Finding Moments of Perfection in Abel Tasman

Ahh, Abel Tasman. How do I describe our 5 days on the Abel Tasman Great Walk? I feel like I should quote some famous personage who spoke about its beauty, or create a few poetic lines to talk about the golden sands, turquoise waters, green jungles and blue skies. But – I guess that’s not really my style, so: Abel Tasman was A.Mazing. It is the Great Walk that takes you through a coastal national park, in and out of so many different varieties of native New Zealand bush, to beach after beach and up to lookouts over the coastline. It is stunningly beautiful. We had absolutely perfect weather and couldn’t get over the incredibly relaxing feeling of ending each day of hiking with an ocean swim and enough sunshine left for lying on the beach.

Over the course of the first four days of our walk, we visited 21 different beaches (Scott: that’s an average of 5.25 beaches per day). It was the first time in our NZ hiking that we had really nice, frequent, scenic locations to stop for snacks, water, lunch, etc. and we really took advantage of it. We took breaks at the best of the beaches we came across, making sure to still get to the end of our hike each day with enough time for a thorough beach sesh. On our fifth day, we did a bit of backtracking to get back to a beach where we would get a water taxi back to the start of the trail, and made time for a proper beach stop at our favorite beach, which we had discovered the previous day.

We had such an incredible time on this trip, but it was so different from our other Great Walks that we don’t even really consider it to be in the same category. The other Great Walks were in the mountains, they were isolated, the numbers of people we saw were low; on the Abel Tasman Track, we were surprised by the numbers of people on the track and on the water. There are lots of tour companies that allow you to do day trips of part kayaking and part walking, and there are tons of boats (tourism and private) all along the majority of the track. We also had no idea that we would be passing through several towns on our way. So the trip was not the isolated beach walk that we imagined, but the scenery was every bit as beautiful as we’d hoped. Many times each day, I found myself thinking “This is perfect”.

Five days of constantly gorgeous trail and views leads to a lot of photos, so I will warn you that this post may have more photos than our usual posts. I’ve added more commentary about the individual beaches and days in the photo captions.

*For those of you who have been following our birdwatcher series, I’m sure you’ll want to know the full list of birds we saw throughout the trip: California quail, shag, fantail, wood pigeon, oystercatcher, weka, pukeko, silvereye, blackbird, hedge sparrow, and even a little blue penguin from the water taxi. (Scott: and wooden gannets.)