Beaches, Kayaking, Walking - the great NZ great outdoors!

Just had a great couple of days in Abel Tasman National Park, North of the South Island. We did the short drive up from Nelson yesterday morning, checked into our great, but slightly crazy accomodation in Marahau and spent the afteroon taking a long (for us!) 4 hour -return walk up the coastal track right at the start of the national park. The walk involved tramping through tropical bush and finding one idylic bay after another! Its mad though you do start getting a bit blase seeing amazing white beached and torquoise watered bays! Pretty tired when we got back so we just made a nice tea and drank some of recently acquired Marlborough Wine on our balcony overlooking the bay - sweet! :-)
Today we spent all day Kayaking on a great tour a bit further up in the Park - going into all sort of coves and lagoons along the way (one of which only has enough water in it for 2 hours a day due to tides). We were able to see some great wildlife along the way too - including our new favourite (since Galapagos) mammal - seals! Playing and posing as usual.
In the morning I was at the back of the kayak steering and lou was in the front and we did the bulk of the paddling. In the afternoon, after stopping for lunch in yet another beautiful lagoon and perfect bay, we put all the kayaks together in a line and we hoisted a sail on our oars and created a makeshift boat - was pretty crazy but got some good speed up. When we weren’t ‘sailing’ we were paddling as we did in the morning but we swapped over and lou steered. It was pretty comical actually because when we swapped over we no longer seemed able to turn right! - very zoolander! :-)
Following our left-turn-only trip back to the beach we chilled out, had a quick swim and got a boat taxi back to Marahau.
An awesome day! Now for some more nice food and finish off the bottle of wine we started yesterday