Howdy folks, sorry for the lack of updates (really this time, I am), it’s just that the past three weeks have been my mid term holidays, and before that I had a work filled week and a half, preceded by the Easter Holidays. So, in order to catch up, I’m going to start back with the Easter Holidays, and go at it from there. The TR from the Easter Trip will be broken up in a few sections to basically get some stuff up as soon as possible. So, without any further ado, here we go…

The Easter Holidays were on March 21-25, and this being a fairly substantial chunk of time, I decided that a road trip was in order. Not having a car (more on that another time), I rented out some tiny piece of shit car with a buddy of mine, and early on the 21st, we were off, heading away towards Abel Tasman National Park. Before even leaving Chch, we picked up a German hitchhiker who was heading towards Hanmer Springs. It was interesting to talk with him, we found out that he was basically doing a round the world trip, and that such trips are fairly common for Germans to be doing. We stopped in Hanmer and get lunch there after dropping this guy off, and then proceeded on our way towards Abel Tas.

The driving is really nice, and quite pleasant, especially as there aren’t that many cars out there on the roads. The road its self goes over Lewis Pass, and travels through some great country with some gorgeous freestone rivers running through it.

After some more driving, we finally made our way to Murchison, a small town of somewhere abouts 900 or so people. Murchison is known for the abundance of both excellent fly fishing in the area and also the water sports in the area, such as white water kayaking and white water rafting. We stopped there and got some coffee at the Rivers Café, a great little place. After that we moved on, as it was getting a bit late, and finally made it to our ultimate destination for that night, Marahau. Marahau is a sleepy little town right at the base of Abel Tas. where were heading into the next day. We set up our tent, made some food (gotta love the beans and rice combo), and yea, that pretty much sums up the first day.

These pics are somewhere between Murchison and Marahau.

The next day we woke up to see just where we’d set up our tent. I always thing it’s fun and somewhat exciting to set up your tent in the night time and then to see just where you’ve ended up the next morning. Well, this was no exception. The mountains right behind our tent were rather unexpected, and at least I thought it to be a nice sight.

In any event, we ate breakfast (a mix of left over beans and rice and some fruit maybe?), and then went off to both pay for the camping and try to figure out where we were going to tramp that day in the park, and how to go about it logistically. After talking with the guy at the backpackers (a hostel, if you will), we eventually ended up deciding to take an aqua taxi into the park and tramp for a few hours and then take an aqua taxi out of the park. We took this route as we’d been told that the section we were going to be doing (approx 9km) was one of the best, if not the best stretch of track in the park.

We just barely made it in time to get onto the water taxi that we were booked in for, but all was well. On the way out, they took us by split apple rock (actually a little bit south of Marahau), which is a famous rock that well, looks like a split apple…

We finally ended up in a place called Bark Bay when we got off the water taxi. This was where our tramp for the day was to begin.

This is a section of the Abel Tasman Coastal Track. It gets a lot of traffic, and as you can see, is very well maintained.

Most of the track runs through forests such as that, but you are afforded glamorous views of super cool beaches every so often. This is one of those beaches.

This next picture is just another picture of the track, somewhat altered forest, but still fairly dense generally rain forest type stuff.

There are a few sections where you can do a small side trip to a beach or a vantage point. This picture is from one of the beaches. The only issue is that you have to go down really far to get to this beach, which therefore implies you need to go up really far to get back from this beach. Kind of a bummer, but really nice nonetheless.

This was a really pretty looking fern frond that I saw along the track.

And a different, much larger fern frond latter along the track.

And finally, our destination, Torrent Bay. To get to Torrent Bay from Bark Bay we walked somewhere around 9km, a decent but not terrible walk. Good fun too.

We had our lunch there, which consisted of some muesli (granola), fruit, and Tim Tams, and then soon thereafter boarded the aqua taxi back to Marahau. When we got back, we poked around there for a bit, and then headed North into the Golden Bay. More on that in part 2! It’ll be up soon, promise. Cheers!