Marlborough Sound

I can't resist showing you some more pictures of Marlborough Sound before I continue with my account of our journey. It is difficult to convey through individual pictures just how striking and how beautiful the scenery is, because it just looks as though I am showing the same picture over and over again.


Imagine that you are on the deck of a slow-moving ship, in the warm sunshine, and that you are leaning on the rail and looking out across the water. For an hour and a half, the images you can see in these photographs are gliding past you, each dramatic, rocky inlet giving way to another, just as dramatic; and all around you the intensely, astonishingly blue waters of the Sound. Catbert, in addition, was looking out for dolphins, which are sometimes seen in the Sound, although sadly we did not see any this time.

At last we arrived at the little seaside town of Picton, where the ferry slowly turned and then reversed into its berth.

Here we disembarked and collected our luggage, and then proceeded to the Avis counter to pick up our second hire car. Apart from camper vans, hire companies in New Zealand generally do not allow you to take your hired vehicle on the ferry from one island to the other. Instead, you drop your vehicle at the ferry port, cross over as foot passengers, and then collect a new car on the other side. I thought that this would be rather complicated, but it worked very smoothly, and the other benefit was that our new car, in other respects identical to the previous one, had been recently valeted, whereas the one we had left...well, enough said.

From Picton we took the scenic route east to Havelock (where we had a delicious lunch) and then to Nelson, where we stayed for four days and visited the Abel Tasman Park. The scenic route climbs up and winds along the Sound and in this photo we have stopped at a scenic lookout point at the top. Here's what I could see:

You couldn't really ask for more in life than a view like that, could you?