Punakaiki Pancake Rocks

One of the other places we stopped on our drive along the West coast of New Zealand was the Punakaiki Pancake Rocks area. This place is really cool; it's full of limestone rock formations that look like stacked pancakes!

In different areas of the lookout platforms, you could see water surging in when the waves came and this sometimes creates blowholes. We weren't there at high tide, so I wasn't able to capture anything too spectacular, but it was still neat to see some small blowholes.

There's really not much else to say about rocks, so I'll let you enjoy the pictures. 

Are you hungry for pancakes now? We were, so we had them for breakfast the next morning!

The background was just as awesome as the rocks themselves.

At the bottom of this set of rocks were swishy plants that look like those things in a car wash.

There was a small blowhole down in this crevice.

We never really saw anybody surfing in this country, though the waves looked great to me!

So, the Pancake Rocks were definitely worth stopping for on our West Coast drive. We spent the night of December 27th near Franz Josef glacier; more on that tomorrow!

Kicking it in Kaikoura

                                                           

After a delicious Saturday morning brunch in Christchurch, Jill and Brian (along with baby Louis) dropped us off at the Jucy office so we could pick up our campervan AKA our home sweet home for the next two weeks. We had a beautiful three hour drive to Kaikoura, where we pulled up to our beachside campsite and got temporarily stuck in the sand! With some help from nearby campers, we got out and parked in a more grassy location (still beachside) and saw dolphins in the distance as we ate a late lunch. Then we headed out again to hike around the peninsula.

There were seals everywhere! A mother and baby one are pictured here. We had to be kind of careful as we climbed over rocks and such; you never knew if a seal would be hiding out underneath or just around the corner.

The rock formations along the walk were awesome too-so interesting and unique. Can you spot all the seals?

Zack wanted me to pose for a picture with a seal. When I wouldn't get close enough for his liking, I told him to pose for a shot. He got pretty close and laid down to look like a seal. Well, the one he was close to didn't like this and actually started chasing him. I've never seen Zack get up and move so fast-ha!

Besides seals, there were these black birds with orange eyes/feet/beaks along the walk as well. We found out later that they are called oystercatchers, and they are very protective of their nests. As we walked anywhere in their vicinity, the birds swooped at our heads! So we took a lesson from the Melbourne bikers who have zip ties sticking out of their helmets to avoid swooping and held sticks above our heads when the "angry birds" were nearby!

After we survived our peninsula walk, we went into town and found out that crayfish was the must-try specialty dish. It's not cheap though, so Zack and I split a 1/2 crayfish and shared an order of local blue cod fish and chips. The crayfish tasted like lobster to me; it was a lot of effort to get the "meat" out. I didn't think it was that amazing, but I'm glad we gave it a try. After dinner, we drove back to our beachside campsite and watched Dolphin Tale (to prepare for the next day's activities-you'll see what I mean tomorrow!) on the DVD player in our campervan. We really liked the little seaside town of Kaikoura.