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10 March
After a very early ferry ride and a long busride we arrived at 7.30 pm at Abel Tasman. The ferry ride from Wellington to Picton was very beautiful. The last hour we were driving on a perfectly flat lake between beautiful islands. At that moment I really wanted to do some wakeboarding and couldn't understand why nobody was wakeboarding over there. I haven't seen anyone wakeboarding yet and in Australia the people don't even know that the world champion in wakeboarding, Harley Clifford, is an Australian. Fortunately, when I come back in the Netherlands the wakeboarding season has just started. Abel Tasman is a beautiful national park and the trekking over there is one of the nine famous great tracks in New Zealand.
11 March
Had a long night of sleep after the intensive traveling of the day before. After waking up I decided to do a part of the great track. Since I wanted to see as much as possible in the limited time that I had, I ran the track instead of walking it. I ran around 24 km and it was amazing. I think Abel Tasman is the most beautiful place I have seen until now. The perfect beaches were everywhere..
12 March
Today we drove along a seal colony and went out there to take some pictures. The next stop was the pancake rocks which was at the coast. We spent the evening in Blackball, a very tiny mine village, with a population of 350 people only. We played some football in the evening. That felt very good after not playing football for a while. Luckily enough, my tackle still does his job pretty well.
13 March
In the morning we got a tour about Blackball and its mines. In the evening we arrived at our next hostel in Franz Josef. In Franz Josef a glacier is found, what makes this village unique. 2 days ago we were still at perfect beaches and now we were up in the mountains, near a glacier. I ran to the bottom of the glacier together with Laura and Allesandro, this was around 11 km. The location was very grey and totally different from the landscapes we had seen so far.
14 March
After running to the bottom of the glacier and back to the hostel, it was now time to really go up on the glacier. With a helicopter we flew to the glacier and walked around there for 3 hours on boots with spikes. It was an experience, but I was not really impressed, I would have liked some more action, we had to wait almost one third of the time we spent on the glacier. After the helicopter flight back to normal ground we went to the hot pools, which were very relaxing. I was quite proud that until the start of New Zealand I had only lost my flightbag and my adapter for my razor (I have a beard now). But, unfortunately, I left my jacket in the bar of the hostel in the evening and apparently someone took it with him, because my jacket had disappeared the next morning.. This sucks, because I really liked that jacket and it was the only warm piece of clothing that I took with me.
15 March
Without my jacket we left to Wanaka. We stopped at a waterfall and at 2 beautiful lakes on the way. At 5 pm we arrived at Lake Wanaka. We played football at a big grassfield near the lake and the sunset was beautiful!! After drinking one beer at a bar I went back to the hostel and there was a Christian with a BBQ and he was surrounded with people. He had sausages on his BBQ and thus I asked whether he was selling those. He told me that he gave them away, you don't see that very often. So everybody got free sausages and he was telling about God. Most of the people got away straight ahead, but I talked with the man for a while. I will never get convinced of his ideas, but it was very gentle of him giving away free sausages on a friday night. The world is not so bad.
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