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Photos © Home At First |
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 A short downpour would have been plenty welcome. Turns out there’s little rain in the rain forest of New Zealand’s Abel Tasman National Park in March, or anytime, for that matter. Early March sees the waning of summer down under, of course, and conditions along the fabled coast path couldn’t have been better. Our three days in the bush (New Zealanders use “bush” instead of “jungle”, “woods”, or “rain forest”) were sunny, warm, and dry. That didn’t mean we didn’t get wet. The two-thirds of us who walked the route over three days stayed moist thanks to daily climbs up and over the lush headlands that characterize this corner of the South Island. Wet? Yep. And not just with perspiration. There came the time each day when we broke out of the dense bush onto a pristine beach of golden sand, dropped our day-packs, found a seat on a weathered white foundling of driftwood, and broke out our lunch sacks. The food was ample if simple, and the calories earned and quickly burned along the trail. The sand was warm; the sea breezes welcome. The low lapping turquoise waves highlighted in white traced the tight arc of the cove or lined the strand like a straightedge. After eating, some of us slept in the shade of the trees where the bush meets the beach. Others sunbathed. A few rolled their pant legs and waded in the lazy surf. Some of us stripped to swimwear and took the plunge. The tranquil Tasman Bay tempted us, and then swallowed us in its electric blueberry Jell-O waters. We went under but remained perfectly visible. We emerged cleansed: sweat salt exchanged for sea salt, cooled to a near-chill, and ready to walk. - |
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Walk? Yep. Twenty-three miles of the Abel Tasman Coast Track. In three days. Four hours to do eight miles on day one. Seven hours for a more rugged eleven miles on day two. Two hours for four stunning miles on day three. Two guides shepherded our group of about two dozen walkers paying for the privilege to raise blisters, swat sand flies, soak their shoes, and try to live without make-up, jewelry, cell phones, TV, computers, shaving, newspapers, cars, money, shopping, |
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iPods,
and clean clothing. The walking was
nothing to fear: just putting one foot in front of another on a very
well maintained trail. One big headland crossing taxed the lungs of the
fittest of us for about 30 minutes after lunch on day 2. No one, except
me with my big camera rig, carried anything more than a basic knapsack
of the size used by college students to carry books and belongings to
class. Most of us wore some kind of hiking boots with ankle support, but
this popular trek, on New Zealand’s Great Walks list with a bullet, is
much easier than the other famous long-distance marches I’ve
experienced: the
Milford Track,
the Routeburn Track, the Tongariro Crossing, the Heaphy Track, and the
Kepler Track. Boots would be useful in wet weather on a muddy trail,
but, otherwise, a good pair of athletic shoes or sturdy hiking sandals
would work fine, especially on days 1 and 3. At the trail’s several
crossings of tidal estuaries, water shoes or bare feet with shorts or
rolled pant legs are the right |
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in these stretches.
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Mixed ages, genders, and nationalities made up our group. Our youngest members were in their twenties. Our oldest member was in his eighties, but he bailed out and left his son and daughter-in-law to finish the walk and joined his wife on the always-optional boat trip that followed our itinerary and paralleled us offshore. We were Americans, Canadians, Brits, Aussies, South Africans, and even a couple of Kiwis from New Zealand: people with remarkably homogenous lives and lifestyles who differed most by minor food preferences and funny ways of pronouncing the same |
| language. There were couples: most were ambitious men and their good-sport wives. There were foursomes, too: couples who enjoyed each other’s company and frequently traveled together. There were solos, too. I was one, but there were other men and several women, too. At the overnight lodges the solos were paired with other like-gender solos, regardless of whether two solos might find another arrangement preferable. Although we spread out over perhaps a quarter-mile, the youngest amongst us did not race through the track, nor did the oldest dawdle. And, while some walkers preferred to stay to themselves at least part of each day, the group was a something | |
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of a marching
cocktail party without the alcohol. |
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Such
were the memories of Tasman’s visit that the first official English
colonists didn’t come to this part of New Zealand for two hundred years,
arriving in 1841. When they settled this, the sunniest corner of New
Zealand, they found a region with good harbors, arable land, surrounded
to the east, south, and west by rugged, mountainous regions that
discouraged development. This almost isolated northwestern corner of the
South Island is today’s Nelson Region, bordered by three national parks
and the Tasman Sea.
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Before
the park was established, lumbermen came to the hills northwest of
Nelson city, and stripped much of the region’s virgin timber from its
forests of hardwoods mixed with several giant podocarp species unique to
New Zealand. The logs would be dragged down to flumes or the small
rivers that carried them to the Tasman Bay for shipment out. When the
demand for lumber declined the industry died and several lumber
encampments became ghost towns leaving only a few farmsteads in the
region. Then, in 1942, Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand’s smallest
national park, was established to mark the tercentennial of Tasman’s not
quite excellent adventure in Murderers’ Bay. |
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come to the Abel Tasman just to walk in the beauty,
to get away from their normal lives, to pursue adventure without danger,
to rekindle their love affairs or, likely, to seek love. Few, I’d wager,
come to Abel Tasman because they want to hug a podocarp. But the guides
that lead you patiently through the park are anything but neutral on the
subject of the environment. Evangelical, yes. Passionate, even. Rabid,
occasionally. The point is made at the outset, with a quick visit to a
remarkable Maori sculpture garden. And the point is continuously
addressed throughout the walk: |
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• The environment is fragile. |
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The
guides mean well. Their frame of reference is a Garden of Eden. Their
ideal is the natural, pre-modern, even pre-colonial, New Zealand, when
Nature thrived with only the minor human impact of the pre-industrial
Maori people. Their message is attractive and powerful, especially
because of the fragile, serene beauty of the Abel Tasman Coast. I was
tempted to abandon my high tech ways, don a breechcloth, and go native.
Honest. And I wouldn’t be the first to be so seduced by the great green
gospel: the towns and villages on either side of the Abel Tasman
National Park appear full of people who have
dropped out of the modern rat-race and taken
up a New Zealand version of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. The successful among
them, economically, sell things or sell adventures related to the Abel
Tasman: camping gear, kayaks, art, crafts, water and land taxi services,
trips, picnics, and “experiences”. Others, probably less commercially
successful, are the teachers and preachers of the Abel Tasman: the
guides. |
luxury hideaways
of the few fabulously rich residents of Abel Tasman whose fortunes are
made elsewhere. Our guides suggested that such a greedy conversion of
the national park into exclusive, private ownership insures that the
heli-commuters who own these properties will never get closer to heaven.
The guides must find this a tough sell. Most of the upper middle class
walkers I trudged through Abel Tasman with looked enviously at the
handful of private getaway mansions we passed. Temptation often offers a
chance for heaven on earth now at the risk of eternal perdition later.
We had some risk-takers in our group. |
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Our lodgings were no mansions. But, after a day on the trail, the promise of a comfortable bed, hot shower, cooked meal, even hors d’oeuvres with a glass of wine, seemed the height of luxury. A bag of our clean clothing and personal effects waited for each of us in our rooms at the lodgings, ferried forward by the boats of the guiding company. Our self-packed care packages ensured that the dirt of the trail would not accompany us to happy hour, to dinner, and to bed. This element: a return to the pleasures and conventions of society at the end of each day on the trail is the key difference between paying to walk the Abel Tasman Coastal Track with a guided group and paying much less to rough it by carrying all your gear and food and walking the path alone. |
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A return to the pleasures and conventions of society at the end of each day on the trail is the key difference between paying to walk the Abel Tasman Coastal Track with a guided group and paying much less to rough it by carrying all your gear and food and walking the path alone. |
Because of the guided trip option, the possibility to walk in paradise is made palatable to many who would not otherwise be willing to pull on their boots for a three-day trek in the near-wilderness. Abel Tasman’s guides must find this something of a philosophical compromise: installing the conveniences of modern life in the park to attract thousands of moneyed foreigners into the fragile environment. No wonder the guides proffer their ecological evangelism with such zeal. They told me, almost in whispers, that the trail—two yards wide and 23 miles long—saves the otherwise mostly undeveloped park by taking almost all the traffic. |
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Word of the great walk has spread far and wide. International visitor numbers have more than tripled in the last ten years (from under 29,000 in 1997 to more than 110,000 in 2007), making Abel Tasman New Zealand’s fastest growing national park. The pressures of growth have resulted in the Department of Conservation (New Zealand’s department of the interior) this month (December 2008) putting traffic restrictions on the park: a maximum of 50 guided walkers per day, and not more than 66 commercial visitors by kayak or any other self-propelled boat. |
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Sea kayaking now brings more visitors to the park than guided walking. Last March when I walked the Abel Tasman with a guided group of about 15 hikers, a guided group of about half that many paralleled us just offshore in sea kayaks. This group, similar in make-up and age to us walkers, paddled the clear, turquoise waters of the Tasman Bay 2-7 hours daily, beaching at a remote cove for lunch, and sailing in to the lodges at day’s end. Those kayakers I asked all said they expected kayaking to be easier than walking, but that they believed the paddling more physically demanding than walking once away from the protected coves in the wind and chop of the open bay. |
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Wilsons Abel Tasman National Park is the Department of Conservation’s concession-aire, with the exclusive license to operate the guided walks and run the park’s two fully-equipped, staffed lodges (Torrent Bay and Meadowbank-Awaroa). Currently, Wilson’s offers guided day hikes, and two-, three-, and five-day guided overnight walks. Wilsons, which has been Abel Tasman’s official guided walks concessionaire since 1982, has offered guided sea kayaking trips since 1995. Like its walking itineraries, Wilsons kayak adventures include day trips (most with optional prepared |
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picnic lunches)
and fully-catered 2-, 3-, and 5-day overnight trips. The 3-day and 5-day
overnight trips include at least one day of walking the Coast Track. |
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Wilsons
operates a fleet of boats that act as buses, taxis, and as sightseeing
cruisers along the Abel Tasman coast, dropping and picking-up hikers and
kayakers by schedule and on request throughout the day. Wilsons operates
real buses, too, picking up clients for their Abel Tasman experiences at
towns scattered around the park and at hotels and inns throughout the
city of Nelson, the region’s capital about an hour southeast of the
park. (Pick-up and drop-off is possible at Nelson Airport, too.) |
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the Queen’s Service Medal for his role in putting Abel Tasman National Park on the international tourism map. Mr. Wilson’s wife, Lynette, is a descendant of the Hadfield family, who arrived with the first English settlers in the Nelson region and whose family estate was at Awaroa near the current Meadowbank lodge in the center of the Abel Tasman National Park. Lynette Wilson’s book about the Hadfield family’s pioneering lives in this remote part of New Zealand, Awaroa Legacy, was published in 1999, and is promoted on the company web site and following an after-dinner multi-media show at the Meadowbank Lodge to interested guests. |
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Despite
being a European colonial family business, Wilsons has courted
association with the local Maori and has been assisting several
independent Maori sea kayak operations in the park in recent years. The
legacy of the Wilson family’s long history (in New Zealand years) in
Nelson is its own extremely close identification with the land, a
stewardship that to outsiders can seem almost proprietary, similar to
that of the Maori. Visitors are well-treated guests, but—unlike in
American National Parks—they are not encouraged to feel any sense of
belonging to this place or even that the Abel Tasman is a New Zealand
national treasure. |
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The experience is a delight for the senses and a treat for the body, but also a mini-course in Kiwi realpolitik: New Zealand manages its considerable natural wonders as Theme Park New Zealand. |
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