18th of February 2010

I ended up staying 12 days at the Sans Souci Inn, helping mainly with the cleaning in the morning or the serving of the meals and doing dishes in the evening. The whole place is really beautiful and environmental, built with clay bricks, grass roofs and probably the cleanest compost toilets I ever seen! Working only a few hours a day gave me lots of time to explore the area, and boy is the Golden Bay area worth exploring!
I explored scenic reserves full of cycads and limestone cliffs which made you think there could jump out a velociraptor around every corner, I went and looked at a beautiful waterfall, a huge cave, the Pupu springs which has the second clearest water in the world (only Antarctica has a clearer water) and the springs just creates a river out of nowhere. Visited several great beaches and I also went up to the north passing the famous Mussel Inn trying their beer and all the way up to the top having a look at the amazing Wharariki beach and doing the Hills track which gave me great views of the Farewell Spit and the cliffs on the way.
But this Monday I said farewell to Vera and Reto and headed to the Abel Tasman National Park to do one of the great walks of New Zealand. On the way there I was picked up by an American dude, Scott, whom was doing the final research for his guidebook, NZ Frenzy, for the south Island, he gave me his guide book for the north island and signed it. An awesome book I have to say, because its his personal view on places and it doesn’t list rubbish like accommodation and restaurants, just different waterfalls, beaches, hot springs and similar.
The hike was 42 km long and took me 3 days. I have to say it was a little bit of a disappointment though after being around the Golden Bay area. It was very crowded and had these houses and even a village in the middle of the park which kind of ruins the experience.
I did pass a couple beautiful beaches and bays though, and had a few really awesome sunrises and sunsets.
Coming out in the south end of the park yesterday I hitched back to Pohara and Sans Souci Inn again and here I ran into a problem with NZ, as I mentioned in the previous entry hitching NZ is really easy, it’s Childs Play! So there are a lot of hitchers around which causes another problem, every now and then the spot you get dropped at already has another hitcher trying to get a ride.
Being a polite hitcher you of course walk further up the road and get behind the hitchers already there, first come first serve. This though can delay you ride quite some because the other hitcher most of the time needs to get a ride before you have a chance of getting picked up. Then we have all these newbie hitchers which actually don’t get behind you, but is a complete ass instead and starts hitching in front of you!
Anyway, I did get a ride back (even before the guys in front of me!) and picked up some stuff I left at the Inn which I didn’t want to carry with me during the hike. It had started rain quite a lot now so I hitched into the nearby Takaka and found a hostel for the night, today it is still raining (supposed to be nice tomorrow) so I decided to stay yet another night.
I have probably been riding in around 30 different cars the last 2 weeks, but because most of them have just been shorter rides I haven’t taken any photos except off this German tourist that picked me up 3 different times the same day and the following days I kept running into him everywhere. And the other photo is of Scott, the NZ Frenzy author.