Blogs from Abel Tasman National Park, South Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 34

We got a water taxi. They showed us a few interesting spots. The beaches were absolutly stunning. Golden sands. They also stopped by island where there were seals. UNfortunalty of all days my camera decided not to work it was today!!! AHHHHHHHHHHH luckily a guy that was doing the same walk had a fancy camera so he said he would send the photos! Taxi dropped us off and we walked through National Park, past beaches, bush it was truly stunning. Weather was very changable but we eneded up on Torrent Bay where the sun was shining! Taxi picked us up and we went back to the hostel.... read more

After Wellington, our time in the North Island was up. we got the ferry over to Picton and the weather was good so it only took three hours. We headed straight from the ferry terminal to a winery where we tried three whites, some spirits, dressings and oils so a good visit!! As the weather was great, our driver took us to a river so we could have a swim and a jump off the surrounding rocks. it was so good to feel the sun again but with burn time being 12 minutes, we lathered the factor 30 on (a bit of a strange experience on the 9th January!) After this, we headed straight to Nelson where we stayed in a converted hotel with a really nice courtyard. We were chuffed to be staying 3 nights ... read more

We’ve just spent the last two days in and around Abel Tasman National Park, our last stop on the South Island. We got into the area yesterday, after a five-hour drive from Greymouth. This day was our planned beach day at Kaiteriteri Beach, rated by Guardian News in the UK as one of the top five beaches in the world. We had planned many different types of tourist sights to see on this trip, but one area that we really hadn’t allocated much time for was the beach. Most of our beach time was planned for Brisbane, but that got rained out, so we were really looking forward to this day. When we awoke in Greymouth it was raining, and the weather forecast for where we were going was similar, so we were worried that even ... read more

WEll, haven't written in a while bc I was out Kayaking the abel Tasman Trek. Our group decided to do a 3 day tour through a company called MSK....this is where we were to do a two day kayak tour and a one day Hiking through the park. Arriving to the MSK headquarters, we are soon faced with a problem...the office was telling us that we had to rent our own camping equipment (tents/cooking stove/utensils, sleeping matts, ect.) BUT the lady we had booked everything, 2 days earlier had told us that EVERYTHING WAS INCLUDED, we had asked her a million times if ALL (camping gear) was included in the pacakge.....well, it wasn't but somehow we managed to get it on "loan", which was good bc we had already payed alot of $$ for the whole ... read more

The morning of the 26th we departed Nelson and headed north to Abel Tasman for a two day kayaking expedition. Our clan had to be the sales person’s worst nightmare. We had him price out every possible option for our trip. He’d give us a few options, we’d huddle and then call him back over and ask if we could take part of one option combine with the anther two and then twist in some other extras. I’m certain he was glad to see us off on our way. We waited a hippy five minutes for our water taxi, i.e. five minutes turned into forty minutes. The boat we loaded our gear in shoved off and then found that the hydraulics were not working and the motor wouldn’t drop. We slowly started to drift out to ... read more