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Monday we just chilled out, went into town and had a look round the big department store called TheWarehouse where I purchased some uber cool tracky bottoms for lounging around in for a bargain of $13 which is about £6 - result! On Tuesday we drove across to Nelson which is a bigger town and we had a look round trying desperately to find an FM transmitter so we could play our ipods through the radio as the mountains interfere with the radio meaning we don't always have music and we have to entertain ourselves!
We drove out the other side of Nelson to Marahau where we pitched our tent in a campsite opposite the beach. We had slightly over estimated the facilities as we hadn't taken any pots and pans with us, just enough food for our stay. Thankfully Fliss had lent us a picnic set so we just made nachos in the microwave and ate them on a picnic bench whilst being eaten alive by sandflies!
The following morning we were up and queuing for our AquaTaxi ride at 9am! These really old school Ford tracors pulled the boat trailers out into the sea and our taxi driver drove the boat out to a cool view point of 'split apple rock' which is apparently pretty famous! We then continued up the coast and hopped off at Bark's Bay which is a beach on the famous Abel Tasman trek. A route named after the Dutch guy who discovered New Zealand about 200 years ago and as it is so accessable and beautiful it is very popular. There is a 5 day trek that you can do and we decided to just do part, we didn't quite anticipate just how far we had to walk back to the camp from where we were dropped off!
The views the entire way were so pretty, the sea is such a beautiful blue colour and really nice beaches which you could just divert from the track and walk down to. We followed a sign to 'Cleapatra's Pool' because it sounded like fun and it turned out to be a large pool in the river with a waterfall feeding into it, we both went for a paddle and got in a lot deeper than we'd planned but it was really cool.
We kept plodding along, trying to keep up a good pace to avoid a very loud annoying american girl who was walking behind us and insisted on talking so loud that everyone within a miles radius could hear what she had to say! 6 hours later we eventually finished the trek but were devastated to realise we still had about another kilometre to walk back to the campsite, when we got to our tent we both just collapsed on the floor and didn't move for a long while!
We forced ourselves to get up and go for a shower, grab some food then crashed out, I believe I was in my sleeping bag by 8.30pm - that's just how I roll!
On Thursday we drove back into Nelson as we had been told that the geograhical centre of New Zealand was somewhere there! We managed to find it but hadn't been told you had to basically climb up a vertical hill to it! Up we went, it only took about 20 mins but our legs ached so much from yesterday! It was worth doing but not overly exciting! We drove back to Mark and Fliss's house for showers, tea and home comforts!
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