Turquoise and Trail Legs

After a surprisingly good night's sleep, the kind that comes when fresh air and a first day's walking conspire to pull you under quickly and hold you there, we both awoke without urgency. There was no alarm this time, no schedule pressing down on the morning. Just the soft grey light of early day filtering through the tent walls and the distant murmur of waves on Anchorage Bay. We started slow, moving with the unhurried deliberateness of people who are learning to let the trail set the pace rather than the clock. Pack up the tent, roll the sleeping mats, compress the bags, shoulder the weight. The ritual was still new to Anth, but already beginning to feel like something his hands might one day do without thinking.

Before we had finished, a DOC warden approached Torrin to check whether we had paid our campsite fees. We had not, and not through any lack of intention. Reception out here was nonexistent, the kind of signal void that makes a smartphone little more than an expensive torch. But the warden, in that easy, practical manner that seemed to characterise so many of the people we were meeting in this country, simply loaned Torrin her Wi-Fi password so he could sort the payment. And since the connection was there, fleeting and precious as water in a desert, Torrin seized the moment. We spent five minutes on the beach while he downloaded his latest audiobook, a small luxury that would fill the solitary stretches of trail ahead with story and voice when conversation fell into comfortable silence.

We set off along the sand, the morning light catching the water in that same impossible turquoise that had stopped us in our tracks the day before. The beach curved ahead, and tucked into the rocky edges where the coastline met the bush, we discovered a series of cave sections carved into the sandstone by centuries of tide and weather. We explored them with the quiet thrill of children finding secret rooms, the cool stone overhead, the way sound changed inside, the drip of moisture catching light. They were beautiful in their own understated way, these small hollows the sea had made and then abandoned.

Heading inland, we came to the first of the Abel Tasman's tidal crossings, and luck was entirely on our side. The tide was out, the vast flat gleaming with a thin skin of water and wet sand that reflected the sky like hammered metal. We walked straight across, our boots leaving shallow prints that filled and vanished behind us, and in doing so saved ourselves nearly two hours of hiking that the longer route around would have demanded. There is something deeply satisfying about timing and tide aligning in your favour, a small gift from the ocean that felt like an endorsement of the day ahead.

The trail continued along the coast, and once again the views to our right were extraordinary. That endless interplay of bush and bay, of headlands reaching out into water so clear you could trace the sandy bottom far from shore. Anth, keeping one eye on his phone, grabbed a couple of geocaches along the way, nice and easy finds tucked into the margins of the trail, those small treasures hidden by strangers for strangers that add a quiet layer of discovery to any walk.

We fell into step with a German backpacker somewhere along this stretch, exchanging the usual pleasantries of trail life. Where are you from, how far today, where did you start. It was becoming apparent that German hikers were remarkably well represented on the Abel Tasman, their accents surfacing at rest stops and viewpoints with a frequency that suggested New Zealand held a particular gravity for that corner of Europe. Mixed in amongst the thru-hikers were heaps of day walkers too, clean-clothed and light on their feet, unburdened by the weeks of supplies that made our packs groan. The Abel Tasman was clearly a trail that belonged to many people in many different ways.

Shortly after the tidal flat, we passed through the small resort of Torrent Bay, a cluster of buildings nestled between bush and water that felt like a brief interruption of civilisation before the trail reclaimed us. We stopped at several viewpoints along the way, each one offering a slightly different composition of the same astonishing palette, before finally arriving at Bark Bay campground.

We rested first. Properly rested, packs dropped, bodies horizontal on the grass, letting the accumulated kilometres drain from legs and shoulders. Anth was certainly feeling it. Two days of walking with a full pack after months of nomadic bus life rather than trail life had made its position clear in his calves and lower back. Torrin, by contrast, was doing well, his body remembering its North Island fitness even after those eleven idle days in Nelson, moving with the easy looseness of someone for whom this was simply a return to normal.

Once camp was set up and the tent pitched, we wandered across another tidal flat, this one smaller and muddier, and climbed a tiny island that rose from its edge like a green fist. Another geocache waited there, and Anth found it with the quiet satisfaction that these miniature treasure hunts always provide. We walked along the beach afterward, the afternoon light growing golden and long, and paused to watch and photograph a small group of sandpipers working the waterline with their quick, mechanical steps, probing the wet sand with delicate bills, entirely indifferent to our presence.

Back at camp, we cooked another dinner. The Pak'n Save oversupply from two days earlier was proving to be both a burden on the shoulders and a blessing on the palate, and once again we ate well. But the weka of Bark Bay, it turned out, were even bolder than their cousins at Anchorage. While we ate, one particularly audacious bird made its move. Not on an unattended wrapper or an open bag, but on Anth's pack itself, working its beak into a zipped pocket with a dexterity that seemed frankly unreasonable for a creature without hands. Before Anth could react, the weka had extracted a protein bar and was already sprinting across the mud flat with the confidence of a thief who had done this a thousand times before. Torrin gave chase, boots slapping through the shallow mud, but the bird had the advantage of local knowledge and vanished into the bushes with its prize, leaving Torrin standing at the treeline, breathless and laughing, outwitted by a bird that weighed less than a kilogram.

We cleaned up with considerably more vigilance after that, every zip checked twice, every pocket secured. The weka had taught their lesson, and we were not keen to pay another protein bar for the privilege of a second one.

Before turning in, we checked the weather forecast. Tomorrow's outlook was rain. We looked at each other with the resigned acceptance that hikers develop quickly, that understanding that weather is not an obstacle but simply a condition, and that the trail continues regardless of what the sky decides to do. We zipped the tent closed against the cooling night air, the bush settling into its evening chorus around us, and let the sound of it carry us toward sleep.

Day two on the Abel Tasman, done. Day three would be wet.Read more