After Takaka came the famous Abel Tasman park. Our first family backcountry trip was made markedly easier not having to carry a tent and being guaranteed to dry out.
Thankfully we had amazing weather. Sunny and 20 perfect for hiking. I carried the food, Ty carried the cookware and everyone else carried their own gear, even Mikaya. Zeke and Levi had the water and our hiking snacks.
Zeke bringing the trail to the street and/or counting to 6.
Whariwarangi hut is a converted farmhouse that was built in the 1890s. Still solid!
We arrived with energy to spare. There was basically no complaining about hills or packs from anyone. We dropped our packs to claim a full room for ourselves and ran right to the beach!
After dinner we walked back for sunset.
Double rainbow!
The layout of the hut was lovely and we filled our room nicely.
The weather was great so we cooked and ate outside at the picnic tables.
From Levi’s journal: [We went on a long hike with 25 lb backpacks with a 197m elevation game then we got to the hut and saw wekas there these little birds that can’t fly and have brown and black feathers
] picture included for Levi’s accurate drawing. I may do that more in the future! Here’s a photo for comparison. I think Levi nails the important bits and narrates the colour. Also he is correct walking on barnacles hurt remarkably less with shoes.
From Mikaya’s journal: [I had a backpack and it’s rilly hevy on my sholders and my mom gave us a tick tack. The wekas wood alwas cum out for food and we wood feed them seeds and flowrs and sticks and lefs]
Day 2 we had a tasty breakfast (while defending our oatmeal from wekas) and then set off for separation point to see a seal colony. The hike had some steep pitches which the kids breezed through but gave Kylie a pause. Seeing her kids down on the rock pointing at seals gave her fortitude and she did great after a few deep breaths.
After a big hike it was back to the beeeeeach.
The kids wisely engaged in a timed somersault race which I’m sure was great for their brains and didn’t result in sand in every orifice…
After another night’s good sleep and some worm wrestling we packed up and made short work of the hike out.
We drove straight to Blenheim and ordered a large amount of fried food from a local dairy (dairies here serve fried food but not dairy, I bought long expired margarine and ramen) and polished it off in minutes.
Thanks Abel Tasman and Whariwarangi Hut for making backcountry camping such a pleasure.
There were a few cars in the parking lot but no one swimming. At first we thought everyone was at a different swimming hole, but after sampling most of the spots along the river I think the locals just weren’t in the water when it was 15 degrees outside.
Mikaya’s journal: [We made 3 sand casls and we had 3 mots and 5 wols and one had a fase. One was a casl with a dekrtif shell and one was a grav for the ofr casl. and the one with the fase was named fred]
The next day we drove up the coast to Patons Rock, a steeper beach with more swimming access. Swimming was definitely easier but still the biggest attraction was hopping rocks looking at tide pools and chasing hermit crabs and other marine life. Apparently there are penguins here and the kids were hunting but we didn’t see any.
On our last night we went out for dinner at the Roots bar. Very relaxed vibe and great food and lots of reading material while we waited.
Our local horse was quite friendly by this point, also still very coy when we didn’t have apples obviously in hand. Like oh I’m just gonna chew this lovely grass 10 feet away and look up in surprise and toss my hair and run in a circle. Ok fine you can scratch my neck. But next time bring apples…
Goodbye Takaka! On to Abel Tasman and our first family backcountry adventure.