Because we have two days here in Nelson, we deliberately kept our start to the day slow and relaxed. We were still in our hotel room at 10.30 am before leaving for a day of looking around this area of the northern South Island.
We thought that we should put the car through a car wash but the one down the road was closed because it was renovating its water supply. We were pointed to another one in a nearby town which was fortunately on the way to one of our planned sight seeing locations. Eventually, with a much cleaner car, we were driving towards the Able Tasman National Park.
This route took us through some very fertile areas where fruit and vegetables were grown. I lost count of the number of crops that we saw but some of them were apples, pears, kiwi fruit, hops and corn.
Eventually, we came to the vibrant rural town of Motueka. It is close to the mouth of the Motueka River on the western shore of Tasman Bay and is the second largest town in the Tasman Region with a population of 8,320. This area formerly served as the main centre of tobacco growing in New Zealand until the early 1980s but it has now been replaced with the variety of crops that we passed.
A little further up the road, we passed through some very hilly and forested country before descending down to the coast at Marahau where the famous Able Tasman Walking Track begins.
It is one of NZ’s grand walks. I once had the opportunity to walk this track but because the scenery is very similar to that of Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria, I opted out in favour of the Milford Track which was very different.
We had a delightful lunch in the cafe on the Marahau foreshore.
We could see a gaggle of tractors on the foreshore with boat trailers behind them. They are used to launch the variety of boats at the boat ramp. This must be a unique thing to NZ. We have seen this type of thing before but in that case there was no boat ramp and the boats were dragged across the sand to be launched by little bulldozers.
By 3.00 pm, we had seen enough and headed back to Nelson around the Otowhere Inlet. We still had a number of historic buildings in the town that we wanted to see.
Back in Nelson, there were some grand old buildings along the harbour. Collecting customs duties was an important function of government. By the beginning of the 20th century, grand customs buildings like Nelson’s Custom House had appeared in all the major ports and provincial centres. Customs’ importance was largely because duties supplied such a large part of government revenue.
There is a cute little street in Nelson named South Street. It is New Zealand’s oldest fully preserved street with its streetscape of original cottages built around 1863 for tradespeople.
We finished our day with a take away pizza from the shop just up the road. The little garden courtyard outside our room was a very nice place to enjoy a pizza and a glass of wine on a mild late summer evening.
