Abel Tasman

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Abel Tasman National Park.

Not necessarily in that order!
Ok, the bad first - setting off on a 5 day walk (Abel Tasman Coastal Track), carrying a tent, in a torrential downpour. We were later to discover that there was a heavy rain warning out for that day. It’s funny how no-body mentions this when you’re handing over your money! Anyway, we survived and it actually cleared up around sunset (it took us a while to notice as we had been huddled in the tent for a while) which leads me on to....

The Ugly - John prancing around in his thermals (he has new stripy ones which he is very proud of!) hanging up all our wet clothes to dry overnight. Ha ha. Cue torrential downpour number 2 in the middle of the night undoing all his good work. So we set off the next day quite damp but otherwise unscathed (i had recovered from the devastating news that we had left the chocolate in the car :o(). After a day of dodging rain showers and stripping down to our pants to cross rivers and a night in sandfly heaven, we finally arrived at....

The good (the very good in fact, I might even go so far as to say fantastic!) - a dry day! After passing along several small empty beaches we arrived at Murderer’s Bay which is thought to be the site of the first landing by European explorers (and also, if you hadn’t guessed already, the site of a fatal attack on Abel Tasman’s group). Here we spent the evening and the following morning on the beach joined only by some very relaxed looking birdlife and the odd ray swimming about our feet. That was more like it!! Excellent.

To top it off, a hard slog up a hill gave us a view of everything from above, glistening in the sunshine. Back down to Totoranui, we caught a water taxi back to the car and headed back up to Nelson.

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