Beyond the sinuous valleys and rumpled ridges of the Hundalees, State Highway 1 meets the Kaikōura Coast at Oaro. It is an abrupt meeting. The outer ramparts of the Seaward Kaikōura Range descend towards the Pacific in a succession of vertiginous declivities, leaving a littoral so narrow that New Zealand’s principal road and railway line have to squeeze through together between mountain and sea. There are places where there seems scarcely room for either. The Main North Line hugs the coast. State Highway 1 follows beside it. Above them the mountains rise; below them the Pacific begins.
At Goose Bay, a roadside sign announces: HIKURANGI MARINE RESERVE BEGINS 320 METRES. Three hundred and twenty metres farther on, the road and railway disappear into separate tunnels bored through a spur of solid rock. Beyond them, I stop, get out of the car and walk across the road towards the sea. I am standing on the edge of the Hikurangi Trench.
There is nothing particularly dramatic to announce this fact. No precipice. No abyss opening beneath my feet. No visible boundary between the familiar world and the extraordinary one. There is simply the Pacific, blue and restless, stretching eastwards towards the horizon.
Around me, gulls shriek at one another over scraps of tide-wrack. Somnolent seals pay no attention whatsoever to a lone writer standing beside the road with a notebook. Offshore, jagged pinnacles of rock, their summits whitened with guano, protrude from the ocean.
A truck approaches. It is a twin-funnelled Kenworth heading north, and as the driver applies the Jacobs engine brake the sound enters the tunnel and comes rolling back out again, amplified and deepened by the rock. For several seconds the entire coastline resonates with it. A baritone singing Puccini. Then the truck is gone and the sea takes over again.
Down on the seaside abutment of the Frosty Morn Creek culvert, somebody has left another record of their passing. Graffiti, scrawled across the concrete: SQUIZ CLICHY SERGE 2026. I have no idea who Squiz, Clichy or Serge are. Perhaps nobody else does either. But for the moment their names sit here between the mountains and the Pacific, three small human marks scratched onto a landscape operating on dimensions of time and space almost impossible to comprehend. Because the most remarkable landscape here is not the one I can see. It is beneath the water.
Strictly speaking, the great submarine feature approaching the Kaikōura Coast is the Kaikōura Canyon, a branch of the much larger system associated with the Hikurangi margin. And that distinction helps explain why this apparently ordinary stretch of Pacific is one of the most biologically extraordinary places around New Zealand.
If I could somehow drain the ocean away, the landscape before me would be astonishing. Instead of an apparently level expanse of blue water there would be slopes, ridges and valleys. The seabed would plunge into a great submarine canyon cutting deeply into the continental margin. Gullies would descend into larger channels. Sediment would accumulate on slopes and tumble periodically into the depths. Eventually the canyon floor would lie around a kilometre below the surface.
On land, something of this scale would be famous. There would be roads to it. Lookouts would cling to the rim. There would be walking tracks, warning signs and photographs on Instagram. But this canyon is full of seawater, and consequently almost the entire landscape is invisible. Its importance, however, is enormous.
The Kaikōura Canyon brings deep ocean unusually close to land. It also acts as a collector. Organic material sinking through the water accumulates within the canyon system, helping support remarkably dense communities of animals on and within the seabed. There are sea cucumbers and worms, urchins and other invertebrates. Fish patrol the darkness above them. And there are squid. Lots of squid. Which brings us to the sperm whales.
Kaikōura is one of those rare places where an animal capable of descending into profound oceanic darkness can feed in deep water and then surface within sight of people drinking flat whites. There is something wonderfully improbable about that. A sperm whale lying at the surface appears to inhabit the same world as I do. There is sunlight on its back. It breathes air. Mountains rise behind it. Boats can approach and people can photograph it. Then the whale breathes deeply, arches its back and lifts its tail. And disappears through the floor of our world.
Down it goes through blue water, then twilight, then darkness, descending into a landscape it can navigate but I can never see. Somewhere below waits the canyon. And somewhere within the canyon waits its prey. The whales are only the most spectacular beneficiaries of a much larger system. Kaikōura sits where currents, underwater topography and nutrients combine to create an extraordinarily productive marine environment. Microscopic phytoplankton capture the energy of sunlight. Zooplankton feed upon them. Krill and small fish gather. Larger fish follow. Squid follow the fish.
Then come the hunters. Dusky dolphins gather offshore. Fur seals feed along the coast. Orca pass through. Humpback whales travel past on migration. Above them, albatrosses, petrels and shearwaters range across the sea. The conventional term for this is a food web. Standing here, it seems hopelessly inadequate.
A food web sounds like something printed in a school biology textbook: little drawings of fish connected by arrows. This is geography turned into life.
The shape of the seabed influences the movement of water. The movement of water helps determine where nutrients accumulate. Nutrients feed microscopic organisms. Those organisms support progressively larger creatures until, at the upper end of the system, a sperm whale weighing tens of tonnes surfaces within sight of State Highway 1. The whale begins with the canyon. So, in a sense, do the birds. So do the seals sleeping on the rocks beside me. Everything is connected vertically. Mountain. River. Coast. Surface ocean. Canyon. Abyss.
A raindrop falling high in the Seaward Kaikōura Range can eventually enter a stream carrying infinitesimal quantities of material eroded from the land. The stream reaches the Pacific. Organic matter moves through the coastal system. Plankton captures sunlight. Fish and squid convert one form of life into another. Far below, something feeds in darkness. Far above, an albatross crosses the sky. And occasionally a sperm whale rises between them to breathe. Even catastrophe becomes part of the system.
During the Kaikōura earthquake of November 2016, the destruction did not stop at the waterline. While mountainsides collapsed onto the road and railway above the sea, enormous quantities of sediment moved through the submarine canyon below it. Communities living on the canyon floor were buried and disrupted. And then life began again.
That seems to be one of the recurring lessons of Kaikōura. The landscape is not static and neither is the life occupying it. Earthquakes move mountains. Landslides bury roads. The seabed rises. Submarine slopes collapse. Then plants grow. Seals return. Creatures burrow into the sediment again. Life rearranges itself around geology.
I look back towards the road. A car passes. Then another truck. For a few seconds there is tyre noise and diesel, the brief mechanical intrusion of the human world. Then it disappears into the tunnel and once again there are gulls, seals and the endless movement of water against stone. Nothing about the view adequately explains what lies beyond it.
That is what fascinates me. The wildlife spectacle of Kaikōura is presented to us at the surface. We see the tail of the sperm whale rising before a dive. We watch dolphins leap beside boats. We photograph seals sleeping on rocks and albatrosses skimming above the waves. Those are the actors. The stage is underneath them. The real architecture of Kaikōura is submarine. And perhaps Serengeti is not such an extravagant comparison after all.
On the African Serengeti, landscape and rainfall determine where grass grows. Herbivores follow the grass. Predators follow the herbivores. Great migrations are geography translated into biology. Here the grass is microscopic. The plains are water. The valleys are submarine canyons. The herds are shoals of fish and concentrations of squid. And the great predators move not across a horizon, but vertically through hundreds of metres of ocean.
I stand beside the road for a while longer. Behind me, the Seaward Kaikōura Range climbs towards the sky. In front of me another great landscape descends into darkness. One is clothed in forest and tussock, cut by rivers and touched by snow. The other is drowned. Its valleys carry currents instead of rivers. Its slopes accumulate mud instead of scree. Its inhabitants navigate darkness instead of daylight. And squeezed improbably between these two wildernesses run a railway line and State Highway 1.
Eventually I close my notebook and walk back towards the car. The seals continue sleeping. The gulls continue arguing over the tide-wrack. Squiz, Clichy and Serge remain immortalised, for the time being at least, on their concrete culvert. And offshore, beneath an apparently unremarkable patch of restless blue Pacific, an entire world falls away into darkness. The underwater Serengeti is there. I simply cannot see it.
TravelWriterLife 