Kaikoura (with Dolphins)

It's currently 10.17 am. We've been up since 4.15 am. Why the madness you may ask? Well we went out in a boat at 5.30 this morning to go swimming with wild dolphins. It's incredibily popular, so much so that we couldn't get the date we wanted and had to go down to Christchurch first (Not much to say about Christchurch - didn't get to go Paragliding. But did buy Mariokart for my DS, so that sort of made up for it)

Anyway, back to today. The dolphins are totally wild, and the company has a 90% success rate of finding some some to go swimming with. Luckily, the early trip apparently has the best chance and they're the most active in the morning. After about 30 mins (and various Albatross sightings) we found a pod of 300 dusky dolphins. Fully wetsuited up, we waddled into position to get into the water and given instructions to make noises to attact the dolphins to us. Basically we paid to be dolphin entertainers for a few hours. I just swam round singing 'here dolphin, dolphin, dolphin' which had a good success rate to be honest.

It was pretty incredible, everywhere you looked under the water was filled with dolphins. Swimming around in circles, I managed to get 4 or 5 to come up and swim around me, playing with me. The pod kept swimming around and we had to jump back onto the boat to reposition ourselves back into the main section of the pod. After a few more swims, we then stayed on the boat and took lots of photos of the dolphins jumping and playing. The dusky dolphin is one of the most acrobatic and we saw loads doing backflips and front flips right beside the boat.

Definately worth changing our plans and getting up at 4.15 for!

Some stats

Temperature of the water - 16 degrees. There's a reason it was a thick wetsuit.
Number of times felt a bit stupid making noises - too many to mention (but everyone else was doing it)
Number of dolphins that think we're all a bit stupid - 300
Number of times we've heard Crowded House in 'In Zed' - once every 10 minutes