A Walk and a Half! part 1...

We started the day with a very pretty woodland walk through the native forest surrounding the campsite, and then headed back into Kaikoura. We decided to attempt the Kaikoura Peninsula Walkway, from South Bay to Point Kean. According to the author of our ‘Short Walks’ book, it would be an ‘easy’ walk of 1.5 hours return. By now, however, we were wise to his somewhat unreasonable estimation of our fitness level and so we took a packed lunch and a cup of tea with us. And just as well, too!
The walk took us up to the top of the cliffs overlooking South Bay, and then over farmland to a lookout point over the seal colony at Point Kean, where we stopped for lunch (1 hour 15mins to this point!) The landscape of the peninsula was dramatically changed by the magnitude 7.8 earthquake in 2016, when parts of the sea floor were raised by up to 12 metres in some places. The resulting new foreshore of barren and undulating rock looks like the surface of the moon in places.
All the way round, we had been checking out the beach from the clifftops, as (according to the book) we could “return along the coastline”. We had thought this meant ALL the way along the coastline, right back to our starting point. So this is what we did.Read more