January 30, 2026
We chose today as the better weather day to go to Abel Tasman National Park, and it was indeed the best weather we have had so far on this trip: mostly sunny with a few clouds.
After watching a lovely sunrise from the deck of our Airbnb, we took the half hour drive to Kaiteriteri, where we had booked the Wilsons Swing Bridge Bush and Beach tour. The tour involved a 1-hour boat ride to Medlands Beach, followed by a hike and some side trips to Anchorage Beach, where we would be picked up by the shuttle boat later in the afternoon. We hiked a total of 9.5 miles including all of the side trips.
On the morning boat ride we passed the Split Apple Rock formation. The shuttle made stops at Apple Tree Bay, Anchorage Beach, and Torrent Bay before dropping us off at Medlands Beach.
We arrived at Medlands at 10:15 am, and we were scheduled to be picked up at Anchorage at 5:20 pm. A direct hike to Anchorage was about 4 hours, so we expected to have plenty of time to do all of the side trips. As it turned out, we made enough stops on the hike that we ended up at Anchorage with about a half hour to spare before the boat pickup time.
Our first side trip was to hike north from Medlands to Bark Bay, where we crossed a swinging bridge and viewed Bark Bay Falls.
We retraced our steps back to Medlands Beach and continued south along the main trail. We took another side trip to South Head, where there was a small view of the beach below.
We went back to the main trail and crossed a second swinging bridge at Falls River.
The trail continued along a ridge with occasional views of the beaches below, and then it dropped down to Torrent Bay which was the halfway point of the hike. Just past Torrent Bay we found a picnic table where we stopped and ate our sandwiches for lunch.
It was low tide at Torrent Bay, and we had the option to take a shortcut across the mud flats to Anchorage which would have saved over an hour of hiking. We chose not to take that option since we wanted to go to Cleopatras Pool which was along the high tide trail.
We still had at least 2 hours of hiking to do, and it was 3 hours until our boat pickup time, so I was getting a bit nervous about the time. It turned out we didn't have to worry since the trail to Cleopatras Pool was relatively flat and fast. We didn't stay long at Cleopatras Pool. Frankly I found it underwhelming, although I suppose it would have been more exciting if we had decided to swim. Only one other person was at Cleopatras Pool while we were there. Most of the others we had seen along the trail had taken the low tide shortcut.
We crossed one more swinging bridge on the main trail back from Cleopatras Pool, and then we had one more uphill slog before finally descending to Anchorage Beach. It was 4:35 pm, and we were supposed to be there at 5:05 before our boat pickup time at 5:20. So we had a little bit of time to relax on the beach before our ride back to Kaiteriteri.
The boat ride back made only one stop at Apple Tree Bay, and it did a close pass by of Adele Island where there were a couple of seals on the rocks (unfortunately I didn't get any good photos of the seals).
We drove back to our AirBnb, relaxed for the evening, and played with Rascal the cat. We had sandwiches for dinner because we were both too tired to cook.