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Tough. Voracious. Cunning. A little shy of company. I like them. A lot, actually.  But apparently, so do stoats and ferrets and possums and feral cats and rats and all those other creatures we thought at the time would make excellent additions to our fauna. Not that the predators would take on a full grown pukeko, but they eat the eggs and the chicks when they can find them. And pukeko chick and roads are not a congenial mix. So these big ungainly birds with their brightly coloured bills and irridescent blue feathers, though there's plenty of them elsewhere in the country,  had been absent from the Abel Tasman National Park for years. But lately, a concerted effort at trapping and poisoning predators has allowed them to return. Good on yer, DOC. I think its their toughness and self sufficiency I admire. They originally found their way here, all by themselves from Australia - they are a sub species of the swamp hens found throughout the South Pacific. They gauge perfect...

Every morning, at dawn, I walk the beach, here in this lovely place. This is an edge; it is a liminal time, the in between, where land meets sea and night meets day, although I try not to think about that. It’s not a time for reflection, but more an act of presence, this mile long there and back. I guess it’s a kind of meditation, though my Centering Prayer anchor word doesn’t quite fit the rhythm of walking, so instead I use the Jesus Prayer as my feet follow one another across the coarse golden sand. Later there will be enough time for thinking. For now, being here is enough. The dividing line is always indistinct. When does a day begin and a night end?  But when a boundary doesn’t present itself with binary clarity it nevertheless still exists. There is night and there is day. There is land and there is sea.  Some days the sun rises gaudily through the clouds and the dawn gathers in the perforated sand. Some days the shadows are as beautiful as the clear, strai...

 I've written about the Abel Tasman National Park before, Here , and Here . We've been many times before, but this was the first time in the Spring. The weather was varied, with a couple of stormy days, but it was fine enough to walk on 5 of the 7 days we were there. In the old days we took tents. Now we’re a few decades on and the attractions of a solid roof, a comfy bed, a fridge and a bathroom are too hard to resist. We towed our caravan over the single lane gravel road and parked up beside my sister and her husband.  After years of absence, the Weka have made a welcome return, due to an intensive pest control program. The archetypical view of the Abel Tasman is of bush clad headlands and golden sand beaches, and there were certainly plenty of those sorts of things on view. But the other feature of the park is the track, 65km or so of fairly easy walking of which we tramped about a third, this time around.    It's hard to meditate in a carav...

 campsite  View from the caravan The cormorant or common shag lays eggs inside a paper bag the reason you will see, no doubt is to keep the lightning out. But what these unobservant birds have never noticed is that herds of wandering bears will come with buns and steal the bags, to hold the crumbs.   Clemency at her favourite beach in the whole park, Little Anapai.   On the track to Anapai   Totaranui Totaranui   After an absence of many years, and following an intensive pest control programme and some effective re releases, the weka have returned.   And so have the pukeko   Totaranui headland   Totaranui   The Avenue, Totaranui  This, and all the pictures following are of Totaranui

Totaranui Beach from the Headland Track, looking South to the string of beaches, ending in Awaroa.  The Abel Tasman National Park is a large block of native forest in Golden Bay. It is best known for the string of golden sand beaches on its Eastern edge, stretching about 65 km in a line from Marahau in the South to Separation Point in the North. A track follows this coastline, winding along the beaches and over headlands between them, providing a 4 day walk of exquisite beauty. There are huts and campsites spaced along the track, and a winding, single lane dirt road leads to Totaranui, a beautiful beach about 10km from the Northern boundary of the park. Totaranui has a large Department of Conservation campsite. Clemency's family arrived in New Zealand from England in 1962 and in 1963 went to Totaranui for the first time, when the national park was only 15 years old and the programme of reforestation from farmland had only just begun. They returned annually and spent about a ...