shearwaters have been returning to breed and in 2024, 27 chicks survived to fly away. 

Further along we looked out over a fur seal colony.  It turned out to be very large with seals lolling on the rocks for miles.

There's fur seal pups way down there

We dropped dropped down to the shore and snagged a passionfruit ice cream at a food truck.

Delicious!

Look at these Norfolk Island pines:

Soon afterward there  was supposedly a shortcut back to town.  We climbed up a hill

And found ourselves in a sheep farm.  We were confused about where we were supposed to go and found ourselves skulking around someone's back yard.  Eventually we realized we were supposed to go up and over the sheep field (steeper than it looks in the photo).

I put my foot down, enough climbing for one day, and we retur Ed to the shore.

Amazingly this was the first chance we had to take pictures of sheep, considering how many we'd driven by all month.  It's not so easy to stop for photos on the side of the highway.  Roads don't have shoulders here.

We continued past historic Ffyfe House, a former whaling station

Making our way back to town.

Past some attractive (but probably invasive) flowers

And backc to the Cypress Beach to complete our loop, and then traced our steps back through town to the campground.