We have been to many of New Zealand’s beaches during our roundtrip, on the north, east, west and south side! And the funny thing was that all these beaches were so different from each other, different colors, different sand, different views. To begin with the most spectacular of all beaches: The Abel Tasman Park (named after fellow Dutchman the explorer Abel Tasman, who sailed his ship here, was immediately attacked by the Maori and sailed away in a hurry but not before he gave New Zealand its current name) is a fantastic tropical park with yellow beaches and green jungles! There are two ways to get into the park, either take the Abel Tasman track, a 4-day walking track (one of New Zealands best tracks), or the watertaxi. We decided to do a little bit of both! So we took the watertaxi to Bark Bay and from there we hiked 4 hours through thick jungle! But first, the watertaxis, little boats that were let into the waters with tractors:

From there it took about an hour to reach Bark Bay, and we took a little detour to see the famous Split Apple Rock!Once the watertaxi dropped us at Bark Bay, we headed into the jungle for our long hike.The jungle smelled like honey! We had occasional views of beautiful beaches.  There were some very cool hanging bridges After hiking four hours through the heat, we spent an hour relaxing on one of the beautiful beaches, waiting for our taxi to pick us up again! The Abel Tasman Park is amazing! We had a fantastic day there, the weather was great and the beaches were yellow :-D But there are so many more awesome beaches in New Zealand! Let me show you a couple from the North Island: Or this one in Plimmerton, just north of Wellington where we saw a beautiful sunset: The Southern Island has a lot of stony beaches, with rounded pebbles:
The lakes around Wanaka and Queenstown are so huge that have their own beaches too! We spent our New Years Eve relaxing on this beach:Because these are lakes the beaches are full of wood! Near Hokitika were some beautiful beaches where people made bonfires: Sometimes the view from the car was so amazing, we had to stop to make photos: In the south, near Dunedin, it was so windy that all the trees had grown to one side. But one of the most peculiar beaches definitely was Moeraki with its round boulders:
Which beach I loved the most? I don’t know!