Francesca and Henk-Jan's Backpacking Trip!
Friday, September 11, 2009
Kaikoura Adventures
When we originally negotiated our Stray bus passes for New Zealand, we managed to get a free trip up to Kaikoura – a small coastal town where whale-watching, dolphin swimming, and kayaking with seals were activity options. So, after a one-night stay in Christchurch, Henk and I jumped onto the Stray bus for the last time Monday morning (the 7th) at 8:00 am. I couldn’t really smell anything, but Henk and the other passengers complained that the bus smelled pretty rank; and our driver B. P. told us it was due to some milk that spilled a few days earlier.
The name of the city is a Maori phrase 'Kai' (meaning 'food') and 'Koura' (meaning 'crayfish')-- and has its origin in the story of Tamatea-Pokai-Whenua who in 1450 stopped off at the peninsula to cook a feed of crayfish on his way south to search for three of his wives who had fled. Bent on recapturing the wayward women he perused them down the East Coast, through Foveaux Strait, then north up the West Coast. All to no avail as he found one turned to greenstone at Milford.
As he paused to 'tangi' (weep) over her, some of the tears fell on the stone which has carried the marks ever since. He came upon his other wives at Ahaura River where they, together with their canoes, had also been turned to greenstone. The names of Tamatae's three wives are now used to specify the three principal kinds of greenstone: Tangiwai, Kahurangi and Kawakawa.
The drive to Kaikoura took about 3 hours, with us arriving first to a lookout point for a few scenic pictures, and then to the Peninsula Seal Colony. These fur seals are known to the Maori as ‘Kekeno.’ The seals were super close! One of them was sunbathing on a concrete slab practically in the parking lot. We walked around watching them, trying to peer into their mouths for a glimpse of their giant scary teeth! One passenger quipped that it looked like they definitely hadn’t used Colgate in a while. Henk walked down to the water to get some really close pictures, while I stayed back and stared at the giant sleeping seal for movement. But there wasn’t much!
Next B. P. took us to our hostel. Way back our first time in Christchurch, I had called and booked Henk and I into the Albatross Inn. The Inn looked like a nice place, and my prediction was confirmed upon our arrival. We were shown into a large living room/den, complete with a fireplace and a really comfortable magazine lounge. As we were checking in, we got a great deal – 3 nights for the price of 2! Not bad… Plus, later that night, we found out that we were the only two checked into the hostel – we basically had a huge comfortable house to ourselves!
Henk and I walked along the beach area of the coast for a while, taking in our new surroundings, and spotting some tennis and squash courts. Once we came back to the hostel, we realized we had a lot of things to book online – our plane from Christchurch to Auckland, and our bus back to Christchurch. We also wanted to book for one of our bags to be picked up in Christchurch and sent back home to my Mom to help lighten our load. We spent the next few hours completing all this, and once we had finished, we cooked a dinner of pasta and relaxing watching ‘The Butterfly Effect’ in front of the fire, which Henk had successfully managed to keep going.
The next morning we were ready to fish! Henk had booked us on a fishing trip for the next morning, and we walked down to the house of our fishing ‘tour’ guides. He was extremely eager to go fishing out on a boat, as he had only ever fished in canals before, and I was excited to see the crayfish we were promised by our boat driver. He explained the difference between male and female crayfish, showing us one of each. The female crayfish secretes out her eggs, and the male crayfish secretes his sperm to mix with her eggs, then the male crayfish carries them around on his inside of his tale until birth. Not that romantic a mating process, but nature is strange sometimes!
Anyways, after we drove around in the boat pulling up crayfish pots and checking them for crayfish, it was time for actual fishing! We were given our rods and shown how to drop down the line – which had to go all the way down to the bottom of the sea floor to catch the big fish we were baited for: sea perch! These fish were bright orange – which huge, ugly eyes. Almost every time we dropped our lines down we felt a tug… immediately! Henk and I ended up creating a system: I would release the line down and wait for it to get to the bottom, flipping the switch to stop the line. As soon as I had a strong tug on the line, I’d call Henk over to start reeling in the fish. Then, I would go to the other pole and drop the line on that one. Since it would take a little while to reel in the fish, I would have a bite on the other pole before Henk was finished reeling in the first pole! Then we’d switch positions again. That method worked great, and we ended up bringing stacks of fish up on the boat. Our guide would grab them off the hook, and fillet them for us right away.
I did start to feel a bit seasick after a while, and I tried to calm my stomach down by taking breaks to sit for a few minutes. Plus fishing when you constantly have bites on the line is tough work! But we did have some distractions – we were surrounded by seagulls and some huge albatross, and a seal swam through the water towards us at one point. Albatross are these giant, kinda mean looking birds with a wingspan of up to 3 feet long. They have these constantly furrowed eyebrows, which remind you of a mad scientist or evil genius. Our driver tossed them some fish remains, which they grabbed in their jaws and literally ‘ran’ off with across the top of the water.
Right before we got ready to go back to town, we had a final bite on one of the lines. Henk reeled it in and noticed that whatever was on the line was struggling a bit differently than the other fish we had encountered. And for a good reason! When he finally got it out of the water, we saw that he had a small shark on the line! Awesome! I took a bunch of pictures, and the boat raced us back into town. The man who ran the operation needed to be paid in cash, and since we didn’t have enough on us, told us we could come back later to pay.
After fishing, we came back to the hostel and attempted to drown our crayfish. They needed to go into the fridge before we could go to the grocery store in town, but we couldn’t put them in alive. After around 30-40 minutes sitting in a pot of fresh water, they died, and we were able to leave. We went to the New World supermarket (a nice hour-long walk, but we were exploring more of town at the same time) and picked up breadcrumbs (seasoned with herbs and lemon), eggs, flour for our fish, garlic butter for the crayfish, and some fruit, hamburger buns, and milk. We even found a bag of frozen kumara fries that we could pan fry ourselves.
After dropping off our new collection of food at the hostel, we made our way back to the guy in charge of our fishing trip to pay him. Once we arrived there, we met a girl from North New Zealand (traveling on the nemesis of our Stray bus – the Kiwi Experience bus) who was sitting there with the guys from our fishing trip drinking whisky. We paid our guy, and he invited us to sit down with them and have some whisky ourselves. We learned that the guy in charge of the fishing was also the last person to do a helicopter-bungee jump in New Zealand ever! Pretty interesting.
I was speaking to the girl, who I learned was 21-years-old and said she ‘had never been drunk before.’ She was traveling with the Kiwi bus, but had come on the fishing trip by herself, and had been invited by the men on the trip to have a few glasses of wine while they boiled her crayfish for her. She had been at the house for quite a few hours before we got there, and was more than tipsy before she even started on her glasses of whiskey. Henk and I wanted to get back to start cooking our fish, but the girl wasn’t looking the best, and with only older men in the house with her, we knew we couldn’t leave her there alone in that state.
We got her a few glasses of water, and soon she was throwing up all the whiskey she drank (probably 4 glasses equivalent on top of the glasses of wine she already consumed) on herself and her clothes. We were too late with the bucket! Eww… Still, Henk and I cleaned her up and I sat with her (it was suggested by the men present that we both run back to the hostel (about a 30-40 minute trip) and then come back to the house, but I wouldn’t let that happen) while Henk ran back to the hostel to make a phone call about a ‘Night Sky’ tour I wanted to do, to see if it was on (which it wasn’t.)
Anyways, the girl got some sleep and sobered up slightly, but not by much. I kept making her drink water, and helped her go to the bathroom. We made sure to go with her when the guy in charge of our fishing trip drove her back to her hostel in town, leaving her in her room with the girls from her bus that knew her. I left her our names, and she messaged us on Facebook later thanking us for keeping her safe, and apologizing for being quite a mess. Finally, we got back to our hostel sometime after 8 pm, following what turned out to be a really long day. Still, we knew we had to cook our fish and crayfish that night.
The first step was our crayfish. We boiled a huge pot of water with some salt and tossed them in until their shells were bright orange. Then we emptied the pot and filled it with cold water to stop the crayfish from continuing to cook in their shell. Later on, (after we ate our dinner of fish and chips since we were starving! It was already 9:30 pm!) one of the women who worked at the hostel showed us how to open and ‘dissect’ the crayfish – pulling out the juicy meat from the claws and tail. We decided to save the crayfish for the next day, and simply ate it by dipping small pieces in melted garlic butter, like lobster. Huge crayfish like ours cost around $80-90 NZD each here in Kaikoura, and considering our fishing trip was cheaper than that (plus we got a ton of fish!) we made out really well.
For the fish, Henk and I made a little assembly line of bowls of flour, egg wash, and breadcrumbs. We dipped the fish fillets in each, and then Henk fried them to a crispy golden-brown. They were absolutely delicious! The outside crust was slightly crispy, but the inside fish was still perfectly moist. While Henk fried the fish, I pan-fried the Kumara fries and salted them once they were done. We squeezed some lemon on the fish, shocked that we had just cooked such a fantastic meal! We surprised ourselves!
We gave out a few free samples of our crayfish and our fish, and it got rave reviews! So we know it must really be good, that’s not just our opinion! :P Anyways, the next day we just relaxed. Of course we had so much fish, that fish sandwiches were for lunch. We spent pretty much the entire day online, using a new budget program called ‘Mint’ (Mint.com) that I found to go through our spending on our debit cards and ‘categorizing’ the different purchases, as well as investigating my credit score. I was most concerned with making sure we budget appropriately for the coming months, knowing exactly how much we should be spending, since Australia and South-East Asia have completely different costs of living. That program is pretty awesome! And better yet – it’s free.
Henk wanted to test how much I had learned by making meals alongside him. So while he got our crayfish appetizer ready, I made pasta with minced meat along with a tomato and capsicum sauce with raisins, apple, and cashews for dinner. Before dinner, we watched the movie ‘Crash’ (Henk never saw it before) so by the time we finished eating we just relaxed surfing the web and talking to my cousin Kyle.
This morning we packed everything up, and are now ready to take the Intercity bus back to Christchurch for our flight to Auckland on the 12th!
Francesca
The name of the city is a Maori phrase 'Kai' (meaning 'food') and 'Koura' (meaning 'crayfish')-- and has its origin in the story of Tamatea-Pokai-Whenua who in 1450 stopped off at the peninsula to cook a feed of crayfish on his way south to search for three of his wives who had fled. Bent on recapturing the wayward women he perused them down the East Coast, through Foveaux Strait, then north up the West Coast. All to no avail as he found one turned to greenstone at Milford.
As he paused to 'tangi' (weep) over her, some of the tears fell on the stone which has carried the marks ever since. He came upon his other wives at Ahaura River where they, together with their canoes, had also been turned to greenstone. The names of Tamatae's three wives are now used to specify the three principal kinds of greenstone: Tangiwai, Kahurangi and Kawakawa.
The drive to Kaikoura took about 3 hours, with us arriving first to a lookout point for a few scenic pictures, and then to the Peninsula Seal Colony. These fur seals are known to the Maori as ‘Kekeno.’ The seals were super close! One of them was sunbathing on a concrete slab practically in the parking lot. We walked around watching them, trying to peer into their mouths for a glimpse of their giant scary teeth! One passenger quipped that it looked like they definitely hadn’t used Colgate in a while. Henk walked down to the water to get some really close pictures, while I stayed back and stared at the giant sleeping seal for movement. But there wasn’t much!
Next B. P. took us to our hostel. Way back our first time in Christchurch, I had called and booked Henk and I into the Albatross Inn. The Inn looked like a nice place, and my prediction was confirmed upon our arrival. We were shown into a large living room/den, complete with a fireplace and a really comfortable magazine lounge. As we were checking in, we got a great deal – 3 nights for the price of 2! Not bad… Plus, later that night, we found out that we were the only two checked into the hostel – we basically had a huge comfortable house to ourselves!
Henk and I walked along the beach area of the coast for a while, taking in our new surroundings, and spotting some tennis and squash courts. Once we came back to the hostel, we realized we had a lot of things to book online – our plane from Christchurch to Auckland, and our bus back to Christchurch. We also wanted to book for one of our bags to be picked up in Christchurch and sent back home to my Mom to help lighten our load. We spent the next few hours completing all this, and once we had finished, we cooked a dinner of pasta and relaxing watching ‘The Butterfly Effect’ in front of the fire, which Henk had successfully managed to keep going.
The next morning we were ready to fish! Henk had booked us on a fishing trip for the next morning, and we walked down to the house of our fishing ‘tour’ guides. He was extremely eager to go fishing out on a boat, as he had only ever fished in canals before, and I was excited to see the crayfish we were promised by our boat driver. He explained the difference between male and female crayfish, showing us one of each. The female crayfish secretes out her eggs, and the male crayfish secretes his sperm to mix with her eggs, then the male crayfish carries them around on his inside of his tale until birth. Not that romantic a mating process, but nature is strange sometimes!
Anyways, after we drove around in the boat pulling up crayfish pots and checking them for crayfish, it was time for actual fishing! We were given our rods and shown how to drop down the line – which had to go all the way down to the bottom of the sea floor to catch the big fish we were baited for: sea perch! These fish were bright orange – which huge, ugly eyes. Almost every time we dropped our lines down we felt a tug… immediately! Henk and I ended up creating a system: I would release the line down and wait for it to get to the bottom, flipping the switch to stop the line. As soon as I had a strong tug on the line, I’d call Henk over to start reeling in the fish. Then, I would go to the other pole and drop the line on that one. Since it would take a little while to reel in the fish, I would have a bite on the other pole before Henk was finished reeling in the first pole! Then we’d switch positions again. That method worked great, and we ended up bringing stacks of fish up on the boat. Our guide would grab them off the hook, and fillet them for us right away.
I did start to feel a bit seasick after a while, and I tried to calm my stomach down by taking breaks to sit for a few minutes. Plus fishing when you constantly have bites on the line is tough work! But we did have some distractions – we were surrounded by seagulls and some huge albatross, and a seal swam through the water towards us at one point. Albatross are these giant, kinda mean looking birds with a wingspan of up to 3 feet long. They have these constantly furrowed eyebrows, which remind you of a mad scientist or evil genius. Our driver tossed them some fish remains, which they grabbed in their jaws and literally ‘ran’ off with across the top of the water.
Right before we got ready to go back to town, we had a final bite on one of the lines. Henk reeled it in and noticed that whatever was on the line was struggling a bit differently than the other fish we had encountered. And for a good reason! When he finally got it out of the water, we saw that he had a small shark on the line! Awesome! I took a bunch of pictures, and the boat raced us back into town. The man who ran the operation needed to be paid in cash, and since we didn’t have enough on us, told us we could come back later to pay.
After fishing, we came back to the hostel and attempted to drown our crayfish. They needed to go into the fridge before we could go to the grocery store in town, but we couldn’t put them in alive. After around 30-40 minutes sitting in a pot of fresh water, they died, and we were able to leave. We went to the New World supermarket (a nice hour-long walk, but we were exploring more of town at the same time) and picked up breadcrumbs (seasoned with herbs and lemon), eggs, flour for our fish, garlic butter for the crayfish, and some fruit, hamburger buns, and milk. We even found a bag of frozen kumara fries that we could pan fry ourselves.
After dropping off our new collection of food at the hostel, we made our way back to the guy in charge of our fishing trip to pay him. Once we arrived there, we met a girl from North New Zealand (traveling on the nemesis of our Stray bus – the Kiwi Experience bus) who was sitting there with the guys from our fishing trip drinking whisky. We paid our guy, and he invited us to sit down with them and have some whisky ourselves. We learned that the guy in charge of the fishing was also the last person to do a helicopter-bungee jump in New Zealand ever! Pretty interesting.
I was speaking to the girl, who I learned was 21-years-old and said she ‘had never been drunk before.’ She was traveling with the Kiwi bus, but had come on the fishing trip by herself, and had been invited by the men on the trip to have a few glasses of wine while they boiled her crayfish for her. She had been at the house for quite a few hours before we got there, and was more than tipsy before she even started on her glasses of whiskey. Henk and I wanted to get back to start cooking our fish, but the girl wasn’t looking the best, and with only older men in the house with her, we knew we couldn’t leave her there alone in that state.
We got her a few glasses of water, and soon she was throwing up all the whiskey she drank (probably 4 glasses equivalent on top of the glasses of wine she already consumed) on herself and her clothes. We were too late with the bucket! Eww… Still, Henk and I cleaned her up and I sat with her (it was suggested by the men present that we both run back to the hostel (about a 30-40 minute trip) and then come back to the house, but I wouldn’t let that happen) while Henk ran back to the hostel to make a phone call about a ‘Night Sky’ tour I wanted to do, to see if it was on (which it wasn’t.)
Anyways, the girl got some sleep and sobered up slightly, but not by much. I kept making her drink water, and helped her go to the bathroom. We made sure to go with her when the guy in charge of our fishing trip drove her back to her hostel in town, leaving her in her room with the girls from her bus that knew her. I left her our names, and she messaged us on Facebook later thanking us for keeping her safe, and apologizing for being quite a mess. Finally, we got back to our hostel sometime after 8 pm, following what turned out to be a really long day. Still, we knew we had to cook our fish and crayfish that night.
The first step was our crayfish. We boiled a huge pot of water with some salt and tossed them in until their shells were bright orange. Then we emptied the pot and filled it with cold water to stop the crayfish from continuing to cook in their shell. Later on, (after we ate our dinner of fish and chips since we were starving! It was already 9:30 pm!) one of the women who worked at the hostel showed us how to open and ‘dissect’ the crayfish – pulling out the juicy meat from the claws and tail. We decided to save the crayfish for the next day, and simply ate it by dipping small pieces in melted garlic butter, like lobster. Huge crayfish like ours cost around $80-90 NZD each here in Kaikoura, and considering our fishing trip was cheaper than that (plus we got a ton of fish!) we made out really well.
For the fish, Henk and I made a little assembly line of bowls of flour, egg wash, and breadcrumbs. We dipped the fish fillets in each, and then Henk fried them to a crispy golden-brown. They were absolutely delicious! The outside crust was slightly crispy, but the inside fish was still perfectly moist. While Henk fried the fish, I pan-fried the Kumara fries and salted them once they were done. We squeezed some lemon on the fish, shocked that we had just cooked such a fantastic meal! We surprised ourselves!
We gave out a few free samples of our crayfish and our fish, and it got rave reviews! So we know it must really be good, that’s not just our opinion! :P Anyways, the next day we just relaxed. Of course we had so much fish, that fish sandwiches were for lunch. We spent pretty much the entire day online, using a new budget program called ‘Mint’ (Mint.com) that I found to go through our spending on our debit cards and ‘categorizing’ the different purchases, as well as investigating my credit score. I was most concerned with making sure we budget appropriately for the coming months, knowing exactly how much we should be spending, since Australia and South-East Asia have completely different costs of living. That program is pretty awesome! And better yet – it’s free.
Henk wanted to test how much I had learned by making meals alongside him. So while he got our crayfish appetizer ready, I made pasta with minced meat along with a tomato and capsicum sauce with raisins, apple, and cashews for dinner. Before dinner, we watched the movie ‘Crash’ (Henk never saw it before) so by the time we finished eating we just relaxed surfing the web and talking to my cousin Kyle.
This morning we packed everything up, and are now ready to take the Intercity bus back to Christchurch for our flight to Auckland on the 12th!
Francesca
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