After missing a beautiful day being on the bus all day yesterday, rain came in and it absolutely bucketed down last night which made going to the loo outside even more depressing! Also, with me being such a light/non sleeper the sound of the rain on the hut did not help. The good news is my wishes were granted having Fio as a roomy as I think she could sleep through “an earthquake” lol :-), I thought that reference was rather more appropriate here than the usual “bomb going off”, with all the tsunami signs around here. Fingers crossed we have neither a quake or tsunami.

It is raining pretty heavily as we get a bite of breakfast, the forecast is for light rain most of the day, maybe it will improve, we are going to get wet anyway so it’s no big deal really. We walk down to catch our “Aqua Taxi” Blue Ford tractors are everywhere, all of whom are individually named, my grandson, Caleb, would be in his element here so, yes I took lots of pics. Enjoy Tractor lovers!

We board the Aqua Taxi’s whilst on the trailers, and a short distance away “Cleveland” the trusty Ford 7000 drops us off into the water. The Skipper reminds me of kiosk Kev (off I’m a Celebrity get me out of here fame), very dry, very funny, I don’t think he had any awareness of his “charm”.

We travel in the taxi from Marahau to Torrent Bay, where we walk the most beautiful walk along the coast through the rainforest. Oh! Sorry I meant to say we are surrounded by rainforest here in the Abel Tasman National Park, which is just gorgeous. From Torrent Bay we “tramp”, which is the NZ descriptive word for walking/trekking, to Bark Bay. The Park is doing a lot of work removing wildling pines, projects Janszoon, through the Department of Conservation (DOC), to reduce the fire risk and allow the native forest recover. The brown in colour dying trees we see are the remains of unwanted 40ha forest of maritime pine, which if left, would have completely overwhelmed the Bark Bay landscape in 20-30 years. The trees will break down naturally overtime. Removal of these pine will transform the Bark Bay skyline, and allow the return of a diverse native forest, providing habitat for native animals.

Wildling Pines are any of 13 species of conifers introduced to NZ that have “gone rogue” and spread uncontrolled, into native habitats, in Abel Tasman, they have dispersed over more than 8,000 ha of the park until a control programme was started in 2016. The reason they are a fire risk is that they suck all the water out of the ground impacting and killing native trees and making it really dry.

Oopsie, I have gone off on one about the trees, I just found it interesting!

Where was I? Oh, yes tramping to Bark Bay. We have some lunch and the Aqua taxi arrives to take us to Observation beach where we will be having a guided kayak journey back to Marahau.

The rain has is light and it is very warm, well I am very warm, everyone else puts on the coats provided and I was having that dilemma, will I be cold and I was the only one who didn’t and boy am I glad, I was perfectly warm until I got out of the kayak and then I was cold, everyone else was worse because they had to take off their coats too. The sea water was so calm and so warm, I would have loved to get in for a swim, however, to do that, it would have meant tipping Anne (pronounced Anna), from Cologne, in too and she did not want to get wet. Also, I had no idea how I would heave myself back into the kayak, it would not have been a pretty sight for sure.

We kayaked around Adele Island, whose husband, Jules Dumont d’Urville founded it in 1827 named the island after his wife Adele Pepin and it has a colony of seals and is famed for it’s birdlife, halfway, we stop for a nice cup of tea/coffee on a sandbar and then off we go again. This kayak was much better as it had a rudder which the person at the rear of the kayak, that would be me, in our kayak, broadly steers it, I was ok when concentrating, so those who know me well know that I have the attention span of a knat, and so when listening to something interesting or spotting something or talking (imagine me doing that!) we would career off course, and it felt to me like when you are in the car and have a lapse and do that small swerve back on course. I thoroughly enjoyed this afternoon, so relaxing out on the water. When back at the campsite it was a race for a hot shower of which there were only 3!

At this point in my travels I have resolved to try to find places to eat that offer something other than pizza’s and burgers, to be fair I have only had one of each, I think the burger I had last night put me off and it is just the thought of it. Fio and I have a discussion about this and we are of the same mind ie to try to shop and cook for ourselves at the first opportunity.

Obviously, there is a lot of lamb dishes on offer in NZ, which is a complete no for me also, urgh, the smell, I wish I did like it, oh well, everyone else is enjoying them.

We leave this beautiful place in the morning and are traveling towards Lake Brunner.