March 9th Part Two

We spent quite a few night doing what we call here, freedom camping. Basically its finding a spot on the beach or even on the side of the road, setting up shop and spending the night for free. It saved us a pretty penny and we found a few great spots…and some not so special too. And with Adam along…there was no such thing as camping food. It was all gourmet (he got to ride in the front seat a lot :) )

Next we headed up to Golden Bay, where we spend the majority of out time. Eli had a friend that was renting a beach house on the ocean, so we fortunately got to much off of them and stay for a night. Another cool spot was Whreaki Beach (pronounced: Freaky Beach...and not spelled like that either). There’s no way to describe the beauty, so I’ll just post pictures. But there were baby seals that got trapped on land from high tide and they were maybe the cutest things I’ve ever seen…for real. From there we did a bit of hiking, reading books and drinking beer. We ended up in Takaka (this is where Eli chose to leave us to head back into the woods) at the San Suchi Inn. It was paradise….it included adobe buildings, lots of green grass, a hammock, a big kitchen for Adam to cook us whatever we wanted and incredibly nice people. We couldn’t leave, and then when we did leave…we came back again. To conclude our time in Golden Bay, we did a coastal hike in Able Tasman National Park into a Hut (where all three of us got ZERO sleep due to abnormally loud snorers) where we stayed for a night and hiked back out the next day. Then to begin out decent back into Christchurch (where Rachel and Adam departed from) we went down to Nelson Lakes, where we walked along the lake and camped in the most sandfly infested campground ever. We woke up the next day and continued south to Hamner Springs. There we ate Thai food, sat in hot thermal pools and laid in the sun all day…t’was wonderful.

Then this morning I dropped them off at the Christchurch airport and began my way south to Dunedin, where I’ll hopefully be WWOOFing with a woman named Lucy for a few days.