Abel Tasman

This is an idyllic place but the journey here was taxing to say the least. I met up with Tom and Barbara at Nelson Airport. They'd come in from San Francisco via Auckland - for once it wasn't me who was jetlagged. I had been under the impression that it was a quick ride in the car to the boat that would take us to Awaroa. Wrong. It was a two hour car ride, stopping on the way to have coffee with Scilla, a friend of Tom and Barbara's. They were holding up remarkably well. Then is was on the road again, to Takaka, the nearest town where we could buy food. It was then that I learned that we had to stock up because there was no place at Awaroa to buy food. I kept on saying this didn't matter because we had the car and could easily go back to Takaka to buy food and they kept on saying, you wait and see.

From Takaka, the car laden with food, we took a scenic road that clings to the hillside above the sea. It was windy and a bit slow but not difficult. I still couldn't see why it was so hard to return to Takaka to buy food. And then I found out, when the metalled road gave way to a very narrow, gravel track that often slunk its way betweeen high banks sprouting tree ferns. The track got narrower and narrower. Cars would come barrelling in the opposite direction, trailing clouds of dust, leaving inches to pass. Just as I thought, okay, I've got the hang of this, it's not too bad really, we came to the first river. So what you might ask, take the bridge, except there was no bridge - we had to plunge into the water in our Toyota Corolla clearly no made for this kind of thing. We survived and then Tom casually said, that's the first one done. about a kilometre on we came to the next, wider and deeper. I swear the water came to the top of the bonnet and leaked through the door seals. But once again we made it, though with some ominous clanking from beneath the car.

Eventually we came to the Awaroa car park, where I discovered a section of the exhaust pipe seemed to dangling dangerously low beneath the engine. Hving unloaded the car - food, backpacks, suitcase etc - we waited for the boat to take us, finally, to the bach.

This place is exceptionally remote. It is also beautiful. Their house stands above an inlet from the bay, where water ebbs and flows with the twice daily tide. Hill rise behind the houses - there are a group of other baches on the inlet - clad in green vegetation, mostly canukas and tree ferns. From the windows there is a view of the sea, a deep blue, stirred occasionally into white caps by the wind which often blows up from the south (a cold wind, coming up from the Anarctic).

Life here is slow, dominated by the tides and the daylight. During the day the sound of cicadas and crickets is constant. The cicadas click, like crackling electricity, while the crickets saws their legs creating a rhythmic hum. We take long walks, go out in the boat and just look at the sea. It is hard to believe there is another life.