Few things in life are as miserable as flying in an uncomfortable airline seat for hours on end. Fortunately for air travelers, cramped legroom and sleepless flights are so last year.
15.01.2024 - 09:19 / nationalgeographic.com / National Park
With its immense buttress roots and leathery green leaves, the northern rātā tree isn’t to be underestimated. Carried on the wind, its seeds land in the canopies of neighbouring trees and begin to germinate. Then, over hundreds of years, each individual seedling’s spidery roots wrap around its host, eventually entombing it and consuming the rotting trunk.
“It operates on a totally different timescale to humans,” says guide and outdoor educator Rod Morrison, as we stand at the base of a gargantuan rātā he estimates is 1,000 years old. “Other guides might be into mushrooms or birds, but I love symbiosis: how different species relate to each other.
”We’re only a few hours into our hike through Abel Tasman National Park, a sheltered paradise found at the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island and one of the country’s smallest national parks. Over the next three days, I’ll be hiking along the 37-mile Abel Tasman Coast Track and looking out from this sea-skirting Great Walk for dusky dolphins, fur seals, little blue penguins and wekas — a ground-dwelling bird infamous for raiding camp tents in search of snacks.
Already we’ve navigated tannin-hued marshlands, deep tunnels of rainforest and beaches flecked with tide-battered boulders. Rod is a guide with Wilsons Abel Tasman, a family-owned water taxi and tour operator with roots in the park as deep as its trees’. He’s given me a swift introduction to the reserve’s flora — teaching me how to eat the tender shoots of hardy supplejack vines, which plants can read my future and which can cure an upset stomach when boiled into a tea.
The pace is easy-going. Together, we enter lofty forests where trees wear tutus of branching kiekie palms, then climb a series of modestly steep bends. While the coastal track is well signposted and would be simple to follow if I were hiking on my own, I’d find the tidal estuary crossings rather daunting. Timing is key: walk too fast or too slow, and you risk being blocked by the rising tide and forced to detour for hours through the mountains. Thankfully, Rod has been tramping these trails since he was a young lad and is intimately familiar with the park’s watery rhythms.
It helps that he has some contingencies up his sleeve, too. We arrive at our first tidal crossing to discover a swollen inlet has made our passage impossible, but Rod has called ahead and a barge is waiting for us. We peel off our socks and shoes to wade out to the vessel in chilly, knee-deep waters and are ferried to the historic Meadowbank Homestead, one of two hosted lodge stays on the trail.
Built almost 60 years before the national park was officially formed in 1942, Meadowbank housed generations of the Wilson family but now welcomes a succession of
Few things in life are as miserable as flying in an uncomfortable airline seat for hours on end. Fortunately for air travelers, cramped legroom and sleepless flights are so last year.
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