Abel Tasman Day 2

After a not especially restful night in Anchorage hut (thanks to a seeming party on a boat and some champion snoring), we woke to find that the Anchorage is rather quieter in the morning than the afternoon.




The first part of the day was a walk around Torrent Bay to Torrent Bay village. It's possible to walk across the bay at low tide, but the tide times made this basically impossible (high tide was about 11:30 AM).


One advantage of taking the long way around was that it got you to where the side trip to Cleopatra's Pool began. One of our guide books claimed the pool was "one of the highlight's of the walk" which was over selling it a bit.


It was nice and all, but not even close to the highlight of the trip -- it's hard to say what the highlight was for us, but it was probably one of the bays further north.


Then we toddled back to the main path and around the bay some more to Torrent Bay village.


Torrent Bay village is a larger enclave of private land in the park, and the overall effect is a little odd, with street names and hedgerows and houses, but sandy streets and no electricity and, well, being entirely surrounded by the sea and a national park. I think most of the houses here are holiday homes or cottages you can rent; Awaroa, which we passed later in the walk seemed more like a place where people actually lived.


This is the view from the beach at Torrent Bay. This was about where we started to realize just how amazing this area is -- I mean, this view is clearly from some Pacific paradise like Fiji or Vanuatu or wherever, not rainy old New Zealand, right?

After Torrent Bay, the path went up steeply and inland a bit, giving us a cool view back over the village.


Around here the vegetation changed abruptly from a fern dominated damp forest that made one think of Jurassic Park to a much drier, almost Mediterranean style. We were never very far away from the coast though.


After a while, we descended to an impressive 47 meter suspension bridge over the Falls River.


After this, it was just one more up and down before we got to Medlands Beach.


This was a much more fun experience than the night before. For one thing, we were camping on the beach!


There were a few tents up when we arrived, which turned out to belong to some Kiwis who were having a gentle Easter holiday paddle around the park. This was our first experience of just how much stuff you can fit into our kayak: while we were cooking up our exciting meal of dehydrated curry with instant mash, the paddlers were opening one of their 8 bottles of wine and cooking up butter chicken with rice. We were a bit jealous :)


The sun set slightly behind the headland which meant we missed the full show, but it was still fun to sit and watch the stars come out and chat with our fellow (slightly bonkers) campers. They also gave us some of their mulled wine, which made us feel a bit less silly for walking and not kayaking :)

Abel Tasman Day 1

As Emma and I had been telling everyone for months beforehand, we were going to the South Island over Easter to walk the Abel Tasman Coastal Track.

On Thursday we piled into the car, drove down to Wellington, got on the ferry to Picton, stayed in the Picton YHA (rating: adequate) and then drove over to to the start of the track at Maharau on Friday. For no very good reason we didn't take any photos at all until we were starting the track on Saturday morning.


This is the ground of "The Barn Backpackers" (rating: Good, but needs more showers) where we stayed before and after the tramp.

This photo has as many clouds as we saw for the first four days:


(that is to say, none at all).

Most of the tramp was gentle up and down through forest, with plenty of views of beaches beneath us.


One of the surprising things about the Abel Tasman park is that dotted along the coast are various enclaves that are still privately owned and contain private dwellings or holiday homes. They look pretty idyllic but I don't know if having to take the boat to the pub or being kept at home for days by winter storms would be much fun...

After only about three or so hours, we came into view of our destination, Anchorage harbour, and by about 1:30 we were walking along the beach to the hut where we were going to sleep that night.


That meant that there was nothing left to do but sit on the beach and read our books all afternoon (this went on to become a theme of the trip...).


The experience was a little strange on one respect though: despite being a (admittedly short) days walk from the trailhead into a national park, the beach was busy, with probably a couple of hundred people arriving or departing by kayak or water taxi.


OK, it wasn't that busy really, but it was a bit more than we expected, and we ended up thinking that we should probably have stayed at one of the smaller campsites nearby. But we shouldn't complain too much: we'd had an extremely pleasant and relaxing day and the weather was set fair for the week...

Kaitoke

After dropping my Dad and Judy off to get the ferry to the south island, Emma and I spent a while shopping in Wellington and then drove out to Kaitoke regional park at the head of the Hutt valley. Kaitoke is one of these places that doesn't seem to be on the tourist trail, but that are still pretty amazing. It's a pretty large chunk (several tens of thousands of hectares I think) of native forest around the Hutt river and some tributaries.


It also has a campsite. That costs $5 a night.


It's also where the exterior shots for Rivendell where shot for the Lord of the Rings films.

The next morning, we walked along the "ridge track" that connects the two entrances of the park, but as our car wasn't going to move itself, we walked about half way along and then turned and came back.

The walk was almost entirely in the forest, so it was a bit hard to take photos that conveyed what it was like, but it was pretty cool.


Then we had a quick swim in the Hutt river and drove back along the spectacular and spectacularly twisty Akatawara road and the good old SH1.

Whakapapa to Waihohonu Hut and back again

After we'd visited Whakapapa when my Dad and Judy were here (photos might appear on this blog at some point), we decided we hadn't visited Tongariro national park nearly enough and that we should come back soon. The last part of the Tongariro Northern Circuit (done in the usual direction) looked about right: spectacular scenery, a long enough day to feel you'd accomplished something — and good practice for the Abel Tasman Coastal Track that we're doing at Easter — but not too arduous.

So we picked a weekend, made some bookings and watched the weather forecast nervously. The week leading up had terrible weather — Palmy got an average February's worth of rain in one day — but the forecast was for the weekend to be good, and so it turned out to be.

We drove up on the Friday night, and stayed in one of Whakapapa Holiday Park's cabins, which was nice enough but we couldn't help thinking that it would have been terribly cold in winter (and Whakapapa is a ski resort!).


We didn't get going quite as quickly as we'd have liked, but by 9:15 or so we were well underway, and taking our first picture of the many we took of Ngauruhoe.


It was clear enough that Taranaki was easily visible to the west.

As we were standing above the Taranaki Falls, we saw smoke from fires at the top of the Whakapapa ski area.


We later read that this was arson. Hard to imagine why people do these things.

As we walked on, the clouds were formed into quite spectacular formations, almost perfectly centered on Ruapehu.


Emma got quite excited by some of the ripples in the clouds.


Something to do with the interaction between two air masses, I think.

We walked on towards the Tama saddle, with Ngauruhoe still dominating the view.


We took the ten minute side trip from the main track to visit the lower of the Tama Lakes.


It's pretty, and a remarkable colour, but it didn't convince us to take the extra hour it would have taken to get to and from the upper lake. The walk to and from the Tama lakes is a popular day tramp from Whakapapa village, and we'd seen quite a lot of people on the path, some utterly inappropriately equipped for where they were. Trainers, shorts, a t-shirt and a bottle of water isn't really enough for three hours walk into a decidedly alpine environment, even in summer. It was almost enough to wish for a chastening flurry of sleet, but the weather was determinedly fine. After we left the lake, heading into the more remote side of the mountain, we saw noone until we got to the hut

The top of the saddle much more featured topographically than we'd expected; the route description implied that the walk went gently up to the saddle, then gently down to the hut, but this missed out on some up and down near the top, some of which was pretty severely eroded.


After half an hour or so of this sort of stuff, we finally got a view to the east, towards the Rangipo desert.


See that little patch of forest on the near horizon? That's where we're going.

Along the way we found some charcoal in the deposits.....


Looks like a tree or tree stump was burmed during an eruption some time ago, and the new cut of the path had exposed it.

As we got close to our destination, we passed the old Waihohonu hut, built in 1904 and one of the first mountain huts in New Zealand.


There were pictures outside of horses and coaches, and it was hard to imagine how they got there given what the approach looked like today.


Crossing the Waihohonu stream meant that we were all but at the new hut.


There's a side to Kiwi tramping that's really quite civilised. Walks generally allot 4-5 hours walking to a day, which with stops for lunch and photos might expand to 6 or so, but this still means that if you get a nicely early start, you get to your destination by mid-afternoon. And then you're staying in a hut, so you don't have to faff around with tents and such, giving plenty of time to relax and sit next to the river and look at the mountains.


Unfortunately, it clouded over too much for the sunset to be as impressive as we were told the one the night before had been.

There's not much to do in a hut after it gets dark and you want to get away early the next morning in any case so by nine fifteen or so we were tucked up in bed.

I'm not going to post so many photos from the second day, partly because we were covering the same ground as the day before and partly because the weather was like this for much of the day:


I am going to include a photo of a bed of pumice that we saw:


It's a little strange, it looks a bit like several hundred square feet of rabbit droppings.

We didn't take any side trips on the way back and walked a bit faster than the day before, but we were still happy to see Whakapapa village come into view.


The weather brightened up considerably for the last bit of the walk.


We were back in Whakapapa by three thirty or so, which meant we had time for a coffee before setting off back home, a little tired but happy with our weekends exertions.