Rewinding the Abel Tasman

As we left Anapai Bay for the last time, the coastal bush closing behind us like a curtain on the Abel Tasman chapter, Torrin sent a message to Annie. The trail angel who had welcomed us into her home with such unhesitating generosity before our first steps on the Abel Tasman, who had fed us and sheltered us and sent us off with Simon's kindness at the wheel, might she be willing to do it all again? Along the trail, her reply arrived. She would be more than happy to. With transport and accommodation assured in a single message, the weight of logistics lifted from the afternoon, and we walked the hour back to Totaranui quickly, packs feeling lighter for knowing what waited at the other end. Anth, this time, walked without the company of an audiobook. Somewhere in the bush behind them at Anapai Bay, a weka was presumably enjoying that particular luxury on his behalf.

Arriving at Totaranui with almost an hour and a half to spare before the ferry, we dropped our packs in the shade and settled into the grass. The large campground hummed with its usual holiday energy, families and day trippers moving between the beach and the car park, but we had stepped outside that rhythm now. We were in the quiet space between one thing ending and the next beginning. We finished off the last of our snacks, those final crumbs of trail food that had survived five days of careful rationing and occasional weka raids, and watched the bay do its slow work of changing colour as the afternoon light shifted.

The time passed quickly, and then the ferry was there, nosing into the shallows with the practised ease of a vessel that made this journey many times a day. We were right on the limit of its trip, among the last passengers to embark on this leg before it turned back for its collection run along the coast. We climbed aboard and made our way to the top deck, the wind catching our hair as the engines churned and Totaranui began to fall away behind us.

What followed was extraordinary. Over the course of the next ninety minutes, the Abel Tasman rewound itself before our eyes. From this new vantage point, elevated above the water and moving at a speed the trail would never allow, we watched the coastline slide past and picked out the places that had taken us days to traverse on foot. There was Bark Bay, where the protein bar heist had unfolded across the mud flat. The tidal crossings we had waded barefoot, the headlands we had climbed with burning legs, the turquoise bays that had stopped us in our tracks, all of it compressed into a single sweeping panorama viewed from the water. What had felt immense and hard-won on foot now appeared intimate and contained, the entire trail visible in a way that walking it never permits. It was a strange feeling, seeing five days of effort reduced to a ribbon of green coastline, and yet it only deepened the sense of what we had accomplished. We had walked every metre of that shore. We knew its mud and its hills and its thieving birds in a way that no ferry passenger ever could.

As the boat stopped at beaches along the return route, day trippers climbed aboard in clusters, sunburnt and salt-haired, carrying towels and day bags and the easy contentment of a day spent on golden sand. The ferry filled steadily until the deck was crowded with voices and laughter, and we sat amongst them with our heavy packs and trail-worn clothes, belonging to a different version of this coastline entirely.

At the final stop of Kaiteriteri, that popular beach resort town where the turquoise water meets a shore lined with kayak hire shops and ice cream stands, Annie was waiting for us. She stood on the beach with the kind of smile that makes you feel like arriving is the best thing that has happened to her all day, and whisked us into the car for the drive back to Nelson. Just at the edge of town, she spotted a figure walking the roadside with a heavy pack and a familiar weariness in his stride. A German hiker, Jonathan, heading back to Nelson. Without hesitation, she pulled over. Her generosity to help was instinctive, as natural as breathing, extended not just to us but to anyone the trail placed in her path. Jonathan climbed in with the grateful disbelief of someone who had resigned himself to a long walk and found kindness instead.

We dropped Jonathan at his accommodation and headed to Annie's, where Simon had already almost finished preparing dinner. The house smelled of home cooking, that warm, enveloping scent that hits you with unexpected force when you have spent days eating rehydrated meals on a camp stove. Anth dropped his pack in the hallway and began unpacking his bag, pulling out clothes and gear in search of something clean to wear, and there, squashed into the bottom of his main clothes bag, tangled amongst shirts and socks like stowaways, were his headphones. His wireless headphones. The ones he had been so certain a weka had stolen from Anapai Bay. The ones he had searched the campsite for, the ones he had mourned with reluctant admiration for the bird that had taken them. They had been in his pack the entire time, buried so deep in the chaos of a hastily stuffed bag that the morning search had never found them. He stood in Annie's hallway holding them, caught between relief and the sheepish realisation that he owed an apology to every weka on the Abel Tasman coast. Torrin's laughter, when he heard, was the kind that comes from deep in the belly and does not stop quickly.

Their hospitality was incredible, the kind that goes beyond mere generosity into something closer to vocation. They asked for nothing and gave everything, and sitting at their table that evening, clean and fed and resting in the comfort of their home, we understood why trail angels occupy an almost sacred place in the hearts of long-distance hikers. They are the people who make the impossible stretches possible, who restore not just bodies but belief.

The next day, we took a zero day. In thru-hiking language, a day of no kilometres, no trail, no forward progress on the map. But zero days are never truly zero. They are the days when the body does its deepest repair, when muscles that have been torn and rebuilt find their new architecture, when blisters dry and joints stop their quiet complaining. We rested and recovered, but beneath the stillness there was preparation. What we had come here for was waiting.

The Te Araroa.

The Abel Tasman had been beautiful, a gift the weather had inadvertently given us, five days of coastal walking that had allowed Anth to find his trail legs and father and son to find their rhythm together. But it was not the TA. The next section would be eight days long, pushing through the Waiau and into terrain that was, by all reports, the second hardest section of the entire Te Araroa trail. Alpine passes, remote valleys, river crossings, and the kind of sustained physical demand that the gentle coastal paths of the Abel Tasman had only hinted at. The weather window looked promising, a stretch of days clear enough to attempt what the severe warning had denied us when we first arrived in Nelson. This time, the mountains might let us through.

Simon drove us into town for final preparations. We visited the Centre of New Zealand, that modest hilltop landmark above Nelson where a monument marks the geographical centre of the country, a small pilgrimage that felt fitting before setting off into its wild interior. Then it was back to the Pak'n Save, those familiar aisles where our journey had begun with overstuffed packs and more food than two people could reasonably carry. We had learned our lesson. This time, we chose lighter options, calculating with more discipline, balancing the need for eight days of fuel against the reality of carrying every gram of it over mountain passes. Every tin was weighed against its dehydrated alternative. Every luxury was measured against the cost of an extra few hundred grams on a steep climb.

One more night under Annie and Simon's roof. One more evening of their warmth and generosity, of conversation and home-cooked food and the quiet comfort of sleeping in a real bed before the mountains claimed us. In the morning, Annie drove us toward St Arnaud, the small lakeside settlement on the edge of Nelson Lakes National Park where the TA waited. True to form, Annie had organised a lift for another TA hiker heading to the same town without a second thought, adding one more act of trail angel grace to a list that had already grown long.

The road climbed through farmland and into the foothills, the landscape shifting from the gentle greens of the coast to something wilder and more vertical. Anth sat in the back seat and watched the mountains grow larger through the windscreen, their peaks still carrying snow, their flanks dark with beech forest. He felt both excited and nervous about the trail to come. The Abel Tasman had been a prologue, beautiful and necessary, but a prologue nonetheless. What lay ahead was the story itself, and it would ask more of him than anything he had attempted before. Eight days. The second hardest section. Alpine terrain. And Torrin beside him, steady and sure, the son who had already walked so far and was now waiting for his father to walk with him into the mountains.

The road wound on toward St Arnaud, and the TA drew closer with every kilometre.Read more