It was really nice to be moving again, especially because after Waitomo we were pretty much done with the north island. Virtually everyone, locals and tourists alike, seems to agree that the south island is the more picturesque of the two, and the place where we should spend most of our time. We therefore booted it down to Wellington, the southernmost city on the north island, where we got to spend a day hanging out and waiting for the ferry to take us across to Picton. The highlight was Te Papa, the national museum. Brand new and no doubt quite expensive, this was one of the most impressive museums I have ever experienced. The place was enormous – six expansive floors housed a brilliant natural history section featuring a colossal squid specimen (you may have seen a Discovery Channel documentary about this squid – I saw it a while back), an informative floor about Maori and Polynesian culture, bits about the colonization of New Zealand which read just like Canadian history, and even an impressive art gallery. We spent a good chunk of our day here and, despite the inevitable museum fatigue that struck by the end, really got a lot out of it.

The inter-island ferry the next morning was uneventful, just slow and expensive – almost 4 hours and $220 for the two of us and our van. Luckily enough we escaped an extreme storm warning in Wellington though, and Picton greeted us with sunny skies. The region at the top of the south island is Marlborough, big for its vineyards and quiet bays. We decided to spend a couple days up here before heading down the crazily hyped west coast. A five day tramping trail, the Queen Charlotte Track, loops around Marlborough and we figured we’d make a day hike of a ridge section in the middle. The drive to our trailhead was almost as eventful as our trip into Taumaruni.

The trail section that was recommended to us began about 30km north of the major highway, accessible through twisty but well paved mountain roads. I guess the best way to describe the twistyness 30km stretch is to say that about two-thirds of the way through we came across 100m or so of straight road and celebrated. Ashley felt sick the whole way, but luckily for her we had a few stops forced on us. The coolest was coming across a group of wild pigs wandering down the middle of the road, a sow and 5 or 6 piglets. They bolted as we turned the corner, and were actually hilariously bad at running – the piglets each fell a couple times and even the sow struggled to make it off the road into the rainforest. The road was also littered with roadkill, and each piece was attended to by a harrier – NZ’s biggest and most common raptor. They reminded me of eagles with hawks’ heads, and were always a pleasure to see. The tramp itself took us along the top of a steep-ish ridge with great ocean views off to either side. Pretty nice, but nothing like the Great Walk we wandered the next day.

After exploring Marlborough we set off towards Abel Tasman National Park, stopping in the small town of Havelock on the way. New Zealanders pride themselves on their green mussels, and Havelock is NZ’s mussel capital. We stopped at the Mussel Pot, a restaurant recommended to us by a pair of bikers we met while dealing with the buggered van, and ordered a sampler platter of mussels. I think I have boring tastes – I found the butter and garlic mussels far better than the sweet chili, blue cheese, or mushroom and cream ones, but they were all still absolutely delicious. We continued on until we were just outside Tasman Ntl Park, finding a quiet pulloff in the mountains where we made camp.

If you ever travel to New Zealand, put Abel Tasman near the top of the list of parks you must visit. Even though we only walked here for around 6 hours, this place stole my heart. The scenery is breathtaking, the tracks are well maintained without feeling like roads, the diversity of environments in astounding, and there is just such an obvious passion for the place – the Department of Conservation has many projects in the works to make this place even better. The most apparent of these is the “bring back the birdsong” campaign, which is basically attempting to restore birds to Abel Tasman (and to NZ generally).

A bit of background - It all comes back to the uniqueness of NZ’s geological history. Billions of years ago NZ split from the supercontinent Gondwanaland much earlier than the other continents, before many now-dominant groups of animals had even evolved. This left NZ with no reptiles and only two species of mammals, both bats which probably flew over later. There were plenty of birds however, and they evolved to fill the niches occupied by mammals in the rest of the world. Huge grazing beasts are common everywhere for example, typically as buffalo, deer, moose, elephants, etc – some kind of big mammal. In NZ, there were 9 or so species of moa, three meter tall birds that were the prominent grazers (the Maori feasted on them when they became the first humans to reach New Zealand 500 years ago, and within a hundred years or so they were extinct). Anyway, this means that NZ’s birds have been able to evolve without worrying about predators, especially ground-based ones. When Europeans introduced rats, weasels, possums, rabbits, and all those other little mammals to “improve” NZ, the effects on native birds was incredible. In many places birds are as rare as in SE Asia (where they eat all of them), or the only birds that are present are European species (pigeons and sparrows abound). There are now extensive trapping programs in place, and possum fur is considered to be the most environmentally friendly material around (the DOC sells the possums they catch to clothes people, funding part of their work).

Sorry about the aside. Abel Tasman was incredible. Go there.

Oh yeah, we saw this weird mushroom. I’d never seen anything like it, and I don’t think you have either: