Abel Tasman Coast Track - Estuary of shell doom

             I know I stranded you guys in Awaroa. I've sat down at least four times to finish up on this and got distracted every single time. Well, tonight nothing can stop me from finishing the last of my sandy stories. Let me dive into my special memory lane and recount that day after the curry disaster night..

              I could hardly sleep the night before. That made it easy for me to wake up early. There was hardly any daylight but the campsite was buzzing with scrambling campers. The tide just stopped ebbing and was about to turn. Derek and Pat were up and were already prepping for breakfast. The gas fiasco the previous night meant that cooked oats wasn't going to happen for me. I munched on some of Derek's granola stash (delicious stuff that) and dug into my reserves. The sleepless night dampened my morning excitement and the underwhelming experience of Awaroa didn't help. Very recently, the public of NZ, along with a little help from charities and govt. of NZ bought out a private beach in Awaroa. This got me very excited about the place but it was visually not as special, compared to the other beaches in the national park. Without any doubt, the estuary is a very important part of the Abel Tasman National Park and a whole range of species thrive on it. However, it simply didn't cut it for me considering the hype and the effort that went into getting there.

              Soon after, we scurried around to make it within the tidal crossing window and packed up as fast as we could. We were the last party to leave the campsite, but we made it out in time into the brackish mouth of the river. The sticky mud flats made it very hard to walk and I had to go bare footed. What looked like pebbles on the soft sediment, turned out to be exhumed graves of all sorts of shelled creatures of the sea. The crustacean corpses were everywhere and the sight was mind boggling. The pain, the crunch, the amazement, all went hand in hand. Luckily for me, the crossing only took about 20 minutes and I was ready to head on. Within about half an hour, we stumble across this beautiful beach with gorgeous golden sand stretching between shrub-clad hills. This was in stark contrast with the white beaches I've gotten used to in the days before. That day was our last day of the hike and was not an arduous one. And adding the fact that we headed off early in the day, we made ourselves comfortable for the first break of the day. As tempting as the idea of a swim was, we exercised some restraint and instead went for a bit of cricket and sun bathing (not that I needed any more tan :P).

          The notion of time, as perceived by our mind is wonderful. Sometimes, days and months go in a blur. And sometimes, a few moments of silent contemplation linger on forever. In that beach, on that last day of the hike, time defeated me. The sound of the crashing waves was the only constant and it took me back to my hometown. The nostalgia kicked in and the beauty around me overwhelmed me. Like John Masefield's poem, the West wind, the sea was talking to me - "Will ye not come home brother?", it asked. It was surely a song to my soul and fire to my brain. If the bitter endings of the previous day were trying to dampen my mood, all their attempts were permanently washed away in the speckled waves washing my feet and the innumerable little colourful pebbles under them.

                  When we were all saturated with satisfaction and happiness, we continued on to Totaranui.

And boy, Abel Tasman kept giving. A cheeky weka and a suspicious looking Pied Shag got added to the list of birds (that already included robins, fantails, wood pigeons) that we've encountered during the walk. Lunch was at goat bay, where we swam our last swim of the walk. We bumped into Jacob, the Austrian backpacker, for the last time and relished the Sun, sand and the smoked mussels that Derek brought along. The final bit of bush was just as incredible as the rest. Like always, I was growing increasingly poignant as the walk came to an end. I knew I would miss what I had witnessed and experienced. That night we camped at Totaranui. We decided to not go further to mutton cove and beyond as the water taxis wouldn't operate beyond Totaranui. I fell asleep easily and woke up to a beautiful day. Soon after we packed up, we headed to the local i-center to drop a few post cards to our loved ones and got to our water taxi. The 30ish minutes ride back to the starting point was through choppy waters and made me slightly sea sick, but I couldn't have bothered less. Lunch at a pub in Motueka and I and CC were off on our way to catch the ferry to Wellington, to return back to a less colourful regular life.
             Abel Tasman is a place you cannot just visit once. It's like a pilgrimage for nature lovers. Every summer I'd have a beckoning for the rest of my life and a longing for the remainder of the year.  That ends my blog post and my attempt to lure more folks to Aotearoa - a place that I now call home.