The adventure begins January 12th from Chicago, O'hare. I don't know when it will come to a close.After the beaches and mountains and volcanoes and thermal ponds and fishing and glaciers and mountains and golf and gliders and mountains and whales and dolphins and mountains and sunshine and great food and scenery and, did I say mountains???
Well, it’s been a month and I miss home! It’s time to find my way back to friends, family and my own bed.
Then a really cool thing happened…WHALES!! There were sperm whales all around and I learned a lot about them.
Fun facts to know about. Sperm whales are carnivorous truly loving large squid for lunch. They are born in the warm tropical waters and nurse for a couple years and live with mom for about five years. Then, the males go away in a “pod” to colder water that they can live in comfy because they have much more blubber to insulate their bodies then the females. The males hang together as a group until they reach around thirty when they get fed up with their mates and go solitary. When they get to about 50, they go back to warmer water to look for love and live to about 80. The females really never leave the warmer water and start mating as early as 15.
It was really special to be so close to these guys as they oxygenated for about 5 minutes prior to a dive. When they went down, they always waved their tail (flute) and disappeared with the average dive being about 45 minutes but up to as long as 2.5 hours.
While in Kaikoura I went for a little boat ride and some of the locals came out to play! They were so cute…they rode the bow waves and jumped and danced all around the boat. There were lots of little babies that were only a couple of feet long that really did a lot of jumping.
I just started bumping around and looking! I made my way back towards Christchurch and played some golf. Then, I went into Christchurch and did some sightseeing around town (nothing remarkable). I then headed north to Kaikoura. This is a sleepy little town that doesn’t want to be anything more then a fishing and whale watching town. It was another beautiful drive through countryside and winding mountain roads.
….it kinda keeps me in touch with home. While I try, it’s really hard to reply to all emails. The internet is really unreliable. It’s taken me as long as two hours to write one single note. If I don’t respond to your note, it won’t be because I didn’t try.
Another local fishing hole.
My last sunset at Queenstown! (at least for this trip)
Look at this picture! Is it any wonder why they filmed Lord of The Rings here???
Queenstown from the fourth green at Jack’s Point Golf Club (designed by Jack Nicklaus).
This is a view of Queenstown as we returned in the helicopter. The downtown area is on the left and lower part of the rectangular shaped harbor center right in the photo. Jack’s Point (golf course) is the finger of land in the upper left corner of the photo.
