We finally booked ourselves on a ferry to the South Island so drove from Taupo to Wellington one incredibly windy day. Thankfully Sean did all the driving but it wasn’t much fun with a loaded van. We spent a few days there and met up with Askea and Rea again. In Wellington we toured around a bit and saw the Botanic Gardens, had a spin on the cable car, saw the new and old St. Paul’s Cathedrals. We also took the mountain bikes out for a spin in Lower Hutt one morning. A free tour is run in the Parliament Buildings so we took that opportunity to see inside the “Beehive” and elsewhere. We learned something interesting on the tour too: when notices of pending legislation are put in the paper anyone, whether a national or just a tourist there for a couple of weeks, can write in and request an oral hearing where they can voice their concerns over the legislation. This cannot be denied, so when the cabinet are considering it the person can attend the entire meeting and has absolute freedom of speech while he/she is sitting in the meeting. Apparently it’s not abused, though I’m sure it might not run as smoothly at home!
And so, on Friday 25th January, 3 ½ months after arriving in New Zealand, we finally boarded the ferry to the South Island.
On arrival, we slowly drove towards Nelson, stopping in Blenheim for breakfast and again in Pelorus Bridge for lunch at the side of the river. We couldn’t resist taking a dip too in the heat of the day. When we arrived in Nelson we went straight to Maree and Ross’ house as instructed! They are both Kiwi’s but Maree sometimes comes over to Ireland and works with Sean’s mum, so Sean met with her this summer in Ireland and she invited us to visit. They were great hosts as we stayed with them for a few days, doing more mountain biking and also going to the Da Vinci exhibibtion running in Nelson at the moment. It was really interesting as it had small models of his drawings together with computer graphics of how some of his machines worked.
We dragged ourselves away from Nelson and drove up to the base of the Abel Tasman National Park, another popular walking track. As we weren’t prepared for camping out overnight, we couldn’t do the 2/3 day walk all the way around the headland, so instead we arranged to get a boat to drop us about seven hours up the track at Bark Bay and we would walk out. The scenery was best from the water, but the walk was nice under the cover of the trees. We stopped for lunch at Stillwater Beach and had a swim before carrying on, the entire walk taking us about 4 ½ hours.
The next day we started heading further south to meet up with some other Irish paddlers. We stopped in Murchison, which is a busy centre for kayakers, but due to the lack of water there at the moment it was nearly deserted! Apparently it’s the best summer they’ve had for about 15 years, which is doing wonders for my tan, but not so good for the kayaking! As it was so quiet, we carried on to Greymouth that evening and met our friends in Hokitika the next day.
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