Cycle: 87km

After two days of gradually gaining altiude we were looking forward to a predominantly downhill ride to the Tasman Bay coast.

We enjoyed breakfast with a view across the hills from Hu Ha and made friends with the enormous, and smelly, pet pig before we set off. Also, before we forget, one of the owners of Hu Ha, Jo Meek, had decorated the hostel with her own artwork and it was brilliant. Scott took a photo of one of the pictures.

We had to go over the 600-ish metre Hope Saddle amost immediately, but set off from Hu Ha's at about 450m so it wasn't a big climb but was quite steep and certainly woke us up! Sadly it was cloudy and blocked what would have been fabulous views of the Nelson Lakes area (so we were told!). We had a nice, long, slightly downhill section through farmland before reaching a junction (exciting - some navigation!) and taking a less busy road to Motueka.

The country lane was really quiet and very pretty with autumn leaves still on the trees 'up North'. As the mountains dropped away we felt we could have been in England on one of those crisp, autumn days that never quite gets light - it was lovely. We saw plenty of stock and orchards - when we reached Motueka we learned that this is a prime apple, green tea and hops growing area. Our only stop on the way was as Tapawera a very small 'Banjo' town (as in Deliverance, new phrase courtesy of our kayak guide the next day!) where we had blow your head off organic coffee from a nice shed.

Motueka seemed like a pretty big (goodness, how our thresholds have changed!) service town and looked ok but not super. We found the hostel we had booked, the White Elephant. After much cafuffle and confusion we were given an ensuite double for the price of the cheap next-to-the-dirty-kitchen ensuite double (because the managers son took the booking incorrectly) and changed our two-day freedom kayak Abel Tasman trip to a one-day guided kayak trip (because the aquapackers (backpackers on a boat in the AT National Park) closed suddenly!). Phew. After that we visited the supermarket (supermaket - yay!) and did a spot of emailing.