18th December 2009
Up and about not much after 6 this morning to get ready for our day trip the the Abel Tasman National Park. We had to get to Kaiteriteri for 8:30 in order to catch our 9am water bus, and Kaiteriteri is about an hour drive from where we are staying in Nelson.
We arrived in Kaiteriteri in good time and picked up our tickets for the boat, and then sat on the beach to wait for the boat to be ready. It was a glorious morning with barely a cloud in the sky. The weather is due to change over the weekend, and it seemed we weren’t the only ones to choose today to go because there were a lot of other people on our boat.
We left Kaiteriteri and started to head north up the coastline, first stopping off to take a look at Split Apple Rock - a round granite rock which has split open to look like a halved apple. As We continued north, we slowed as we passed an island to look at some seals. We then began calling in at different Bays to drop people off.
The Abel Tasman walk takes 3 days to go from end to end, but you can choose to do different legs of it, and the water taxis enable this by dropping you off and picking you up at different Bays along the route. The most popular leg of the walk is from Bark Bay to Torrent Bay, which is what Trevor and Carol from Nelson had recommended to us, but we had also decided to go for the package which takes you up to Awaroa Bay first, and drops you off there for a couple of hours, before picking you up again and taking you down to Bark Bay to do the walk.
We jumped off the boat at Awaroa and took a walk to Awaroa Lodge. This is an eco-lodge set in lovely grounds, very nice, but having seen the price for a coffee here, we left and followed the coastal path northwards, past the lodge’s organic vegetable gardens and the Awaroa landing strip. Besides the occasional helicopter going over, it was really quiet here, and at one point all we could here was the humming of busy honey bees - wonderful. Soon after this we were stopped in our tracks by the incoming tide which had filled an inlet, preventing us from crossing so we retraced our steps back the beach at Awaroa Bay and spend a pleasant hour or so reading books in the lovely sunshine and enjoying our picnic lunch.
Our 1pm boat pick up soon came round and it was back on board for the 30 minute trip back south to Bark Bay. From here it was a pleasant hour and a half walk along undulating and windy tree covered pathways and across swing bridges with glimpses of lovely little bays and turquoise sea.
We made good time on the walk, even though we weren’t rushing it, and made it to Torrent Bay in time to catch the 3:30 back to Kaiteriteri. By now the tide had gone out quite a way, completely changing the look of the bay. In this area they have a 4m tidal rise and fall, so when we came by earlier in the day there was just a thin strip of beach, but now the beach was huge. We had to wade out the last way to the boat, which had to keep some way off the ever-growing beach in order to avoid getting stuck.
Once back at Kaiteriteri we sat on the beach for half an hour drying out from our bit of wading then it was back to Nelson for our last night at The Bug hostel. Tomorrow we start to head southwards back towards Chirstchurch.