Wine, Walks and Dolphins
Photo from National Geographic/Getty Images UK rudely violated by me
Picton, Marlborough and Abel Tasman, New Zealand
Picton is a pretty little harbour town with lots of blue houses. We drive on winding roads and pass cute little mailboxes and amazing views until we get to Smiths Farm in Havelock. We get a nice shaded spot by a bench to park our van, and freshly made banana muffins and a bag of food for the goats and sheep on the farm upon checking in. I already love this place.
The farm has nice and clean facilities and is surrounded by green hills. Not only is it a beautiful and cheap place to stay, it also has its own little track past all the fields with cows that lead us to a beautiful waterfall! We come back after sunset to see the glow worms hiding in various places on the track and I try but fail to take photos of them.
The next day we drive back to Picton and get on E-Ko tours’ little boat and go chasing wild dolphins in the Queen Charlotte Sounds. The view itself is spectacular, but once we find a pod of bottle-nosed dolphins and start accelerating towards them, my heart is pounding so fast, and I cannot hide my excitement.
I’ve been obsessed with dolphins since like 2nd grade, and one of my very biggest dreams since then has been to get up close to a dolphin. The boat stops a bit ahead of the pod, which is now coming towards us, and we get in the water and start singing through our snorkels – at first it’s more little screams, as the water is freezing and our wetsuits aren’t exactly keeping us toasty. I start singing Toto’s Africa, and Canada’s National Anthem, until I just start making the same weird noises as everyone else. I see a fin only a few meters away coming straight for us and I grab Craig’s hand, because I am both scared and excited. It decides to swim around the group. The closest a dolphin will come to us in the water today is 2 metres, and the closest it will come while we’re on the boat is less than half a meter, as one particularly playful dolphin decides to chase the boat. Needless to say, I am smiling from ear to ear the whole day.
After coming back to Picton harbour we buy a bottle of Peter Yealands Sauvignon Blanc – apparently the best Sauvignon Blanc in the world – and we drink it in the kitchen out of our little mugs from the kids’ section of The Warehouse.
As we finish off our well deserved drink, a family with two kids walk in and start preparing dinner. I befriend Quinn, aged 5 and Ida, aged 2 and end up looking after them for a few hours while their parents are walking in and out of the kitchen. They call me Crazy Girl and ask why I have so many rings in my ears and sit in my lap to show me their Lonely Planet book. After dinner we are pretty much ready to go to bed.
What’s exciting about the next day is that we are driving to Blenheim and going on a wine tour. A tour where we get to drink wine for 3 hours! So I imagine sitting down at a wooden table with a group of like 8 people and having several glasses of wine in front of me all at once. We’ll see how it goes.
We check in to Top 10 Holiday Park and wait for 1 O’clock, where Kevin from Marlborough Wine Tours picks us up. Kevin is an absolute star, having retired 6 years ago, but loving drinking and sharing stories about wine so much that he started doing wine tours. He also thinks I am Irish.
First, he takes us to Lawson’s Dry Hills, where Craig, Kevin and our young wine expert Riley are the only ones there, except of course for me and an equally as excited little bird. Riley is about our age and super adorable and shows us a truck unloading green grapes into a machine for pressing. Then we try a total of 9 wines, one glass at a time, as well as fermentation juice, which basically tastes like sweet alcoholic lemonade.
Next, we go to Saint Clair, where we meet Tricia, who’s the co-owner of the tour company as well as our driver for the rest of the day. It’s still just Craig and I tasting around 5 different wines and talking about how hungry we’re getting until Tricia introduces us to Jenna and Xin who will be joining us for the rest of the tour. We chat for a bit and get our butts to Rockferry for more wine.
We are getting increasingly drunk and taking the wine tasting a lot less seriously than in the beginning, when we were listening attentively and pretending to know what a Pinot Gris is. At Cloudy Bay I drunkenly decide that $33 for a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc is perfectly reasonable, so we buy two. We’ve arrived late, past 4, and are being total pains asking for group pictures on several cameras and whatnot. Let’s hope buying some wine made it okay.
Lastly, Tricia takes us to Makana Chocolate Factory, where I stay for a total of 15 seconds before I buy something. While looking at a few workers making chocolate, we are offered a free sample of to different chocolates piled on top of each other, and I mistakenly think it’s just one piece of extremely delicious candy, so I buy a bag of it. By itself, it’s basically Daim chocolate with nuts. Craig buys orange chocolate, which turns out to be the bottom piece of the sample, so all is well after all. The combination of the two is Heaven and I would probably murder for more of it.
After we’ve been dropped off at the camp site, we have some delicious cheese and more chocolate and I drunkenly pass out in the car – it’s not even 6 yet – and I wake up at like 9 PM when Sharon FaceTimes me to show me her Nana’s garden.
We’ve spent enough time in the Picton/Blenheim area, so we make our way down to the Abel Tasman National Park to put my new boots to use. Driving is a nice way to pass the time, especially since we get to sing along and harmonize to awesome music. Our current favourites are
- The Book of Mormon – Hasa Diga Eebowai
- Tracy Chapman – Fast Car
- Moana – How Far I’ll Go
- The Lonely Island – Boombox
- Busted – Year 3000
- All-American Rejects – Give You Hell
- Iggy Azalea – Fancy
- Macklemore feat. Ryan Lewis – Can’t Hold Us
- Fall Out Boy
- The Black Eyed Peas
We make a stop and do the Tawa walk to see two disappointingly tiny Elvy Stream waterfalls, but at least we break in Simon and Garfunkel, as we end up naming my boots. When we reach The Barn by the start of the Abel Tasman track, we have a bit of food and move into the warm kitchen and end up drinking our two bottles of Cloudy Bay and play 21 with Irish Seth Rogen and Swedish Leonardo, because that is actually his name. When we run out, I.S.R. tops up my mug of water with some gin, because we are pure class.
From our car, we can see the beginning of the Abel Tasman track, the beach and a beautiful sunrise. As the sun shows its face, people roll out of their tents or cars with a disoriented look on their face and begin to pack up. A guy is annoyingly grinding his own coffee behind us.
We go to Abel Tasman Aqua Taxi with some other backpackers, and here I once again go all Brock from Pokémon and fall in love with our skipper Vinny, despite everyone once again thinking that Craig and I are a couple. We get on the water taxi while it’s still attached to a tractor and then we get dropped into the water after a short drive. Vinny takes us around to see Split Apple Rock and then seals at Adele Island while Craig and I try to make some of Adele’s hits into songs about seals. Rolling in The Deep/Swimming with the Seals is the best we’ve got.
Finally at 10, we get off at Bark Bay and begin our ~ 20 km walk back to Marshmallow in Marahau. The weather is perfect, around 20 degrees and sunny, and the track is relatively flat. We pretty much have a view of amazingly blue water and white sand beaches all day, so we aren’t too upset about the long walk.
I am I constant competition with the signs telling us how long the walk will take us, as well as people who we are trying to pass on the track and vice versa. A couple annoyingly passes us while wearing matching track pants, and in the guy’s case, no shirt and a backpack, while the girl’s wearing a T-Shirt that says “(Some German last name)’s GF”. We regretfully skip Anchorage Bay and instead do a steep climb down to Observation Beach, but all in all it’s a perfect walk.
Me looking at Adele Island and probably singing “Hello from the other side”
By the time we’ve reached the end, 3 hours and 40 minutes later, our knees and feet are giving in though. We manage to crawl to the Fat Tui food truck for amazing gourmet burgers and sweet potato fries though, before we get back to The Barn and treat ourselves to some ice cream and Wi-Fi.
Not feeling too energetic, we retire to the TV room and watch The Intern and whatever else people decide to put on the DVD player. Eventually we drag our asses to “bed” and I have nightmares about being Beth from This Is Us and my husband Randall locks our kids in the house and burns it and Aga tells me it means I find it hard to accept my current situation.