Spring Break Part 2 - Marlborough Region

After having Abel Tasman complete and under our belts we proceeded on the rest of our journey. We now had a bunch of extra days since we dropped the inland track from our itinerary and so this allowed us to take our time and enjoy some of the small but well know city of Nelson that apparently is home to the official "Center of New Zealand".

View of Nelson. 

That night we had camped at the sweetest camp site, right next to a herd of cows, and no sand flies. We slept very well, happy to be done lugging our huge bags on our backs. In the morning we set out for the Marlborough sounds. We found the scenery to be quite similar to Abel Tasman, but not quite as tropical.

Drive to the Queen Charlotte track. 

Our campsite that night however, sucked! The sandflies were terrible, the Kea birds creepily surrounded our tents at sun set, and in the middle of our nightly card games we heard an awful skreeching noise from the trees. As Hayley and I jumped up on our picnic and worthlessly held on to each other the boys grabbed their head lamps and large rocks and peered into the unknown of the trees. Turns out a possum was paying us a visit.. He probably wanted all our tasty food. Also that night there was a slight monsoon, with winds so insanely strong that our tent would bend in half during some larger gusts of wind and Hayley and I spent the majority of the night awake, hoping that the tent wasn't about to collapse on us.

With all the excitement of the previous night we all reluctantly awoke early in order to get a good start on summitting Mt. Stokes the next morning. Although the weather was quite overcast we headed up the mountain anyway to some quite splendid views.

On the way up!

Mt. Stokes summit!

 You can even see Wellington on the North Island from the summit (it's in the distance in the far left). 

After Mt. Stokes we all concluded that there wasn't much else of excitement to see in the Marlborough sounds and so left early on our way to Kaikoura. However, Zak and I had spotted a cool photo while we were at the last DOC site and got directions to said "cool place" and decided to stop by it on the way to Kaikoura. Following our directions we turned onto a sketchy, narrow dirt road around the same time that the sun set and it was completely dark. Figuring we would not be able to find the spot in the dark we decided to park and camp anywhere along the road-- hoping that whatever's farmer's fence we were next to wouldn't care the next morning. This lead to us cooking and eating dinner in the middle of the gravel road that night for lack of an actual picnic table :)

Livin' cheap! Haha. 

Only the next morning did we realize what a beautiful spot we were camping in. We took in the amazing scenery all around, and then all of a sudden a truck was rolling down the road toward us and we all had a moment of fear that this was the farmer that was going to fine the crap out of us for sleeping on his land. Turns out that this guy was super nice, and was so excited to meet us and hear our stories. He invited us to visit his sheep shearing up the road and said he would tell us exactly how to get to the cool cave/gorge that we saw at the DOC site back in Nelson. 

 There was sooo much wool!!! And some super cute kids running around :)

Zak was the only one brave enough to attempt catching the sheep. It's so much harder than it looks. So entertaining watching him struggle, haha :)

After hanging out with our newly made farmer friend we finally set out to what we now knew was called Saw-Cut Gorge. It was an epic tramp- tons of freezing river crossings (nothing we weren't used to though), really cool rock formations, breath taking views. 

 And then we finally reached the gorge itself! It was awesome!! :)

So the conclusion to this tramp was that Zak and I have spectacular taste in finding the sweetest places to check out ;) Then off to Kaikoura we went...