The Write Way Around: Traveling Tales

I feel the buzz of my alarm, and I hear its faint beep coming from underneath my pillow. It is pitch black outside still, and I am hungover from a total lack of sleep. I battle the desire to just roll back over and go back to bed.

I lie there for a minute or two before finally summoning myself to sit up and get moving. My German friend Robert is telling me that we are amongst the last to leave from the hostel. It is around 5:15 a.m. and we need to be at our check-in and briefing for 5:45 a.m.

Already I am starting to wonder why I signed up to do this given how much I hate the cold. The day before Robert and I checked out a local dive shop to enquire about dive prices and dive sites, and I was foolish enough to ask about the temperature of the water. We were told it has been a steady 15 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit), and immediately I gasped. I might as well sign up to swim in the Arctic, I thought to myself.

I rub away my sleepy eyes and start to get my bearings. Robert is ready to go, so I rummage around the darkness of our room and quickly change into my swimmers. I throw on some warm clothes and pack some extra ones for after my swim.

You are getting to swim with dolphins, Alexandra, I tell myself. Whatever cold you feel will pale in comparison to how amazing this experience will be.

I had finally made it to Kaikoura, a picturesque town on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Coming from the Maori words for food (kai) and crayfish (kaoira), Kaikoura was originally most known for its crayfish. The panoramic view of this coastal town is an unbeatable one, and it makes you wonder just how often New Zealand’s landscapes will steal your heart and render you speechless.

But people do not just come here for the pretty views and the crayfish. In the last couple of decades, Kaikoura has become a tourist destination for its abundance of marine life found in its waters due to a deep sea trench just off the coast. Visitors coming to Kaikoura can swim with seals, go whale watching, go fishing or get up close with albatross and other seabirds.

Yet one of the biggest draw cards here is the chance to swim with dolphins in the open ocean, an adventure I was getting ready to set off for at daybreak with Dolphin Encounter.

Dolphin Encounter is the first business to offer both dolphin swimming and watching tours in New Zealand, and it offers tourists both the option to swim with the dolphins for $170 or stay dry and dolphin watch from the boat for $90.

Kaikoura is considered among the best places in New Zealand to swim with dolphins in the wild, specifically the dusky dolphins. Dusky Dolphins can be found swimming in the waters of Kaikoura year round and are known to be the most acrobatic of dolphin species, so to say I was excited is a massive understatement.

Robert and I arrived at the Dolphin Encounter office just in time for our briefing and to get fitted for all our of gear: wetsuits (which were amazingly thick), masks, snorkels and fins that we would need for the morning’s swim. We watched a couple of informative videos, and for some reason I was growing more and more nervous as the minutes passed. What happens if the dolphins do not like me or are in a bad mood? (I sound like Karl Pilkington in Idiot Abroad when he talks about getting stuck with a snidey dolphin.) What if I swim too far away from the boat – are there sharks around?

I do not know why I always jump to the worst, but my mind always races with ways that any given situation can go wrong.

The briefings finished, and we headed out to the bus to take a two minute drive toward the dock. There were two boats ready for the activity, and Robert and I ended up on the same one. It was still really dark out, still really cold. I reminded myself not to think about what the water would be like.

The boat set off in search of the dolphins, and as we drove further from shore it was like we were pulling the sun up with us. Slowly it peeked up above the ocean, its light dancing across the waters. The sky was like an etch-a-sktech of colors: a little gold streaked here, pink swirls and light purples there.

I started talking to a few of the crew members – a local Kaikoura girl who loves all things about the ocean and is hoping to maybe go work on a boat somewhere up in Canada as well as a girl originally from Florida who has been loving life in this desolate little town and been using her experience to further her studies and professional pursuits by honing in a focus for her graduate thesis.

We sat at the back of the boat, checking out the sunrise. The scene could not get any more beautiful, I thought to myself, until suddenly I saw the first dolphin shoot out of the water like a cannon.

Did you see that? I turned to my Swedish friend who was also on the boat with us. He was smiling like a kid in a candy shop.

After about 20 minutes or so of driving, the crew found a pod of dolphins for us to swim with. Swimmers can visit up to and swim in five different spots in the ocean with the dolphin pods, swimming for a total of 30 or so minutes. But by the looks of it, it seemed like there were enough dolphins around this spot to keep us here all morning.

Sticking true to their acrobatic fame, the dolphins were putting on a sunrise show for us, complete with flips and all, making Kaikoura feel like a lost paradise that only we know about. Myself and the other swimmers were eagerly throwing on our gear to get into the water.

Once I had my gear on, I made my way to the back of the boat to sit down. The waters rose up on to my lap, and I let out a shriek. It was cold. Really damn cold, but all I wanted to do was get in that water and start swimming.

The boat’s horn blasted, giving us the go ahead to dive in, and it was like we were diving in for a triathlon. There were about ten of us or so out on the boat that morning, and we all made our way in to swim toward the pod. The water shocked me for the first few seconds, but in the end I was just too excited to care.

The staff at Dolphin Encouter told us that one of the best ways to entertain the dolphins and keep them curious was to continue to make noises as we swim since dolphins communicate through clicks and other sounds.

Additionally, we were told to swim in a circular motion around and around with the dolphins to keep them engaged as well as to dive straight downwards and keep our arms down by our sides – all in an effort to be more dolphin-like and keep them more interested.

So, even though I felt somewhat foolish, I (like everyone else) started making whatever clicking noise I could that came to mind.

The visibility of the water was not great, probably no more than 3 to 5 meters (15 feet) in front of me.

It was an eery feeling almost – waiting for my first dolphin sighting. It was like walking through a haunted house: I knew something was going to come out at me, but I just did not know when.

I was swimming for about a minute until a dolphin appeared out of the blue (literally) and darted right past me. I started screaming, naturally, a habit that I kept up each time a dolphin swam past me in the waters.

This was hands down one of the best experiences I ever had. A deluge of excitement ran through my body like a kid running down the steps on Christmas morning. I was smiling from ear to ear.

There were around 20 or 25 dolphins in the ocean with us, and as we swam through the waters, clicking away like happy simpletons, the dolphins raced around us. They swam not even a foot in front of me, below me, beside me – jumping out of the waters above me. Every so often I would lift my head up out of the water just to see their fins gliding through the waters and then cutting every which way. I would catch them jumping about over the waters, and then I would duck back under to try and find them.

Normally when I scuba dive, I am all about the visibility of the water. If you can not see anything, it really hinders the dive; however, with the dolphin swim, the low visibility enhanced the whole experience and made it all the more mysterious and thrilling. I never knew where the dolphins were coming from or when they were coming and then suddenly there would be two right beside me – hence the reason I continued to scream throughout my swim every time dolphins suddenly came dancing around me.

 

 

We were in the water for what felt like the most amazing of lifetimes when I realized that I lost the feeling in my toes. I tried wiggling them around, but they felt like they needed a little bit of grease to get the movement back into them.

For a minute I thought about heading back to the boat, and within five minutes I was saved by the sound of the horn calling us back to the boat. I had in the last few minutes become that cold that I was praying for it to be over, because I could not bring myself to end the dolphin encounter early on a count of frostbitten toes. The guilt of not soaking up every minute would have been too overwhelming.

 

We were greeted with hot water showers once we got back on the boat, and there were blankets, hot chocolate and biscuits waiting for us once we dried off and got back into our clothes.

I was shaking a bit too much to drink my hot chocolate for the first – hm – twenty minutes or so of being out of the water, but eventually I managed to steadily hold a cup and guzzle it down.

Following the swim, we had some time to watch the dolphins play in the wake of our boat. It was a race as they zipped and zoomed in the wake to keep up with us, frolicking along the way and jumping here, there and everywhere.

 

Myself and the other swimmers were on Cloud 9, our faces painted with silly smiles as we rehashed the outrageously brilliant experience we had that morning.

“I heard someone screaming!” my friend Serena from Canada said. “Was that you? Good to know you are okay!”

I do not know if it is all Americans or all New Yorkers, or maybe it is just me, but I always seem to make memories all the more vivid with my reactions, commentary and fun-loving (and dramatic) nature.

Nonetheless, with or without my dramatic flair, swimming with the dolphins in Kaikoura is certainly one of the best experiences I have had throughout all of my travels, and it is something that should be on everyone’s New Zealand itinerary.

DISCLAIMER: I was a guest of Dolphin Encounter, and an underwater camera was provided for me by Dolphin Encounter. As always, all thoughts and opinions of my experiences are my own.