We got up, drove to the check-in and got in line for boarding the Bluebridge ferry to the South Island of New Zealand/Aotearoa. Once in line, we took the time to have breakfast…right next to the Connemara, our ferry for the day. Having been to Connemara two years ago and also because of Fiddler’s Green we had to listen to “Connemara” a couple of times this morning. Good fun!

From the moment our line started to move, bording was a rather quick affair. Up and up we went to get from the belly of the ship onto the deck. Bye bye Wellington! See you in a couple of weeks! It actually takes almost an hour to get out of Wellington harbour so we moved along the bays, the same route Flo and the kids had taken on their bike tour. At some point, a pod of dolphins joined us briefly. Dolphins make everybody happy.

Crossing the Strait wasn’t too bad, I just had to be on deck the whole time. I get nausea as soon as I go below deck. The last hour was spent moving through the sounds to Picton. By lunch time, we were on the South Island, Te Waipounamu, Te Waka a Maui. No. 3 started to make jokes about how he didn’t get a paddle, now that he was in Maui’s waka and I realized that it’s pretty awesome that the kids know the story about how Maui fished up the North Island.

From here, we made it to Nelson for our first freedom camp in the South. Nelson allows freedom camping in the large parkings lots in the middle of town. So convinient. It allowed us to explore on foot, have an ice cream and later on dinner in town. Only downside was that Flo still had to work and couldn’t sample any of the crafts beers around.

The next day was a bit of a stretch. We’d managed to get a booking for canoeing in the Abel Tasman National Park tomorrow the earlierst, so what to do? Flo really wanted to visit Te Waikoropupu springs again. However, there and back again was quite the drive over the Takaka Hill. We started with a visit to a beach at the side of the road so Flo could call his sister whom we hadn’t talked to in a while. After the call, it was close to lunch time already. We stopped at the next lookout, Hawkes lookout, had lunch and a look around.

Over Takaka Hill and then we were there: Te Waikoropuru. The tapu spring. The cleanest water we have ever seen. It’s still very impressive even though didymo has arrived at the place now. We took our time to take it all in…afterwards it was too late to go on the hydro powerstation hike. Instead, we went back over Takaka hill and enjoyed a night of freedom camping at Hawkes Lookout. It was about as far away from Kaiteriteri, our starting point for canoeing, as Marahau but it was for free. 🙂