misty galway days

Kaikoura in the rain looks exactly like the West of Ireland, and it filled me with a silly, happy feeling to be so far from home in a completely familiar environment. Hiking along in the damp, mizzly rain, a sharp wind coming off the sea, wandering along steep, craggy cliffs (but not too close to the edge, Mum!), and coming across the odd sheep. How perfect.

Even more perfect was for the sun to burn the fog away to reveal snow-capped alpine peaks cutting across a perfect blue sky and rushing down to the sea, to go running along a perfectly flat beach path whilst looking up at mountain faces and feeling the sun warm on my back.

More perfect still was to spend a morning in a nippy little catermeran looking for dusky dolphins on a perfectly clear day, in the hope of swimming with them. Of course, perfection would be actually swimming with them, but unfortunately, today they weren't playing ball. Never mind. Maybe I'll get a chance to swim with them up in the Bay of Islands - I still had a glorious morning out on the ocean, checking out very big birds (albatrosses) and watching the cute little dolphins swim around the boat.

And the only downer? Coming a close second in a pub quiz on account of not knowing enough about sex. Damnation. This is after getting lots of very hard science questions right, revealing my inner geek and my knowledge of when the atomic clock was developed, as well as how many bits to the byte, and where the US Masters is played. My father would be proud.