The Adventure begins- Gore Bay and Kaikoura Sanctuary

Today starts the adventure. We walked a couple blocks to a cute place for breakfast and then packed our bags and headed the 2 block walk to meet the rest of our group at 10:30am. 13 of us plus our two guides Claire and Mel. Nice variety of people. 3 sisters, 2 friends, a couple from Seattle area, one from Germany and a guy from "The Commonwealth of Kentucky", plus ourselves, Jessica and Kevin.
We drove along the coast, heading north dfrom Christchurch. Our fist stop was at Gore Bay. Beautiful views of the ocean and shoreline. It started out foggy, but just before we had our delicious picnic lunch, the sun appeared. WE walked out along the beach. Lots of cool rocks with holes in them and people decorated and hung them on the fence.






Back into the van- named "Bill" and continued north. There was lots of roadwork going on due to the 2016 earthquake which destroyed the eastern road system on the South island.
Kaikoura Sanctuarywas our next stop. We had our first fur seal sighting and then hiked along the ridge for outstanding views.







Our fisrt night was at a place that actually had apartments. We share one with Jessica and Kevin, did a load of laundry and then went over to Claire and Mel's apartment. They cooked dinner for us. Grilled steaks, corn, salad and dessert. We got to know each other better and were given our large packs to prepare for our 2 night hut-to-hut hike.
There is an unusual type of pine tree that grows in New Zealand. The needles grow up.



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