The last few days on the South Island were absolutely lovely. The daytrip to Abel Tasman National Park was great – first a boattrip to Torrent Bay, then walking back along the Abel Tasman trail for about 4-5 hours. I ended up in a group of four for most of it, with Janneke from Holland, Daria from Germany and Bruno from Brazil. Janneke was at the YHA with me, so after a day of the great (and beautiful) outdoors, we ended up in the sauna at the hostel. 🙂
In the morning I left for Picton, which turned out to be a short but eventful busride, as we had to stop several times for a passenger with diarrhoe. I wasn’t feeling too great either, because I had really bad cramps. Thanks to painkillers they were mostly gone by the time we reached Picton and I decided to see Bruno again before he left on the ferry to Wellington that day. After that I went for a nice little walk along the coast in the Victoria Domain. The evening I spent reading in the dorm room that I had to myself – during the 3 weeks of travel I think I read 16 books in total, thanks to bookswap shelves in all the hostels!
The ferry trip back to Wellington today was nice, the weather couldn’t be better and, while I couldn’t read once we were out on the open sea, I was able to sit on the sundeck and didn’t get seasick at all. We even saw two schools of dolphins in Malborough Sounds! And in Wellington Supryia and Rathy picked me up and I’ve been chilling at my old place of residence with Rathy, Jessica and Meredith. It is good to be back, but also rather strange because I’m no longer living here, just staying for a visit… Anyway, got lots of plans for the next week, obviously, meeting people and seeing places one more time. But first, here’s the last photos I took on the South Island, as always to be found in full on Flickr:
