Whale watching
North Island
In New Zealand we did three more expensive tours. All of them totally worth the money.
One was a whale watching tour in Kaikoura. We stood up really early to get on a tour in the morning. But every tour was completely booked till late afternoon, so we bought tickets for a tour at 5 pm. Till then we had some time to kill so we visited the city and went shopping (or more precisely looked at stuff we didn‘t bought in the end).
At 5 pm we finally went on bord and headed out to the spot the whale was to be found. Our guide said the previous tours weren‘t that lucky and hadn‘t seen the whale but maybe we got more luck. And indeed we did. The Whale played with his tail and even jumped fully out of the water once. It was breathtaking.
Canyoning at Waitomo Caves
The scound booked tour was a canyoning tour into one of the Waitomo Caves on the South Island. It was an 5 hour tour and overall a big adventure.
It started with rappeling into the cave and wading trough the pitch black river upstream deep into the cave. Once we made it to a sand bank we all had to switch off our headlamps, and there they were: The whole ceiling of the cave glowed in the dark, like thousands of stars. It was so quiet and peaceful. I could have sat there forever.
After having admired the beautiful glowworms the action starts again. We crawled through several underwater tunnels and swam back to the starting point with floating tires.