Leap day! Here in Wellington they’re celebrating by bungy jumping off a high bridge. Any excuse, I guess.
We headed to the South Island via ferry this morning. The ferry boat is a huge cruiser that has ten decks. The bottom one is for rail cars, the next up for regular vehicles and the rest for passengers. It’s very nice and civilized and takes about three hours to cross over. They have rows of seats lined up like on an airliner, but much more roomy, and swivel seats by the windows. They have a cafeteria, a games room, and even a small theater (showing Atonement, of course). 
Sharon bought two little bottles of champagne to celebrate our voyage. Chris spent much of the trip on the top deck being blown around while taking far too many pictures as we entered the Marlborough Sounds on the way to docking in Picton.
After getting off the ferry, we drove west a little bit through more twisty mountain roads with gorgeous views of the water to our right and unbelievably verdant tree fern forests to our left. We’re getting tired of twisty mountain roads though. Then we headed south through the wine country of Renwick and Blenheim … guess what, we don’t really care that much about wine country, so we pretty much blew right through that and headed for the Pacific. And an hour later or so we had our first sight of it! (shown here).
We passed a road called “Wharanui Beach Road” and turned around to go back and get our first close-up look at the Pacific. What we found was a remarkable black pebble beach — no sand or even dust, just black pebbles of various sizes, from rice grains up to golf balls. Sharon was quite happy exploring the pebbles!
We continued our drive down the coast, heading towards Kaikoura. We knew that there was a roadside seal colony on the way there, and we weren’t disappointed. Two words: Baby seals. Not just baby seals, but FOUR baby seals all jumping and romping on each other (look closely at this picture). Oh, and a couple dozen adults …
We finally arrived at Kaikoura, checked into another holiday park (yes, with the ubiquitous ducks) and walked down to a nearby restaurant for dinner. We have a confession to make. We’re really bad at seafood . This place is swarming with crayfish (big ones; might be rock lobster) and green mussels. We hate them both. We like fish and some other forms of seafood, but those two (and oysters) just creep us out.
We finished up with an hour of internet access at an internet cafe. We are sooo starved for internet access ….