Last Sunday I went to Abel Tasman National Park to do the walk “Abel Tasman Coast Track”, or almost all of it anyway. The entire track is 60 km, but I decided beforehand to “only” do 44,5 km, as it was expensive and complicated to find transport from the end of the track back to the beginning, but from where I now stopped it was easy to take the water taxi back. The first day I walked 23,9 km from where the track started in Marahau to Bark Bay, where I slept the first night. It was a nice little site that had toilettes and a small kitchen shed with bench space to prepare your food and three sinks with water (not drinkable without filtering or boiling), where you could do your dishes and fetch water for cooking, and a tap with filtered water. The second day the plan was to walk all the way to Totaranui, 20,6 km, where I would take the water taxi the morning after, but it was not all problem free. A little while after Bark Bay I had to cross a water inlet that filled at high tide, which was coming in when I got there. The water was up to my chest when I crossed, so I had to strip down to my underwear and put my bag on my head to keep as much as possible dry (lucky I brought extre underwear), and after a total of 13,5 km, when I reached Awaroa, it turned out to be a large tidal crossing that wouldn’t empty until after 5 pm, and it would get dark around 5.30, so then I would have to walk 2 hrs in the dark if I had waited. The problem was that you have to book your campsites in advance, and I had already booked for Totaranui that night, but a ranger came to the Awaroa camp site while I was waiting for the low tide, and he said that they wouldn’t get full at that site anyway, so he could let me sleep there instead, so that is what I did. There they also had a kitchen shed, toilettes and fresh water. In the morning I crossed the tidal crossing and walked the last bit to Totaranui. I got there about an hour before the water taxi would leave, so I had a bit of a break there. There there was more Weka birds, that wasn’t very shy, they ate from my hand. There were also New Zealand Fan Tails, that flew right in front of your nose and showed off, but they weren’t interested in food, even if you dropped it on the ground. All in all the walk was a nice experience, but I felt it was a bit too many steep uphill climbs to be truly enjoyable and the first day the environment was quite boring, as it looked exactly the same for 95% of the time. |