This is Kaikoura Coast.

East coast of the upper part of the South Island (Te Waipounamu) is mountainous and has Kaikoura as its main town.

Before whale watching Kaikoura was just another fishing town (with a popular line in crayfish) and provider of services to a small agricultural community in the surrounding hills.

These days it thrives on tourism. Crayfish cost a small fortune, and the Marlborough grape growing / wine producing region starts a little north of there.

State Highway 1 between Parnassus to Kaikoura should probably be a national disgrace. 12 kilometres of it is so winding and rough the speed limit is set at 60 kph (about 36 mph). Personally I don't mind. It makes negotiating it less stressful. 

Bends aren't the issue. In fact the winding corners and steep drops are nothing on a scale of mountain roads. Nor are there potholes or crumbling tarmac. The tarmacked surface is contiguous; all joined up, and reaches edge to edge.

It is the texture of the road I find remark worthy. My van has its seats on top of the front wheels so I feel every bump, jolt, lurch, judder,.... and there are plenty.  In fact I'd say the shaking is as contiguous as the tarmac that follows all these angular contours.

Parnassus to Kaikoura (and back - it is both sides of the road) is a prolonged torture by shaking, resulting in chipped teeth and skeletal dislocations.

However, who is complaining?  In the last major earthquake parts of Kaikoura coast were raised a metre, and landslides and road movement had cut Kaikoura of its road and rail connections both south and north for months.  An inland route (which had been little more than a goat track through the Waiau Valley) was reopened first but only good for one way traffic over much of its length, so that traffic was strictly controlled and passed through in convoys (like the Suez Canal).

SH 1 is a positive motorway (even at 36mph) compared to that.

Once you make it to the coast, the sea on a calm day is azure. It put me in mind of crossing the causeway from mainland Greece to Lefkada.  Glowing in the sunlight, it only lacked small islands with impossibly located monasteries to complete the picture.

My return trip 3 days later, was a total contrast: the wind was howling, skies glowering, rain lashing, and mist clung to recesses behind the headlands. Herekeke was bowed flat in the wind and spray fleckled the railway lines.  

It's a clear line to Chile from here.

The main reason I stop on the Kaikoura Coast however, is to hold conversations with New Zealand fur seals. Their population along that coast has increased many-fold in my lifetime and they are a delight to watch at any time of the year but particularly when the pups are learning to swim in protected rock pools.

Comical.

The lifted coastline has provided them with plenty more rocky beaches to haul out on in wild weather, and I watched as one carefully got itself comfortable in long grass in the lee of a suitable rock, rolled belly up and went to sleep; totally unconcerned by my presence.

Centre bottom one carefully selected its spot and more or less went to sleep at my feet.

Poser

There were places they were packed more closely and places I could have got nearer but I had this place to myself and the seals - no other tourists.

As furry critters go (and leaving aside Tiggers with anthropological attributes) fur seals and sea otters vy for favorite animal status in my personal experience of mammalian wildlife.