National Parks By Land, By Sea

After a couple of gentle days exploring Wellington’s excellent Te Papa museum and the Marlborough wine region, it was time to hit some more areas of amazing natural beauty.

First was a day hiking part of the Queen Charlotte Track. We started at Ship Cove, a picturesque spot which Captain Cook visited five times over the course of his three voyages to NZ. The area has never been farmed or forested so remains almost unchanged in appearance since Cook’s visit.

After five hours of walking through bush with fantastic views of the Queen Charlotte Sound (see photo), our return to Picton was via water taxi. This proved to be almost better than the walk as each of its three stops took us into another lush green bay lit up by sunshine sparkling off the clear water, and we even saw a pod of dusky dolphins playing in the sunshine! (Full photo album.)

Despite our long walk, the following morning we were due to be in Abel Tasman National Park so that evening we drove to Motueka. Abel Tasman is another coastal beauty spot, but unlike the QCT it has soft rock which leads to long golden sandy beaches and interesting rock formations around the headland.

Again we were taken out to one of the best bits of the park by watertaxi, but then our morning was spent sea kayaking–a good way to fully appreciate the coast line! We actually started the morning by kayaking off shore to a small island fur seal colony. This was unfortunately pretty dull, and the paddle back felt like a bit of a hard slog (especially when my paddling partner needed to rest every couple of strokes!) and I was glad when we pulled up onto a beach for lunch.

After lunch we set off for another walk through the bush. Unfortunately there were not quite enough viewpoints though and so we only caught fleeting glimpses of the sandy coves and turquoise lagoons below–we thought afterwards that perhaps a full day of kayaking would have been a better plan as in a way the QCT had been a more interesting walk, and also had fewer people and more birds, including some flightless Wekas which are unique to NZ!