Abel Tasman

Map showing Wellington, Picton, Nelson, Ricmond and Abel Tasman

Set off on the ferry with Lani, Julie and Josie for south island bound for Abel Tasman. We didn’t go completely prepared, and almost nothing went right but the weekend turned out to be awesome!

The three hour ferry got us to Picton. It was a gorgeous ride with views of the south and north island, but it was pretty cold so we spent most of it sleeping inside. We also couldn’t figure out why, but the majority of the passengers were South African Rugby Fans, which made for a good ride. Plus like most of New Zealand, the entire ferry was consumed by World Cup Decorations, flags and posters everywhere. In Picton, we supposedly booked a bus to Nelson. Somehow, and I still say it was the computer that screwed up, but my ticket was actually booked for the next day. After some begging the driver was nice enough to give me a ride as long as the bus didn’t fill up. We walked around Picton, but eventually got some advice that it was easier to hitchhike from Richmond, so we made it to Richmond for that night. We didn’t realllly have much of a plan for accommodations (we were thinking of a random park with our sleeping bags), which we told a man sitting behind Josie on our bus to Richmond. Out of some miracle, the guy offered us his spare room as long as he got the OK from his wife (no worries he had a 12 year old daughter, owned his own business, and lent out his spare room frequently to travelers). So we made the group decision to take him up on it.

The next morning we set out with a plan to hitch to Abel Tasman. In the end it took us 3 rides to make it to the entrance of the trail. For the first we had to split up, Julie and I got a ride with a dad and his awesome 8 year old son, on their way to the sister’s birthday party. While Josie and Lani got a ride by a Skydiving company heading to the airport. Then we met back up and a pickup truck gave a ride a little bit closer. Too much of our luck, for our last ride an ambulance pulled up! They were off duty, going in our direction and could fit 4 girls and their packs. And then like typical American girls we had to take pictures once we got out.  Overall, I was completely taken back by how trusting and open everybody was. We didn’t stand for more than 15 minutes for any ride, and almost every car that passed us by seemed to read our sign and consider where we were heading.

Thanks to the ambulance, we finally made it to the trail, the reason we came in the first place. Because the trail followed the coast line, there we beautiful views the entire way, until the trail would pop into the woods and looked straight out of Lord of the Rings (which I did FINALLY watch from the urging of friends…if you don’t know the Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed throughout NZ) with options for side trails leading to different beaches.

The tramp (hiking in NZ) went well, until our next debacle that night. We were planning on staying in a hut, which were thinly placed throughout the trail. We planned on making it to Torrent Bay, which we did just in time for the sun to go down. Except there was a camp site at Torrent Bay, not a hut. We were pooped, the sun was setting, the other hut was a 50 minute walk back were we had come from, and there were no clouds in the sky. So we made the executive decision to just spread out our sleeping bags under the stars for the night. It was a fantastic decision until near midnight, when we were woken up by a light drizzle. We thought about our options; hike in the dark, suck it up, and the last resort of chilling in a port-a-potty for shelter. It was only a drizzle so we decided to suck it up, the rain let up and we just went back to sleep….until around 2:30 in the morning with a harder rain. Lani and Josie made a move to the port-a-potty, but Julie and I were just not to that point yet. We tried for about 40 minutes to sleep under the picnic table until us too, succumbed and took refuge in the port-a-potty. There’s a completely new level of friendship you reach when you have to share a tiny disgusting space with 4 people for multiple hours (I’ll save you from further detail), but luckily with no sleep we were all quite slap-happy and in good spirits. If we all don’t get infected with e-coli and nobody catches any port-a-sickness (a term we deemed the next morning, along with port-a-cough, port-a-sinuses, and port-a-cold) then the situation was incredibly funny.

We finished the hike (28 kilometers in the end) apologizing to everybody we passed for our port-a-smell, and was picked up by the water taxi and headed back to Nelson, where we booked a hostel, picked up some shampoo and soap, had an incredibly long hot shower and a nice bed (well a hostel bed) to sleep in.