Day 3 Abel Tasman

We both had another good nights sleep and slept just about to our alarm going off. I bet in a couple days we will probably be ready to sleep in a bit.

We arrived plenty early to Kahu Kayaks for our "Swingers Delight" tour, greeted by guides actually happy to be there! After everyone arrived and a quick van ride to the ocean we boarded the water taxi and got dropped off about 15 minutes later at Torrent Bay for our 4ish mile hike. We crossed a fairly long, somewhat unsturdy feeling swinging suspension bridge. It crossed a river that emptied into Sandfly Bay, we didn't go visit that beach, even though it looked amazing. The name was a great deterrent. Even with the ominous clouds most of the morning the weather held out for the duration of our hike and was starting to clear by the time we got to Bark Bay; where we had lunch (and Heather spent most of her time running away from curious bees)

After lunch our same water taxi came to pick us up and bring us back towards town and drop us off at Watering Cove to fetch some kayaks and kayak around in the ocean for a few hours. Our cheerful Canadian guide, an older German couple, young Swiss couple and a young german girl joined us. Normally double kayaks can be a bit of a challenge for us, but these were true sit inside ocean kayaks with a rudder so steering was much easier. We paddled out to Adele island (not named after the singer we found out) to look at some New Zealand Fur Seals while our guide chastised seal gawkers for being closer than 20 meters of the seals.

We were lucky that the tide and weather were perfect so we continued around Adele Island to a secluded cove which had a perfect sand beach. We beached there for a break as our guide made us mochas and hot chocolate. An hour or so paddle/float later we got back to the beach we started at, which now required an 800 meter walk to get back to the dock since it was low tide. They used old tractors to drive down onto the beach and into the ocean to retrieve the boats and kayaks and bring them back to the road. All of which were old Ford 7000s. They had to be pre 1980 because they drove them right into the ocean to get the boats loaded on them so anything electrical wouldn't survive.

We then headed into town to get gas and some groceries for dinner. The Toyota van we have gets around 17mpg, which isn't bad, except that gas is around $nzd 8/gallon. It makes filling up a bit expensive each time. We got zucchini, packaged mushroom risotto and a white fish ????(starts with a T) ????for dinner. It all was delicious. We also noticed at the store that they have a ton of delicious sounding hard ciders here, we tried a passion fruit and strawberry lime cider. Both were quite tasty.

As per our normal routine so far we were tucking ourselves into our cozy camper by 9PM.Read more