Summer

One season was still left out: summer! As soon as we arrived at the North of the South Island, at a town called Nelson, summer had arrived. There we arranged our 4 day track to the popular Abel Tasman National Park. It’s an area where the first European set foot on land, and yes he is Dutch. Go figure. So the theme of that hike was ‘Goh, die Abeltje toch’ [sorry, only sounds nice in Dutch…].

Anyway, we planned to do one day of kayaking on the sea and then 3 days hiking. Everything was very well arranged and to get away from the tourists we decided to go camping which was absolutely fantastic; nice camping spots along the sea.

The kayaking and hiking was easy compared to everything we did before, but we thought we sort of deserved an easy walk. And because of the nice weather, the sea was very appealing! We saw a cool seal colony and we spied on them for hours! And on our way back with the water taxi we saw dolphins; we had never seen them in a natural habitat before, so that was truly amazing to watch.

After this hike, we went for a nice dinner in a great pub where loads of people recommended us to go to. And since they brew their own beer (mjummie!) we asked whether we could park the Van at their car park for the night so I could have some beers as well. And of course they said yes (you got to love the Kiwi’s!) so we had a fun evening playing games and drinking excellent beer. That night we decided to go crazy so we went hang gliding a few days later…

It was cool to see everything in the air and just enjoying cruising down. The last days Eefje and I spend walking along the dunes and beach near Farewell Spit where we both had the fantastic feeling of being the happiest person in the world. And we were: running through the sea, splashing each other, getting wet, laughing and just being very happy to have spend a month with each other in a lovely country like New Zealand. So saying good bye to Eefje was sad, but then again we felt amazingly happy with the previous month: thanks to Patrick who lend us his Van we truly had the most amazing time we could have had. So once again Patrick: Eefje and I are genuinely thankful for the Van. It would have been completely different without!