No kayaking for us....

Abel Tasman National Park

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We arrived in Nelson quite late at night.  Before we left Welly we had asked at the hostal if they knew of any good hostals, and they recommended one called Accents On The Park which worked out pretty expensive.  So we did a little research (basically picking up any leaflets we could see that said Nelson on them), called one of the hostals and booked ourselves in.

When we arrived at this hostal, I was a little unsure... it looked like your average haunted house from the outside, and when we walked in, it looked just as scary from the inside.  The lady owner (a ghostly looking woman) showed us the room we had booked and it was dire.  The shower was actually inside the room!!! Anyway, we made our excuses and left very, very quickly, practically running back to the car, and headed for Accents On The Park, which was looking better value for money by the second....!

Accents was a lovely hostal, and the owners were really nice people.  We arrived late, and fortunately a couple who had booked in hadn't turned up so we stole their room for the night.  We dumped our bags and headed out for some much needed dinner.  Unfortunately we found out pretty quickly that NZ is very different to South America where people start dinner at midnight.  At 10pm it's virtually impossible to find anywhere still serving food!! We eventually found a Thai restaurant and tucked in...

The next day we headed up to Abel Tasman National Park to try a spot of Kayaking.  We were told the night before that most of the trips leave at like 8am from the National Park and it takes an hour to drive up there...  We decided we were way too tired to try and make it so took our time and headed up there late, hoping to catch an afternoon trip.  Unfortunately, and proabably due to my essential Starbucks stopover, we missed it by 15 minutes!  Anyway, not to be outdone, we decided to do a boat trip around the park (which is actually miles and miles of coast) and do a spot of treking.  It was beatuful, but we soon realised how out of shape we had gotten since the Inca Trail...

The experience itself was pretty cool as we had to travel around the park on water taxis which literally drop you off between the various bays and ofcourse these speedboats can only get so close to the shoreline......Yaz and I found ourselves rolling up our jeans and jumping into the freezing cold water each time we boared these boats. 

We got back reasonably late and decided that after all that walking we deserved a couple of drinks and so headed to the pub where they had a live band playing some pretty cool 80's tunes - Out here all music is old music, they're literally a decade behind in everything! We ended up chilling there until quite late, watching the Kiwi's dancing away (again, 10 years behind the times - I swear there were people there doing Michael Jackson moves).