Kaikōura

Sperm whales dive where the continental shelf plunges toward a thousand metres almost within sight of the beach. At Kaikōura the mountains meet the ocean without foothills — the Seaward Kaikōura Range stands snow-capped directly behind town — and the town's own name declares its other obsession: kai koura, to eat crayfish.

The Kaikōura Canyon is the engine: a submarine trench hard against the coast, pumping deep-water nutrients into the shallows and anchoring sperm whales, dusky dolphins, albatrosses and fur seal colonies to one small stretch of sea. The encounters run on wildlife law and weather — permitted boats and flights find whales by hydrophone and patience, sightings a strong likelihood never sold as certainty, and on shore the rule is distance: twenty metres from every seal, no one between an animal and the sea. The Peninsula Walkway earns its own morning — pā history, uplifted reef platforms and colonies below — walking ground the 2016 earthquake lifted as much as two metres, a rearrangement biologists are still reading. Then crayfish, boiled or grilled — the town's namesake rite.