in the merry old land of aus: kaiteriteri, marahau & abel tasman national park

Now we are taking a catamaran from Nelson to spend a day on the beach in Kaiteriteri before heading to Marahau. We arrive via our sea shuttle and immediately love this beach. The sands are golden and the water is so blue! We were quick to join in on the fun; there are people kayaking, water skiing, and eating ice cream along the beach and main street. After our couple hours of getting our first tan lines!@!! :), we hop on the bus and head to Marahau.

The sand on the beach is finer and whiter here in Marahau, even though we are only about 7 kilometres away from Kaiteriteri. Also, there is the lowest tide that I have seen with my own eyes. You can see it too with the high tide and low tide pictures I have posted below. Along this beach I saw two more tiny, clear jellyfish and a clear and pink crab. We are staying at the Beach Camp Backpackers and it is a pretty reasonable place; it isn’t far at all from the beach and we were able to book a kayaking trip into Abel Tasman National Park for tomorrow. The Gourmet Platter is our kayaking trip from the beach in Marahau to Watering Cove. On this two hour trip, we go around Adelle Island, where there are two colonies of seals and a lot of bell birds (which sound like bells and wind chimes all at once). From here, we stop at Watering Cove and eat lunch, it is a bread roll (sub) and muffins and oranges and was very good despite it not being on a platter. Our water taxi, which is a lot smaller than the ‘cattie’, picked us up and brought us to Bark Bay for our hike down to Torrent Bay. This was a very scenic walk that Heather, Alison, and I did on our own through the rainforest, beaches, and small mountainsides. I would highly recommend this walk to anyone who travels to New Zealand and Abel Tasman National Park!