May 08, 2006
Taas man...
Its been a while since I wrote my blog, mostly because of some mysterious problems with the servers in Finland. Besides that, we're in a very remote place right now, so no Internet for a while.. :(
We're at the very North of the South Island (Takaka and Motueka) right now. We kind of hoped that the weather would be milder in the North, but the autumn seems to be chasing us.
It still gets quite warm during the day, but the sun sets around 5:30pm and the nature starts looking more and more autumnish... Even looking back at the pictures that we took at the beginning of our trip, I can see the difference.
I'm afraid these are our last summery outings in Tshirts this trip.. We're at the very Northern tip of the Southern Island (big deal, as Kaj says, its not even a continent! Not even the Northern most tip of the country, its just the Northern most tip of some island...:)
But there's beautiful sand dunes and even a spit (a sand strip in the sea, like Neringa, although its a far cry to Nida...), so its an interesting place to visit.
We didn't go swimming there, mostly because its not warm enough (water is ok, I even went for a dip in the sea today!! It was about as warm as Baltic sea gets at the end of June!), but the waves in some of those beaches were so unbelievable huge and messed up, that swimming there wouldn't have been a wise thing to do...
And then we took a 6.5h day walk in the Abel Tasman national park.
A water taxi dropped us off on the beach half way through the trail (normally it takes 3-4 days to walk the whole trail) and then we walked back (the tourist services here are quite amazing!!!)
The trail winds through the forest and sometimes goes down to the sandy bays with beautiful azure green water. This place must be amazing in summer!!! We saw a wild goat in the forest...
... and we met the Spanish surfer guys in the depth of the forest again!!! Its been the 3rd time we encounter them in different places in our trip, without planning or even discussing too much about our plans.. Thats really fun and amazing, but on the other hand quite terrible. It basically shows in a very obvious way that most of the people (us included) travel on some very well laid out paths, checking out the same places (also described in the guidebooks). We had couple of other people that we used to stalk on our way (they must have felt the same.. :). I'm weary even to think how it must be in the high season in the midst of summer. The roads are quite full (relatively, of course :) of camper vans and at times the hostels are really crowded.. It must be a nightmare in summer!
Funny signs on the way to the Farewell spit from Takaka. :) This area seems to be full of hippies, people in dreadlocks, people that appear to be "very chilled" and they're not all tourists, I'd say, mostly local... Kaj was in his element.. :)
And the Arthurs pass, on the way from the West coast to the East, nice scenery, but not much to tell about it, just didn't have a chance to throw it in anywhere else.. :)