Marlborough Sounds 2

The main activities in the Sounds are pottering around in boats and walking. Walking is centred upon the multi-day hike along a long distance footpath called Queen Charlotte's Track. You can join the track at various points along it so this is what we did, just walking out for a couple of hours and then back on the same route.
It was quite strenuous walking because the path runs down to the water,  climbs again to the top of the next peninsula, runs along the top for a while, and then repeats the same sequence over and over again.

There are only brief glimpses of the views across the water and the long lines of hills because the land is covered with thick bush, which is the Kiwi term for forest.
In the bush of the Sounds the dominant species is the tree fern. NZ has 165 species of fern (80% endemic) and 8 of them are tree ferns. These tree ferns are also of 2 different types: hairy trunks and scaley trunks! They are seen everywhere, and some are very tall.

Although Wekas are not hunted on mainland NZ, we saw so many of them while we were in the Sounds that I could understand that they are probably so numerous in the Chatham Isles that the islanders are able to continue with their traditional catching and eating of them. It can't be very challenging hunting though because the Wekas we encountered behaved like ducks or chicken and came so close looking for titbits that we could have picked them up. That's provided we could avoid their bills that are like daggers. They seemed to lie in wait and appear at every stopping point, including at the Eatwell Lookout post.

So we spent a very happy day walking parts of the Queen Charlotte's Track. After a peaceful night in another DoC site, the next morning we travelled - ignorant of the fact that much of South and North Island had been struggling with a violent storm - back along the winding road and into Picton to catch the ferry across the Cook Straits to Wellington on North Island.