Swimming with the Fishes

12-26-09 Boxing Day

I am sorry to report that our vacation took a turn for the worse today. Tasha tried to kill me. I’m not sure why she wanted to kill me but she did. Let me tell you about it.

The day started out innocently enough; we awoke early so that we could walk a couple of hundred feet to the Encounter Kaikoura building to begin our morning with the Dusky Dolphins. Encounter Kaikoura is an award winning organization that offers boating tours to view Sperm Whales, Dusky Dolphins, Albatross and other sea birds in their natural habitats. In our case, Tasha was going to snorkel with the dolphins and I planned on taking lots of pictures. Well all that went according to plan. Tasha swam with the dolphins and I took lots of pictures of them. Far more pictures than I took the first time we did the tour and I got some really excellent shots.

After that, we came back to the apartment to make a couple of phone calls to the family to wish them a Merry Christmas. Once that was done we went off on another hike.

This is how Tasha tried to kill me. When we got to Kaikoura she had mentioned that one of the things she wanted to do was hike Mt. Fyffe. Her complaint was that she had been here twice already and had not had the opportunity to at lease do some sort of hike on Mt. Fyffe. Grant you, there is an eight hour hike that you can do to the top of Mt. Fyffe but this fat, old, middle aged ex-smoker was not going to agree to an eight hour hike. I knew I wouldn’t come back alive from that one.

No, I agreed to a nice little walk up a hill to a picnic area that supposedly had great views of Kaikoura and its coast. Boy was I duped! First of all we parked the rental car on an incline. Once we got out of the car we started climbing, and climbing, and climbing, and climbing. I mean all we were doing was climbing. And this wasn’t your grandma’s nice gentle grade; at times it was as much as a 45% slope that we were climbing.

I must admit, I thought it a little suspicious that we didn’t have an “official” map of the track (the last time we didn’t have an official map, we almost got lost in the Big Basin Redwood Forest) so we had no idea how long the track actually was or what sort of climbs were involved to get to the picnic area. Not only that, it turned out to be a pretty warm day and if it weren’t for the fact we were covered by the forest canopy most of the time, I probably would have died from heat stroke if the heart attack didn’t kill me first.

Still, somehow I managed to survive and I’m here to tell the tale, sordid as it may be. I will tell you this much, you won’t catch me going on any more hikes without an “official” map, that’s for sure.

Off to Nelson tomorrow. I’ll be staying out of kayaks.

Cheers!

P.S. Alright, alright! In fairness, the part about Tasha trying to kill me is not true. I just made that up to make the story more interesting. In fact Tasha was just as uncomfortable as I was and any visions you had of her sashaying her way up the hill, well you can just wipe those thoughts right out of your head.