The next day was a nice day, we got picked up early to get the Ferry to Picton. The weather forecast for the crossing was 'moderate' winds, but it was very gentle fortunately. It was a lovely 3 hour crossing, you can see the south island as soon as you pull out of the terminal practically. Lots of mountains - lovely. The way into the south island terminal at Picton is through the Marlborough sounds which are beautiful. It was a beautiful day and the sea and sky were both so blue, with the green of all the fern trees on the banks, very nice.
I booked to stay in a hostel in Picton for 2 nights, and so did another couple who I'd been travelling with on and off since Auckland, Anna and Adam from Brighton. Our hostel was quite nice and did free chocolate pudding and ice cream every night - bonus! The afternoon I got there, I signed up for a wine tour as there are lots of vineyards around that region - they do a very nice Sauvignon blanc. It was just me and a girl called Stephanie on the tour. We went to 3 vineyards and tried lots of wines - yum. We went to Cloudy Bay, Forrest Wines and Hunters. I think the middle one was my favourite. Ooh, and we stopped off at a chocolate boutique on the way back and got a few free samples there as well!
The next day (22.06.10) I went for a walk along the queen charlotte track. This is a walk that runs along the Marlborough Sound, it takes about 3-4 days to walk it all, so I just did the end section. It was a lovely day, I got a water taxi for an hour to the start of the track. On the way we saw a couple of pods of dolphins and they followed us for a bit, jumping and swimming in the wake of the boat.
The boat landed at a place called Ship's Cove, this is where Cap'n Cook landed. Its a beautiful spot, it had a little memorial to him and a maori carving, it was lovely. The first 40 minutes of the walk was quite hard going up a hill, but it was worth it for the views out of the sound at the top. The walk itself was mostly through bush, with you being able to get the odd glimpse of the sounds through the trees, which was a bit frustrating at times when I wanted to take some pictures, but it was really nice. The walk took me about 4 hours and was very pleasant. I got there just in time to get the water taxi back. On the boatride back, we saw some more dolphins coming to say hello.
The next day, we got on the bus around midday to go up to Nelson. I was a little disappointed with Nelson as I'd heard it was the cultural or artistic capital of New Zealand... I didn't really see all that much there for it to own its title unfortunately. I stayed there for 3 nights and the hostel I was in baked us cake every evening so that was good!
The town was ok I guess, a fair few shops to poke about in and there was a walk you could go on to get to the 'centre of New Zealand' (apparantly if you stick a pin in a map where Nelson is, the county will spin evenly - but Ive since read that the actual centre of NZ is about 50k's away from Nelson so a pretty poor claim to fame if you ask me). There was a nice view from the top though across the water and over to the Abel Tasman national park. I was planning on doing a walk there one of the days, but it would have cost me $80 just to get to the park and to do the water taxi to get there, and after having to pay $70 odd to do the queen charlotte track, I decided against it. Seems pretty expensive just to go for a walk :( So I had a few quiet days in Nelson, catching up on my blog and going to watch the A-Team at the cinema.
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