Catching our breath in Wellington, gearing up for the actual official reason we’re even in this hemisphere: my meetings over the next two days with NIWA and CSIRO about my software project.

But it’s been a bit of a whirlwind since I’ve last written. I mentioned then that we were headed to Motueka, and were looking forward to finally spending more than 24 hours in one place. Well, one of those two things happened.

We did get to Motueka, gateway to Abel Tasman National Park, after a lovely drive around the bottom of Tasman Bay. It’s a funky little town, with a sort of Eugene, Oregon feel to it. Camping equipment stores, coffee houses and organic bakeries, all permeated with a sort of modern hippie vibe. Groovy little holiday park with mountain bikes on loan. Friendly, easy-for-me-to-relate-to folks. I guess not so surprising, given its role as the last real town before you launch off into your outdoor adventure.

Our specific reason for being in Motueka was to visit an experimental farm run by an American acquaintance. He’d purchased a couple of dilapidated hillsides that had been practically denuded by livestock and started throwing money into resuscitating it as an organic farm and educational center. Sound familiar?

I’ll spare you the gory details, but D and I spent the morning with Harnold, the farm’s caretaker, walking the hills, poking our heads around the facilities, and asking several million questions. Mind you, this farm is a couple of times larger than Natembea, and is being run on a more substantial budget; they’ve planted – and this isn’t a typo – 65,000 trees and native plants. They’ve set up an orchard of heirloom apples, built a caretaker house and modular 60 seat classroom. Yes, I was practically drooling at the infrastructure investments and expertise that had been put into this project.

We came away from the farm both inspired and intimidated, and with a lot of thoughts we needed to think more about.

This is the part of the story where we go back to Motueka and relax, but…it isn’t. You see, all morning while we were walking the farm with Harnold, Devon and I were also madly scratching our arms and legs from the absolute London Blitz of mosquitos that had made it inside the campervan the night before. We’d lain in bed with our headlamps on the ceiling, just whacking our palms against it, mashing bloodsucker after bloodsucker after bloodsucker, sometimes a couple at a go, trying to deplete the airforce of mosquitos before our arms or batteries gave out. We did eventually get most of them, but in the morning we were freckled with bites, and no amount of Benadryl would still the itching.

So. Faced with another night like that – there was no way to get into or out of the van without admitting a torrent of them when they were about – we decided to beat a retreat. Back to Nelson? Sure. Back to Nelson for a lazy ramble through the shops and parks. Then, what the heck, we needed to be in Picton the next afternoon for the ferry. Why not put the drive time in now, and allow ourselves a lazy morning? Picton it was.

And Picton was a lovely town. Wrapped around one of the zillion little bays in Queen Charlotte Sound, it’s about half the size of Port Townsend and, like Port Townsend, seems split between stuff-out-on-the-water and stuff-up-in-the-hills. But what water! And what hills!

On the water side, a stroll through the marina revealed stingrays and eagle rays just cruising around the boats, and at least three or so different types of starfish on the rocks. Lovely cafes and quirky chachka shops for those who, like us, were just passing through for the ferry. On the “hills” side, a seemingly endless network of footpaths up, around and past them. We didn’t have a ton of time, and have been doing a lot of walking, but couldn’t resist just one little excursion up the ridge along the eastern side of town.

Then…the ferry. What can be said? It’s a great big boat we drove our campervan onto, then wandered around killing time until it was time to drive off at our new destination. And here we are. The next two days are work for me, meeting with the folks from NIWA and CSIRO who are using (and improving!) my code. After that, off to explore the North Island, and I’ll hope to have more to report, travelwise, then!