Easter Weekend!

Happy Belated Easter! Our Easter weekend was filled with adventure and breath taking views of the Abel Tasman; it was absolutely wonderful :)

We woke up early Easter morning and attended the 8am service at St. Pauls’s Cathedral, which is located right in the center of downtown Nelson. While the service was in the Anglican tradition, it was much different from what we are use to in the U.S. in terms of an Easter service. In other words, it lacked the momentous awe expected from the Easter celebration found in lengthy hymns, a joyous choir, and a large congregation. However, we still enjoyed the service and in all honesty, felt better about ourselves for attending. After church, we regrouped at our apartment and packed up our gear for the weekend. Due to our car (the adjective that goes in front of car is inappropriate for our adult viewers), Lindsay’s friend Anna graciously offered to take us one-way to the start of the hike. We arrived in Marahua around 1:00 p.m. on Sunday afternoon and began the four-hour hike to Anchorage along the beautiful coastline of the Tasman Sea. We walked at a pretty good pace, considering we stopped every five minutes to take pictures (Emily Brooksher and Katie Arnheim for you, haha). Our original camping site was Torrent Bay, which was about an hour away from Anchorage. However, we stopped in Anchorage to get water and ended up just camping there due to the growing darkness from day light savings and increased expectation of rain. And it was a good thing we stayed there! This was not due to the weather (which we had no problems with), but because Lindsay’s friends Dave and Sarah ended up being docked in Anchorage cove and found us setting up our tent a little ways up from the beach. The original plan had been to sail back with them on Monday to Marahua. However, since there was poor phone service in the Tasman, we had feared that this was not going to happen because we would not be able to get in touch with them. Our fears were lifted after seeing them, and we ended up having dinner on their boat that evening. The next morning we awoke to a beautiful day (literally we could not have asked for better weather). The night before, Dave had offered to put our packs on the boat while we hiked the next three hours to Bark Bay. We naturally agreed, and after doing so, we were off on the middle stage of our adventure: a three hour hike to Bark Bay filled with the best scenery on the Abel Tasman. With cameras out and smiling faces, we had a most enjoyable time during the hike. I have said this to a few of you before, but everywhere in New Zealand looks like the scenery from a movie and most likely has been. We were trying to decide what movie the Abel Tasman could have been used in (maybe Jurassic Park or Mighty Joe Young). I know this information can probably be found online, but if you have seen those movies then you will have a small understanding of what we were seeing. We finally arrived at Bark Bay to find Sarah and Dave waiting for us with their boat. Here was the tricky and almost disastrous part to the so far perfect trip. To get to the sailboat, we had to ride in a little dingy boat, which is probably intended for only two adults at a time. However, with ambitious spirits, we attempted to all four ride in the petrol-fueled boat over the crashing waves hitting the shore. As you can imagine, this did not go so well, and we ended up soaked holding our day- packs over our heads. We then decided to carry the boat to a near by sand bar so it would have a better chance of getting over the waves. Emily and Sarah went ahead and Katie and I waited on the beach. After five minutes and seeing that the dingy had run out of fuel, Katie and I ran to a water taxi who had just dropped some kayakers off in the cove. Katie convinced the driver to take us to Dave’s boat and also to pick up Emily and Sarah on the way. We finally arrived on the boat wet but relieved that our stuff (a.k.a cameras) had not been damaged.
The sailboat trip back was awesome, although getting out of the cove caused us to all to feel a little seasick. We got back to Marahua two hours later, and caught the bus back to Nelson. This was probably one of the best weekends we have had since we have been here. We are starting to get really excited about our up coming travels, which will begin at the beginning of May. Until next time….