North Coast of South Island

We have finally been enjoying the heat again!!! It has been lovely and warm +30’C so lots of beach time…

Kaiteriteri Beach is very close to Abel Tasman National park which you cannot access by car… Kaiteriteri and Marahau are the  two places where you can take various boat trips or walking routes to Abel Tasman. The girls had enough of walking by this point and we didn’t fancy any boat trips either…as me and Miia are not very good on boats!

We decided to spend a morning on the Kaiteriteri beach and found a lovely spot by the river mouth. The girls were happy playing in the sand whilst me and steve took a few minutes to enjoy the sunshine we have been missing here in New Zealand.

Later on we carried on driving north through some challenging mountains again, where at one point the ground had slipped away and the road was down to one lane! These were really windy roads and really, really, really high (I admit I had to hold on to my seat again few times)!!! Funny thing was you could only drive 30km/h and they had signs speed limit 100km/h???

After a nerve wrecking drive we arrived to our campsite and our pitch was right on the Golden bay beach… I mean when the tide came in at night time you could hear the waves very close, I had to get up to check we were not floating off to sea!! It was another lovely spot and an endless beach again. We spend time looking for shells and stones there which Miia has made into necklesses and bracelets. Miia is already planning ‘when she gets home and gets her stall outside our house again to sell them’!

The following morning we drove right to the top of the north coast to Puponga where the longest natural sandbar in the world called Farewell spit is situated. We were going to go to explore it on our way back from Wharariki Beach but after walking over the big hill to get to the beach and back… and all the endless walking on this lovely sand dunes isolated beach we were all very tired and felt we had seen enough of sand for one day.

We now had to drive back again over the lovely mountain I enjoyed so much!!!

Later on we arrived to Nelson where we spent next few days…

Nelson was a very pretty town and had really nice feeling to it, lots of character. We found a campsite by the beach again but this time the site was huge and we were at the other end so we  didn’t really go to the beach there. We decided to pitch outside a massive playpark and minigolf, where we could see the girls playing from the van… few hours quiet time for us folks!

It was a another nice top10 site, only thing was we were right under the flight path for the local airport… felt like the planes were going to land on top of your camper!