North to South and onto Kaiteriteri

Leaving Wellington, we would be heading south and experiencing a new island of New Zealand, and also a new driver on our bus. We won't say the name of our first and last female driver, but lets just say she was known among other Kiwi Drivers as 'Angrea' and her attitude was pretty stinky! Apparently this was her last drive on the Kiwi experience, so maybe she was just sick of us backpackers!

Despite this, she drove us to the ferry port and got us on board. It cost everyone about $50 each to cross over on the ferry. Angrea said even though it would be 10am when we got to the other side, the first stop of the day would be a wine tasting! We got onto the ferry and met Dan, an English guy who joined in on a few of our card games and also brought a very confusing one to the table!

Although the North Island was fun, it hadn't given us that wow factor scenery we were expecting from New Zealand. As we made our way over the water, we could see already that the South Island was going to be beautiful.

Amy Tom and John en joying some sun up top

We got to the otherside to a place called Picton, and it was a beautiful day to be able to see the South island in all it's glory. As promised, we got to the wine tasting location after about an 45 minute drive from Picton.

The Marlborough region is known for producing an amazing Sauvignon Blanc, and Amy who worked with wines was especially excited as it was a place she'd heard of.

We tried the delicious wines as well as sampling some fudge from the tiny shop next door. The wine tasting location was sat on a roadside in the middle of nowehere, so Steph and Amy went over to the vineyards to take in the breath taking 360 degree views around us.

The day was filled with mostly driving, and we wouldn't be reaching our location for the night - Kaiteriteri - until the evening. It was a chilled day, something we needed after the excitement of Wellington. 

As we reached Kaiteriteri, the sun was starting to set leaving the most amazing pink streaks over the sky.

When we finally got to Kaiteriteri lodge, we managed to run across the road to the beach to catch the end of the beautiful sunset. The South Island was already winning us over.

We got into our rooms, and Mark decided to have a break from us for a bit and go with some of the others from the group. Tom and Steph stayed in a six bed room along with Archie, Iqra and Amy, and also a girl who was on the Kiwi Experience but had stayed at Kaiteriteri a few days. We can't remember her name but she was a nurse and she appears in a few pictures later!

Kaiteriteri is a very remote location, so apart from the odd corner shop which was now closed, there wasn't much else to do. It is only a one night stop on the Kiwi Bus, but as we were arriving so late in the evening, our group decided two nights would be better in order to see what Kaiteriteri had to offer, a decision we would not regret. Luckily the lodge put on a pub quiz so we got into teams and had a go.

It was a pretty tough quiz, one round including Barbie dolls dressed as celebrities which you had to guess, which caused some real tensions amongst our strong friendship group.

Archie, Iqra, Amy, John, Annie and Mark did well and got second place.

However they weren't good enough to beat our team! And we were victorious once again winning a $30 bar tap at the bar (the second one we had won in New Zealand, just saying). We all got a beer in each, and spoke to Angrea who begrudgingly sorted out our chosen day trip for the following day; The Abel Tasman National Park.

After our drinks, Amy introduced to us a new game, as the same old rounds of cards were getting tedious. She had no name for this game, but it involved charades, mime and memory. We played this for hours, and it created some of the funniest and memorable moments from our trip, so we just called it 'fun'. Archie trying to mime "penis caught in a conveyer belt", and Mark trying to explain "the forbidden love between a black and white person" will be something we will never forget. That evening we also found out Archie's secret to such a pert behind, and he swore that yoga was the way forward, so we all had a wind down session before bed, some maybe relaxed too much, as the evening was quite flatulent and we still don't know who to blame, but Tom didn't sleep very well as he was laughing too much.

The next morning we woke up early, and cheerfully said goodbye to Angrea as she drove onto the next location. We got our walking gear on and waited at the beach for our water taxi to take us to Abel Tasman.

The beach. was. beautiful, and the sunny weather and crisp air made it a perfect day to do some walking. The location was postcard perfect, and we heard that Shania Twain also owned a large holiday batch nearby so she clearly loved the place as much as we did.

We waited in the sun looking out onto the clear waters and rocky coastline, when we saw our water taxi approaching. We had to take off our shoes to avoid wet feet, and the water was very fresh! Our water taxi driver was a really nice man, and told us some of the best walks to go on at Abel Tasman. The ride was quite a bumpy one, and he also took us past the 'Split Apple Rock' on the way.

He promised on the journey back, he would take us to his secret location where he knew we could spot some seals! We were very excited about this prospect!

He dropped us off on a beautiful isolated beach, and said he would come to pick us up on the other side of the national park in 4 hours time. If we weren't there, he would send a search party!

We started our long walk, and after about 10 minutes down the beach, we found a rope swing which we spent lots of time at! It had a beautiful back drop, and the child in us came out and we spent a while playing there.

After a bit of a nag and reminder that we had a time limit at Abel Tasman, we got off the swing and ascended the climb up a hill to the top of the National Park. From here we got a lovely view of the beach we had just been playing on.

Little Archie!!

The beautiful scenery was getting us all quite excited, but little Archie was excitable at the best of times, was bouncing and skipping all over the place. Ourselves and Mark were walking behind him when he did an especially bouncy skip, and he fell arse over tit, flipped completely over and ended up with his legs stuck up the side of the verge similar to a beetle on its back. We're pretty sure it registered on the Richter scale.

We were dying of laughter and had to take a break from the walk to collect ourselves. Thankfully Archie was ok, however the same couldn't be said for his poor Crunchie that he had brought along. His power food quickly turned into powdered food.

After this slight mishap, we ventured on our 3 hour hike and looked over the beautiful scenery, which went through forests and looked out over the clear blue coast.

Eventually, we got to a beach which we hoped was the decided pick up point with the taxi man. We sat down and enjoyed some snacks, and joined Archie for a spot of refreshing Yoga after our walk.

John, Izzy, Tom, Steph, Mark, Annie, Archie, Amy and our Nurse room mate

We waited patiently and started to worry if we had got to the right beach, when we saw our lovely taxi man coming to get us in the distance. 

We bundled on and he asked us about our walk and what we thought of beautiful Abel Tasman. As promised, he drove slightly out of the way to some large rocks in the ocean. Sure enough, we saw a few families of seals basking in the last bit of afternoon sun, and we all squealed with happiness!

We got back to the Kaiteriteri Lodge and cooked up a storm to keep us all from getting unwell, as poor Iqra had spent the whole day in bed with her cold!

The next morning we waited for our new Kiwi Experience driver to pick us up. We crossed the road to the corner shop to pick us some supplies and we spotted a little zip wire with another lovely back drop (these Kiwi kids are spoiled with there playgrounds) so we had a bit of a play on that before we saw the big green bus show up.

We were greeted by Mangee, the  BEST driver we would have, and he was so happy and clearly loved his job and his country. We bundled on the bus, and headed to our next location on another beautiful day.