Abel Tasman, day 1.

What a pair of days that was! Yesterday morning, Jane rousted the whole group in her usual sickeningly-cheery morning voice, shepherded us all through making breakfast and a sandwich-shaped pack lunch, and packed us all into the vans. At Marahau wharf, we, our daypacks, and a motley assortment of miniature overnight bags piled onto a steel water taxi and pulled away to Abel Tasman National Park.

Ah, but it's a beautiful place. The water taxi took us up the coast, past several headlands and coves and a few islands. Superficially, it's the same improbably rugged coast as at Punakaiki; only here the abrupt, cliffy islands are made of orangey iron-rich granite, the waves are small and gentle (there's barely any surf), and every cove & inlet features a picturesque beach. Four-meter tides and broad expanses of peachy-tan granite sand, carried out of the mountains on a host of small swift rivers, mean that estuaries and sandy tidal flats are everywhere.

We cruised up the coast, stopping just off of Adele Island to watch a fur seal colony's pups cavort amongst the half-submerged rocks, and finally made a landing on the beach at Tonga Bay. We shouldered our daypacks, took a few photos, and were off on our hike. I ended up dead last before long, as probably I should've expected; but I was never too far behind, unlike on that hike during the Queenstown activity weekend. The company was good, at any rate.

The terrain was lovely, too. Our track led over many small mountainsides and the steep valleys between them, mostly hugging the coast. That meant frequent glimpses of peach sand and sparkling turquoise water, beaches from postcards. The bush was overwhelmingly native, a mix of rimu and southern beech with a varied understory and more tree ferns than you can shake a stick at. Most of the tree ferns were silver fern, an icon almost as New Zealand as the kiwi, and their pale undersides flashed occasionally in the dappled sun. In one steep-sided, moist valley, I found colonies of Tmesipteris -- a crazy fern with no roots of leaves -- growing out of several silver-fern trunks. The people hiking with me wore indulgent grins as I had a brief fangirl moment.

At Bark Bay, the next one south of Tonga Bay, we stopped for lunch -- sandwiches on the sand. Back in the wind and no longer hiking, we felt the chill again, and many threw on all the layers we'd shed. While we sat and ate, the usual gulls landed to regard our lunches with those fierce, beady white eyes; but so did a pair of soberly-feathered paradise shelducks. The female was actually eating out of people's hands! These were wild birds -- I should've needed binoculars to count the bands on a single feather, but no. They'd obviously been human-fed too much. In hopes of teaching them that humans aren't totally trustworthy, I gave the female a bit of bread and a sharp (harmless) little slap with the same hand. She fluttered off a meter with an indignant squawk, but promptly went back to taking handouts. Now I just feel bad.

After lunch, it was back on the track for a few hours, headed for Torrent Bay and the night's accomodation. On reaching the day we had the choice of going the long way around, back into the hills, or crossing the low-tide sand flats by way of a shortcut. I and four others opted for the shortcut. We squished, splashed, and squelched our way across the flats, arriving at Anchorage beach with salt-water-sodden boots and not a little laughter.

There, out on the water of Anchorage's sheltered bay, our hostel lay at anchor. Cat A Rac is the floating hostel of Abel Tasman, a big catamaran cabin cruiser with bunks in each hull and a lot of kitchen space. Her dinghy brought us aboard in several trips, to claim our bunks and lounge on deck til dinner. My feet were freezing by this point -- although the sun was warm, the air was chilly, and I'd soaked my boots crossing the flats -- but I managed to get reasonably comfortable in time to watch and giggle as some of the more macho Arcadians jumped off the roof of the top deck (third story!) into the chilly water.

Dinner was a barbecue on deck, prepared by the hostel's captain on an enormous grill at the aft end of the middle deck. We ate rice salad, sausage and steak; some of us gathered round a propane space heater afterwards, sipping tea and chattering. Thirty minutes after nightfall I went down to get another cup of tea, but backpedaled hastily to let the birthday party climb the stairs. It was Shane's birthday: somehow Jane had smuggled a cake, candles, and a lot of cookies aboard for a little party. We sang to him and snarfed the sweets. More talk afterwards; gradually, the group thinned to nothing, and it was just me on the deck with the stars.

Before I left for New Zealand, one of my professors told me it was possible here to read by starlight and see color by moonlight. With the huge, full moon in the sky, I couldn't tell about the stars: but there was color, just the faintest tinge but definitely there, under the moonlight. I scribbled in my journal -- you can definitely read by moonlight, too -- to prove it, then went back to admiring the stars. It's an unfamiliar sky, and I know precious few of the stars; I'll have to look them up before I stargaze next, so I'm not just admiring blindly.

Bedtime, eventually, led back down into the starboard hull. I snuggled deep into my bunk, only 2 feet or so high but comfortable, and fell fast asleep. It's been a long time since I let the water rock me like that.