Check www.geetstravels.com for my continued travels.

I wrote the following post during my last days in New Zealand. It's not complete and at the moment there aren't photos, but for the sake sharing as much of my story as possible, I won't let this go to waste:


Ugh, I'm disgustingly behind on what I've been up to. I'm a bit too lazy to actually go into incredible detail so I'll skim over the major events of the last month. The main focus here simply being that I want to share some of the pictures I captured along the way.

Kayaking the Abel Tasman

Touted as one of the absolute best places to sea kayak in the world, this was something that I wanted to do from early on in my trip. Nelson, the last city I mentioned being in was quite close to here, about an hour drive, tops. One night, I met an English guy named Henry at my hostel. We got to talking and found we were both interested in doing some kayaking and camping over a few days. We set off early the next morning and by 11am we were out on the water, packed tightly in a 2 person kayak along with some camping gear, a few changes of clothes, and food to get us through the next 3 days.
We were on a mission to make it out to the seal colonies on Tonga Island by the middle of day 2 (located near the far north of the national park probably about 15km away from where we started.) Kayaking really does take some effort, your arms simply weren't designed to carry you long distances the way your legs were. In order to reach our goal, we had to kayak about 5-6 hours a day. The first day, we had some excellent weather, albeit still cold because it WAS winter. We made it deep into the estuaries that are accessible only at high tide to see the Cleopatra Pools. Just before it got dark we landed at the beach-side hut we'd sleep in for the night. We crashed out early in the night, around 8pm, slightly after finishing up our delicious dinner of flame grilled baked beans, toast, and cheese sandwiches complimented by a fine boxed wine labeled 'dry'.
On the second day, Henry and I made our way up to Tonga Island. The weather was a bit more harsh this day, with light showers and tail winds that we had to row into on the way back. But, it was well worth it to get to the protected cove that a colony of seals call home. It was just Henry and I surrounded by 30 some-odd seals lying amongst the rocks. One baby seal that was playing by himself in the water was glad to get some company. He swam all around the kayak, and even jumped up on the front of it to take a closer look at us. I scrambled to turn on my camera, but he teasingly jumped back into the water before I could snap a shot. We hung out in the cove for another 20 minutes as more and more baby seals joined in, swimming around us doing tricks, and playing with a string hanging off the side of the kayak.
We landed at a few more beaches along the way as we got hungry for snacks and lunch. Some ocean swells really started to pick up later in the day bobbing the kayak up and down, splashing us