Verge of Tasman.

Another day of travel. We got up, checked out of the hostel, and schlepped all two million kilos of our gear downtown to the i-site, where Jane was due to pick us up in a few hours. On the way we swung by a Macpac store having a big sale: I scored a pair of nice hiking pants for a third the going price. I need to rein in my shopping... Eh, they'll be a good investment. Once downtown, we dropped our gear (with relief: my back's still bothering me from that haul) and ourselves outside the i-site to wait.

And wait.

Jane was an hour late, having apparently suffered through an improbable series of delays on the way to Nelson. She did make it, though, with plenty of time (and, amazingly, good humor) left to get us to our backpackers'.

This one was The Barn, a nice-side-of-average rural hostel sandwiched between the edge of little Marahau town and the border of Abel Tasman National Park, 5 minutes' walk from a major trailhead. The whole Arcadia group -- we're assembled now for the Abel Tasman activity weekend -- settled into said lodge and claimed beds. In the two hours before dinner, four of us headed out to the aforementioned trailhead to do a bit of hiking. The group ended up breaking up a bit as we went: Cindy, myself, and another friend named Stevie took the turnoff for a beach.

We found ourselves shortly on a shelf of pale tan sand above a broad expanse of sandy tidal flats. With the sun sinking behind the mountain at our back, the sky was awash in subtle color. The clouds were so multilayered that I couldn't immediately distinguish them from the mountains of Marlborough, away over the sea. The fading light ran silver in the shallow channels that ran the river out over the flats to sea. As Stevie and I walked out on the sand, we crunched innumerable little clamshells underfoot; a quick poke at the sand turned up more live ones, buried to wait out the tide. Under small holes we found minute crabs, the largest a few centimeters across but more commonly 7-8mm point-to-point. It was obviously a live, vibrant estuary, just waiting for the tide.

At a lone hulking chunk of granite sticking up from the sand, we eventually parted ways. Stevie and Cindy headed back to the Barn to help with dinner; I pulled out my watercolors and sat down to paint. An hour and a half later, I'd managed to get some little sliver of the place into my notebook. With cold-numbed hands and a sense of accomplishment I headed back in.

Back at the Barn, Jane and her helpers soon served a big pasta dinner, which was mercifully different from the macaroni-and-tomato-paste monotony of the past week. (Hey, it was cheap.). Afterwards, Steph and Claudia initiated several more people into the way of the Tim-Tam Slam, and a bunch of us played Pictionary (hilariously) until bedtime.