Abel Tasman Pictures

Happy New Year! In honour of 2006, you get two picture updates today AND a post about my recent holiday (if I have enough time). Just so you know, I was really annoyed with my slow internet last week and in a hurry because I was packing, so that is why there was no picture update.

Abel Tasman National Park is at the northernmost part of the south island, and it is gorgeous. I went tramping and kayaking over a couple of days at the end of November, so the weather was starting to warm up but there weren't many tourists yet. The water was just amazing.


The mountains in the background are in the vicinity of Nelson, just to give you some geographical perspective.

Now, of course this bird doesn't have just one leg. It was chilling out on a rock and had just brought its leg up when I snapped the picture. But it is so cool!

Me in my official kayaking gear. I ended up taking off that yellow jacket windbreaker thing because it was pretty warm, really sunny, and I had good layers on underneath. It was a small group; the guide, a guide-in-training, and two other couples. I had a great time and realized that I love sea kayaking just as much as I love regular kayaking.


It was a bit of a complicated process to get from the kayak company to our kayaks. First, we put on all of our gear, and then we all loaded into the boat that was attached to a tractor. The tractor pulled us down the road for a while before reaching the beach. We had to cross a wide expanse of the beach because the tidal difference is HUGE (all of that beach shown above will be covered in water in a few hours), and then our boat taxiied us out to the smaller cove where we picked up our kayaks. The whole process was repeated on the way back in.


Our kayaks! We fit an amazing amount of gear into these kayaks. All of our food, cooking utensils, water, sunblock, shoes, extra clothes, everything! I was in a kayak with the guide-in-training, a girl who was my age. We had a blast.


This is a shot of the beach where we stopped for lunch. We stopped for an hour, maybe a little longer, and during that time, all of this ended up under water. The tides were huge in Abel Tasman. The beach had a lot of big "climbing" rocks over to the left, and in low tide you could walk around the point on the right to the next beach over. There was also a sort of lagoon in the back that was just sand when we arrived and had enough water in it to kayak when we left.

There are several small islands right around the coast, and most of them have lots of seals chilling out in the sun or playing in the water. We kayaked around them and got as close as we could, but A) the Department of Conservation has strict guidelines about how close you can get to the seals and islands and 2) seals are dangerous! After we kayaked around this island, we caught the breeze on the other side and "sailed" back into the initial cove. So much fun!

OK, that's picture update numero uno. I promise another one later today!