Picton & The Marlborough Sounds

As seems to continue to happen in New Zealand, you visit one place and then the next place you go to seems to outshine the last. This time Picton and the Marlborough Sounds. This is in the NE corner of the South Island and where most people come across on the ferry from the North Island.

Our plan here is again to explore of the great NZ walks called the Queen Charlotte track. In a similar vein to the Abel Tasman we are not planning to walk the entire thing, as this will take 4 days and need camping equipment. So we chose the 2 main sections, manageable in a day, and booked a water taxi to take us there.

The first day's walk was at the furthest end and started at a place called Ship Cove. This was where Captain Cook stopped and based himself to explore the South Island. It was about an hour's boat ride from port of Picton, but this gave us a great view of the Queen Charlotte track from the boat.

Now i know that people say that you meet people you know all round the world and freaky things happen, but no sooner had we jumped off the boat at Ship Cove, that i thought i recognised a couple ahead. A lovely couple called Dot & Peter Mayne, who go to St Paul's church and i have loosely known for years. Low and behold, i stop them and IT IS THEM!

They were over in Christchurch visiting one of their daughters and had taken a short break up to the Marlborough Sounds...of all the places, timings, situations....!
So after that nice, but unexpected, hello we cracked on with our 5 hour walk along the track. The track had a number of steep climbs along the way, but being up high gave us great views through the trees to see down to the sea, bays and beaches.

We arrived at our pickup point at one of the lodges along the way and took a slow boat back to port, via a number of the other bays and picking up other walkers. A nice little bay called Honeymoon Bay caught me eye too!

That night we retreated to our hostel to rest up. The best bit about this hostel (and i promise not the reason we picked it) was the fact that at 8pm they served free chocolate pudding nad ice cream...Whoop ! This was much needed and of course well earned after the hours of walking we had been doing.

The next day we again boarded a water taxi, but took a short 20 miute trip to another section of the Queen Charlotte Track. This time we planned to do a short walk of 2/3 hours and finish at a lovely little lodge called Lochmara lodge. We decided to treat ourselves and stay the night in the Lodge (i know, no free pudding, but i'll survive). Luckily we had given our bags to the water taxi guy so we didnt have to lug them on our walk.

We arrived at Lochmara lodge mid afternoon, had lunch and chilled out. The lodge had a large series of grounds with various art works and landscaped areas to chill out and be away from the world, just what we needed.

That night we enjoyed a meal out - now this sounds daft, but in 9 weeks of being in NZ we only ate out a handful of times, so as you can imagine, we were quite excited. The lodge was great and a nice change to the usual hum of a hostel. The next morning we headed back to Picton and collected our car and large backpacks stored at the hostel.