We arrived in Kaikoura, after dropping a few people of in Christchurch, and checked in at our hostel. It was really nice and cozy. It's called "the lazy shag" for anyone who's interested. Me, Simone and Elli had booked a dolphin snorkel the day after and we were so excited, even though it meant that we would have to wake up at 4 am the next day. 

 

I went to the beach with Sarah, one of the Canadian girls, and Cassie, an American girl, and we had a great time in the waves. The stones were really uncomfortable to walk on, but it didn't really matter. 

 

I went to sleep way to late that night and when the alarm went of in the morning, I felt like a zombie. We got dressed and started walking towards the dolphin encounter. We were there around 05.00 and got to put on wetsuits, listen to a presentation and then we hoped on the bus that was going to take us to the boat. 

 

We had just left the harbour when we saw a group of or orcas, we stopped and we could see another group. The guide in our boat told us how lucky we were to see them, since it'd been 5 weeks since they last saw them. It was amazing to watch them swimming around there while the sun was slowly rising above the horizon. Unfortunately we could not stay there forever, we had dolphins to find. We continued our journey, we saw some albatrosses before we finally reached our first dolphins.

 

We put on our gear and jumped in the water. It's insane how close they come, they're so curious and playful. We had to attract them by making sounds and dive down to them, which was hard since our wetsuits were bouyant. So much fun!

 

We had to go up after about 20 minutes to go to the next place, where there were even more dolphins. We were in the water for about 50 minutes all together and every minute was amazing! The dolphins seemed to like us because they followed us quite far and did flips and tricks for us, beautiful animals.

 

I regret not doing the whale watch before the dolphin swim, because I couldn't really enjoy watching the whales from a boat when I had been swimming among the dolphins the day before. Sure they were cool and we saw three, which is a lot, but there was no action and you can only see about 10% of the whale. The experience didn't get any better with  seasickness either. I'd been sick for quite a while and the waves made me feel even more sick. I didn't throw up or anything, but I was quite relieved when we were back in the harbour.