Nelson and Abel Tasman

After leaving the sheep farm, Ashley and I headed towards Nelson and enjoyed a wonderful evening of sailing! We went out on a sail boat for $40 each and followed behind the sailing races that were going on that evening. We sat at the very front of the boat with our legs dangling over the edge. It got a bit rough and we both got rather soaked, but loved every minute of it! We brought a few beer on board and with just 4 other girls and the skipper on board, we had an excellent evening.

The next morning (after receiving a fine for where we had parked that night) we headed out on a water taxi for Anchorage, a destination in the middle of the Abel Tasman national park. This park has only been under government control for the past 60 years and those that bought up property before then, are lucky enough to have houses and cabins in a beautiful remote area. We set out on a 4 hour walk with just over 6 hours to do it in. We made a stop about halfway for some lunch and a quick swim and made it to our pick-up destination with an hour and a half to spare! But as we sat there waiting for our water taxi (wondering where it was) we saw a boat, looking very much like our water taxi, fly by. We took out our pamphlet and realised that although our ticket said to meet at Tonga, the actual meeting spot was half an hour past that. We raced up to where we were suppose to be, but besides a few families with their boats, nobody was there.

I got a little excited at the thought of being stranded and proceeded to attempt to build a fort. However the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly, so we decided to walk down the beach and ask the boaters for a ride. In the friendly kiwi tradition, they were nice enough to drive us to the beach they were heading for. The ride was actually quite fun, as it was kind of rough and we were bumping all over the place. After being dropped at this beach we realised that it was going to be a 4 hour walk back to our car, so we called up the water taxi company and had them pay for a boat to get us back. Finally, we reached our car and headed back to the next down to load up on groceries.

Unfortunately Ashley then realised that her purse was missing from the vehicle, so we headed for the police station to make a report. Ironically, we had earlier thought that our day could not get any worse, however for Ashley it did! The only thing of real value was her passport, but all her makeup, journal and contact info was in there as well. We went through the process of filling out the report, and then decided to stay in that town till we could call the passport office the next morning. We drove out to a nearby river to camp for the night. As we were setting up our micro-camper for bed I noticed that Ashley's bag was indeed in the car, but had been hidden under our mattresses! We both ecstatically jumped around, and decided it would probably be a bit too embarrassing to go back to the police station to tell the officer. Unfortunately for Ashley though, this story is one I will never let her live down, buahahah!!