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After exploring the gentle farmland north of Christchurch the transition to the Kaikoura coast is dramatic. While driving along the Kaikoura coastline you will pass grassy hills, rugged mountains and experan immense presence of the ocean.
The broad alluvial plains of Canterbury narrow as State Highway 1 heads north along the eastern shores of the South Island. The parallel mountain chains of the Inland and Seaward Kaikoura Ranges have been pushed up from beneath the sea to create towering rock walls that rise steeply from the coast, while just offshore lies a deep underwater canyon, rich in marine life. Kaikoura has always been linked to the sea. Centuries ago coastal settlements of Maori relished the crayfish that are still a rich harvest of these waters. A European whaling station established in the 1840s operated for 80 years. Whales still abound off the coast, but today t he boatloads of tourists who put to sea to seek these huge mammals are respectfully armed only with cameras. The Kaikoura Coast can boast to offering some of the world’s best natural land and sea wonders! Located midway between Christchurch and Picton on the beautiful, rugged east coast of the South Island, Kaikoura offers a unique combination of ocean and mountains to create stunning coastal alpine scenery. Dedicated to preserving the local natural beauty and wildlife, Kaikoura is proud to offer a large selection of eco-tourism oriented activities, including Whale watching and Dolphin swimming. Watch whales, dolphins, ocean birdlife and other marine life species everyday on the water or from the air. Get up close and personal with dolphins and seals within their natural ocean environment as part of a tour. Scuba diving, sea fishing or kayaking around the beautiful Peninsula, there is plenty to see and on the sea. For coastal land-lovers you can enjoy motor biking, horse trekking, walks, tramps, scenic flights, wine tasting, hunting or experience Maori hospitality.
1Kaiapoi
From Belfast just north of Christchurch on SH1, drive north 7.7 km to Kaiapoi. Turn right off the highway onto Ohaka Road then turn left into Williams Street which leads 1 km to the Kaiapoi River.
Kaiapoi was established in the 1850s, as a port at the mouth of the Kaiapoi River. Once one of the busiest coastal ports in the country, the port still remained in use until 1967 after the railway reached Kaiapoi in 1872. The coastal trader Tuhoe, a two-masted schooner built in Auckland in 1919, has been beautifully restored and takes tourists on trips up the river. The Kaiapoi Woollen Manufacturing Company, established in the 1870s, produced high quality woolen garments and blankets for over a century, including uniforms for soldiers that fought in the Boer Wars, the First and Second World Wars and the Korean War.
2Waipara
Return to SH1 and continue north 39 km to Waipara.
Built of brick and containing a carillon, pipe-organ and stained glass windows, the church of St Paul's in this small town of Waipara was built as a memorial to George Henry Moore (1812-1905) by his daughter who inherited the fortune he had made through his vast Glenmark sheep station. With over 92,000 sheep on his farm and listed as New Zealand’s wealthiest settler in the “doomsday book” of 1885, George would often walk to Christchurch with a tent on his back to save having to pay for accommodation. His daughter used to bake around 300 loaves of bread a week to feed to the ducks, swans and peacocks that lived around the huge artificial lake he built below his mansion. Construction on the mansion began in 1881 with the building taking 7 years to complete. It featured high stone walls, battlements and fixtures imported from Europe, and although it burnt down in 1890, the spacious out-buildings can still be seen standing near the farm managers delightful old house. The picturesque gatekeepers cottage was completed before the mansion and the spacious stables are among the most impressive in the country. In 1866 a huge number of bones of the now extinct moa were found after a swamp was drained at Glenmark, and were later transferred to the Canterbury Museum. Significant archaeological finds continued to be made in the Waipara area including 4 different species of moa which were found in a swamp in Pyramid Valley 1938, with 50 almost complete skeletons having been found by 1941. The most recent finds include the skull and jaws of a mosasaur.
MAORI LEAP CAVE
Continue north-east 55 km on SH1 to Cheviot through rolling farmland. As the journey continues north-east the landscape becomes more hilly, with stands of dense bush,and at Oaro the road meets the wild coast. It is 64.6 km from Cheviot north on SH1 to Maori Leap Cave, signposted on the left.
Set into 30m cliffs, the Maori Leap Cave, discovered in 1958 was found to contain the fossilised remains of a number of sea mammals and birds. The cave runs through 60 million year old Kaikoura limestone rock that was formed from the calcium-rich shells of billions of tiny plankton-like creatures that accumulated on the sea floor over millions of years. Some of these microscopic creatures had shells and skeletons made up of silica instead of calcium. The silica was dissolved and concentrated to form deposits of chert or flint which can be seen in the cave as areas of shiny, dark rock set against the creamy-white limestone. The area was gradually raised above the sea, which carved out the cave over the last couple of hundred thousand years, until it had risen above the level of the waves. Water seeping underground through the soil picks up carbon dioxide and becomes carbonic acid which is mildly acidic. This natural acid eats into the calcium in the limestone, dissolving it away to form features like stalagmites and stalagtities. As the water laden with dissolved calcium carbonate continues to drip down from the roof of caves, the calcium settles out of the water, forming stalactites hanging from the roof with stalagmites building up below them. Dissolved iron oxide leaching out of the limestone has turned some of the stalactites in the Maori Leap Cave a deep orange color. Tours of the cave take about 40 minutes and run several times a day.
Kaikoura coast
3KAIKOURA
Continue north 4 km on SH1 to Kaikoura.
With its spectacular backdrop of the Seaward Kaikoura Range, the township follows the beachfront towards the peninsula and the sites of a number of Maori pa. The museum on Lustone Road has a range of maori artifacts, farming and fishing implements and thousands of historical photographs as well as the old 1910 town gaol. There are also fossilized plesiosaur bones set in rock. During the first weekend of October each year the town hosts the Kaikoura Seafest, a celebration of the ocean that attracts thousands of visitors. Kaikoura is one of the few places in the world where you can go whale watching all year round. You can also put on a wetsuit and go swimming with the dolphins. Dusky dolphins are the most common in the area, feeding out at sea overnight before returning to the coastal waters in pods of 20 to 50 during the day. You can often see hundreds of dolphins around the tour boats, entertaining the tourists with acrobatic leaps and flips.
fyffe house
Turn off SH1 right onto Lustone Road and continue southeast onto West End 0.5 km. Continue 3 km on the Esplanade along the Kaikoura waterfront to the Fyffe homestead signposted on the right.
Robert Fyffe was the first European to settle in the Kaikoura area, establishing a whaling station in 1842. In 1857 Fyffe discovered an early moa-hunter burial site near his house including an almost complete moa eggshell and recent excavations near the homestead have shown that the area was a moa-hunter settlement between 800 and 1000 years ago. The old cottage, built in 1842, still sits on its original piles partly made up of whale vertebrae, while behind the building you will find two posts remaining from the original whale bone fence. The earliest part of the house was built by Robert Fyffe for the cooper who made the barrels in which the whale oil was stored and transported. After Robert Fyffe drowned in 1854, his cousin George managed the whaling station and built the rest of the house in two stages between 1857 and the early 1860's. The house is still in almost completely original condition and is open to visitors.
SEAL COLONY
Continue 1.5 km east past the Fyffe cottage to the end of Fyffe Quay Road and the eastern end of Kaikoura Peninsula.
From the peninsula there are outstanding views across the sea to the mountains. From the end of the road you can see evidence of the huge forces at work that have uplifted the landscape over the millennia. The twisted shapes of the strata in the rocks were created by immense pressure generated as two sections of the earths crust collide with one of the continental plates being pushed up over the other plate which is being pushed downward. The result is the uplifted Kaikoura mountain ranges on one side and the deep underwater Hikurangi Trench system known as the Kaikoura Canyon on the other. The limestone rock formations have been eroded by the weather and the sea with the softer siltstones wearing away faster to leave prominent ridges in the rock strata. This is a fascinating landscape and it is made even more interesting by the presence of one of New Zealand's most accessible seal colonies. The seals may look harmless while they are basking on the rocks in the sun, but these are wild animals in their natural habitat and you should be careful not to get between a seal and its escape route to the sea. In the water they are much more playful and you can organize to go swimming with the seals with experienced guides.
4WHARANUI
Return to SH1 and continue north 71 km to Wharanui. This is a beautiful stretch of coastal highway with few signs of habitation between the sea and the rugged wall of mountains to the west. The Kaikoura coast is famous for its crayfish (the name means 'to eat crayfish') and there are excellent locations for snorkelling, diving, fishing and surfing
The picturesque stone church of St Oswald, built in 1927, can be seen at Wharanui, the last coastal settlement before the highway turns inland to bypass Cape Campbell. Looking north, from just past the church, you can see the lighthouse on Cape Campbell, marking the most easterly point in the South Island.
WHALE WATCH
The waters off the Kaikoura coast are often red with clouds of tiny krill, the staple diet of the sperm whale. Warm and cold currents converging offshore create an upwelling effect, which brings nutrients up from the depths into the light zone along this part of coastline. A short distance offshore the continental shelf slopes gradually to a depth of about 90 m before plunging to over 1600 m less than a kilometer from land. New Zealand's first commercial whale-watching trips began in Kaikoura in 1987 and quickly gained an international reputation. The sperm whale, Hector's dolphin, dusky dolphin, bottlenose dolphin and New Zealand fur seal are the most frequently seen marine mammals, but pilot whales, killer whales, minke, humpback and southern right whales are sometimes also encountered on the trip. Sperm whales are more likely to be sighted from October to August while killer whales are usually seen from December to March. Spotter planes are used to locate the whales and the tour boats are equipped with hydrophones to pick up the sound of the whales under water. Most of the whales seen in the area are adolescent male sperm whales which weigh around 40 tonnes and reach 16 m in length. They use a reservoir of oil to help them dive to depths of around 1,600 m in the deep-water canyons south of Kaikoura. They can stay down for around 30 minutes to hunt giant squid, feeding on these deep sea creatures until they mature around the age of 25 and head off to join small breeding groups in the warmer waters north of New Zealand.
RIVERLANDS COB COTTAGE
Continue north from Wharanui 53 km on SH1. The hill country around Ward, Seddon, and up along the Awatere Valley was the area where large-scale pastoral farming was first established in the South Island. At Lake Grassmere you can see huge piles of sea salt extracted from a series of evaporation ponds in the area. At Riverlands the cob cottage is signposted on the left.
The Riverlands cob cottage was built in 1860 for a local farmer and can be viewed complete with interior fittings, colonial furniture, clothing and household objects. These early houses were built using a mixture of straw and puddled clay which was either made into bricks or packed between forms and allowed to dry to create the walls of the building.
Canterbury - Blenheim
5blenheim
Continue west 2 km on SH1 to Blenheim.
Blenheim was later renamed to commemorate the famous battle won by the Duke of Marlborough in 1704, however it was originally named Beavertown by a party of surveyors who identified with that animal after they had been stranded in the area by floodwaters. The town was built as a river port at the junction of two rivers and in the late 19th century floods were a regular occurance through until the 1960s when flood banks were built. Today Blenheim is known as the sunshine capital of New Zealand. Located in the centre of Marlborough, New Zealand's famous wine-growing district, the town is full of shops and galleries displaying the local arts and crafts. Seymour Square features colourful gardens as well as a stone war memorial clock tower and a multi-coloured fountain on the site of the reclaimed swamp around which the early township was built in the 1850s.