Kahurangi & Abel Tasman National Parks

Our next stop was Greymouth. We stayed at a backpackers owned by an Israeli couple - The Duke. This place has a bar on it's 1st floor. On the night we stayed there 4 local 40 years old ladies were celebrating a birthday of one of them by drinking, drinking heavily. They drunk so much they couldn't sit straight on their chairs. We can't imagine seeing this sight in Israel...
From Greymouth our plan was to go to Nelson lakes national park. On the way there we stopped in a town called Murchison to ask about the weather and we found out one of the huts on the trek was closed. The lady at the I-Site (New Zealand's tourist information network) recommended us about another trek on other national park nearby - Mt Arthur and Gordons Pyramids.
We spent the night at one of Murchison's holiday parks, and the next morning started the trek. It was the last day of 2009, we carried with us wine and cake in order to celebrate new year's eve at the first hut. This trek is probably not popular among foreign tourists, the only people we met in the huts were Kiwis (locals). We had quite nice weather on the second day, except few winds from time to time. From the minute we left the hut the track was exposed all the way and we enjoyed walking on a beautiful ridges, having nice views of the mountains and the sea. Pleasant way to start a new year.




























Here is 0.5% of Sarit, the rest is covered because of the wind.




















































































The view from the 2nd hut:














We shared the 2nd hut with 3 local families, you can imagine the noise we had at night with all the screaming children.
We woke up the 3rd day and saw heavy rain. We waited few hours in the hut for the rain to stop. The rain finally stopped around the afternoon and we started the walk back to the car park.

We drove to Motueka, spent the night there and continued the next morning to Tekaka.
From there we went to a day trip in Abel Tasman national park. We couldn't get hut tickets, or even campsite tickets to the trek because it was over booked. That left us only with day trips. We chose to walk the northern part of the track because it's less crowded. The beaches were nice but the water was too cold to swim.







































































After Abel Tasman we explored some more places on the area called "Golden Bay". We went to Wharariki beach. It was so windy we couldn't open our eyes there.
We continued to the clear water of Pupu Springs.














On our way to Nelson (the city, not the park) we stopped to buy a famous local salami. It sold via automatic machines, just like Coca Cola or snacks. The salami was tasty but the real experience was to buy it using the machine.