We got nuked. It was terrible.
We started out by waking up way late, slightly after 9:00. We ate breakfast at that café, which was rather good. Alyssa and I each had a croissant with bacon and stuff inside. Amanda had muesli. Alyssa and I thought the muesli looked fairly gross. Amanda said it was healthy and her mom would have liked it. We made fun of her saying that she didn’t actually like it, just ate it because she thought her mom would like it. But apparently she liked it. I don’t know.
Then, we set forth to walk down the spit. The sign said 2.5 kilometers. Amanda thought that would be a nice morning walk and then we could head back down to Abel Tasman National Park, where she wanted to do a walk along the beach. Amanda and Alyssa put on sunscreen, I didn’t because I didn’t think we’d be out for very long.
Well, we walked. And walked and walked and walked along the beach. From the maps, Farewell Spit looks like it’s all beach, but no, there’s a bunch of trees in the middle of it that are mostly dead, and beach along each side. The only reason it matters is because we thought we’d be able to see the whole spit, but with the trees in the way we couldn’t. Amanda thought we’d just snap a few pictures and be on our way. I kind of wanted to see both sides of the spit.
We had walked for well over 2.5 kilometers. We’d been walking for over an hour and then we lost Alyssa, because she didn’t want to keep the pace that Amanda was setting. As Alyssa faded into the distance, I told Amanda that she must’ve read the sign wrong, and it must’ve been 25 kilometers. Maybe there was a bug that looked like a decimal point or something. We kept looking at the end of the spit saying we were this far already, we couldn’t quit now. But it was really hot and the beach was probably the least beautiful thing we’ve seen in New Zealand. It had garbage all over it, and actually about where we’d started from it was more crushed seashells than sand. Plus usually when you think beach, you figure it’s sand next to water, right? Well, this was sand next to dirt, which had some large puddles in it. The water was probably a kilometer out from the beach.
We pressed on. Eventually I couldn’t even see Alyssa in the screen on my camera at 68x zoom. Then, when we finally got to what we thought was the tip of the spit, it turned out it wasn’t. It was just a bend where we couldn’t see past the trees. We said, well fuck this, and we went back. We had taken to walking across the dirt instead of the beach because it would be more of a straight line back to the café and therefore quicker. I had taken off my shirt because I was so hot. We kept saying, "I hope Alyssa turned back!" and we kept thinking that we’d get back to the café and she’d be sitting there with a carafe of water, waiting for us. But no, we found her, still casually strolling down the beach, and we yelled to her to come out on the dirt with us as we walked back. I took my shoes off, following Amanda’s example, and splashed through some puddles to cool off.
Then, the tide came in. We wound up back on the beach, which was covered in broken seashells and rubbish, so we had to put our shoes back in. I lost a sock on that beach. My shoes became filled with the sand that was all over my feet, and that was not comfortable. When we finally reached an area where there was shade, I stopped to take my shoes off and dump out all the chunks of broken seashell that had somehow accumulated in them.
We finally made it back to the café, where we got a liter of water and three cans of soda, sat there and drank in the coldness, and then left for Abel Tasman Park.
That sign had said 2.5 kilometers. Apparently there was supposed to be some sort of trail not far from the café which led across the trees in the middle, so you could see the other side of the spit, and then back to the café. We never did find that trail. After looking at a map of the spit, we discovered that the entire spit is, in fact, 25 kilometers long, and we probably did the first 20 of it, meaning we’d walked 40 kilometers with no shade or water in about four hours.
By the time we got to Abel Tasman, none of us wanted to walk. We went in far enough to see a beautiful beach, where we stood and let the waves lap over our feet for a while, took some pretty pictures, and left.
It was my turn to drive, but I was so badly sunburned that by the time we got back to Takaka I had to have Amanda take over for me. Just letting the sun touch my skin was making it hurt and I could barely move my arms. I rode shotgun from there, where I swaddled myself in a soft blanket, mainly to keep the sun off of me but also because it was soft. We drove to Nelson, a city we’d passed through the day before, and got an expensive hotel room, where we were able to finally see the extent of the damage the sun had done. I was red all over. Amanda said she thought even my nipples were sunburned. Alyssa was also as red as a beet. I know I’ve been redder than that before but it’s never hurt so bad. I honestly had cried for part of the drive between Takaka and Nelson. Amanda, who was barely pink from the sun, left Alyssa and I and walked down to a store not far from the hotel to get some aloe vera. Alyssa ordered a pizza. I laid in the bed and wished I had died. My back was probably the least sunburned area of me, my shoulders were the worst. I sleep on my side almost exclusively; it’s nearly impossible for me to sleep on my back and I think I’ve slept on my stomach maybe once in the last five years. Somehow, despite the pain, I managed to get onto my side and drift nearly to unconsciousness, but not totally.
We had pizza, Amanda played nursemaid to Alyssa and I, slathering us with aloe vera and tending to our various other needs since, as said, I could barely use my arms, and Alyssa was not much better.
I spent the night tossing and turning very slowly and didn’t get much good sleep at all.
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