Abel Tasman National Park

1/24/2007 - 1/28/2007

Today we had another early start as we had to get to the place from which we were renting sea kayaks for our 5 day expedition kayaking throughout Abel Tasman National Park. We ended up getting 1 single and 4 double kayaks. These sea kayaks are much less maneuverable than the river kayaks we had been using on the Rangitikei, but the sea kayaks are extremely stable and can be used to store all of our gear. These two pics are of us getting the kayaks set up and of the boat drop site, respectively.

The first day of kayaking was by far the most arduous. The wind was against us for pretty much the entire time. After the first couple hours of paddling, we stopped for lunch at a beach that had some stunning views. Here are some pictures from that beach.

After lunch we had another couple hours of hard paddling since we had to go through a segment called the "Mad Mile," called this because it has a tendency to get pretty rough there since it is not really blocked by any land masses. I would definitely say that the Mad Mile lived up to its name by being pretty "mad," but I also thought it was a ton of fun. I would much rather paddle through rough water and big waves than just cruise over flat water. Since all the sea kayaking I had done before this was in pretty flat water, I really wasn't that excited about doing it for 5 days on this expedition. However, today's paddling through rough water turned out to be great fun thus getting rid of that lack of excitement.

Basically how the expedition worked was that we would kayak to different parts of Abel Tasman National Park where we would camp at night. There were plenty of walking paths between the various campsites and places of interest in the national park, which I really enjoyed.

For the first night we set up camp at Te Pukathea Bay. After setting up the tents, we took a walk to a lookout point with some more wonderful views shown below.

The campsite was pretty nice, but there was a constant din produced by tons of cicadas. They were all over the place. Here's a nice picture of one.

On day 2 we packed up our gear and then kayaked to our next campsite at Bark Bay. It only took about an hour and a half to get there, so after we set up camp there we went out for some more paddling to check out a little island that had a bunch of seals on it as well as go to Onetehuti Beach to do some walking. Here are the pictures of the seal colony area. The second picture is of Philip.

Onetehuti Beach, shown in the next picture, was where we landed our boats so that we could hike to Awaroa Beach. It was a nice one hour hike, and at the end we found a cafe/lodge, which was like an oasis in a desert. All of us were pretty hungry and thirsty, but none of us really had any money. We kinda stood there salivating for a while before we turned around and went back to the Onetehuti Beach. Then we went back to Bark Bay for the night.

On day 3 I chose not to do any sea kayaking since we were staying at the same campsite at Bark Bay for the night. Instead, I set out with Adam, Philip, Jen, and Andy on a hike to that cafe we were at yesterday. The goal was kind of to get there, have a beer, and then come back. We actually did just that. I'm not much of a beer drinker, but I like being able to say that I hiked for 5 hours round trip to get a beer in a lodge at Abel Tasman National Park. Another nice thing was that we were basically walking away from rain the entire time, and we found out later that the rest of the group was stuck in their tents the entire day due to the rain. Unfortunate for them, but I had a fun day. Here are a couple pics I took on the walk.

Also, that evening there was wonderful sunset that had an incredible rainbow. Check out the picture below.

Now, that picture is cool. However, this next one looks a lot better. Granted, it doesn't exactly represent what the sunset truly looked like, but it definitely has an interesting effect. (No, I didn't use Photoshop. I just tinkered around with the focal point of the picture and got this shot. Pretty good, eh?)

On day 4 we kayaked to Anchorage Bay for the night. Group PC1 happened to be there today, so we were able to hang out with them a bit. We all walked to this place called Cleopatra's Pool shown in the picture below. It had a cool rock slide. After some time in the pool I went with a few others to climb up the rock canyon above the pool to check out a waterfall. It took about 20 minutes to get there, and we had to jump between rocks, go against rushing water, and walk on some really slippery areas. It was actually a little dangerous, but it was a lot of fun. The water wasn't very warm, however.

On day 5 we packed up our gear and kayaked for about two hours back to the place we started. There was a nice wind at our backs, which made it pretty easy. It got a little cold and rainy at the end, but we made it. It was a nice trip.