Marlborough Sound, Nelson, Smith Farm

Undeterred by what we now recognise as a bit of light drizzle (no more than 20mm of rain in any 6 hour period), we struck off towards Nelson to see what we could see.....and eat, of course.

We had both imagined Nelson as a large town, situated next to the water. In fact the main commercial district is some way from the sea, but quite pleasant with jewellery evidently quite the local craft. We dawdled and rubbernecked in a most agreeably slow, holiday fashion but couldn't quite find Lunch.

Remembering, and topping up on, advice we headed to the Boat Shed Cafe. It's perched directly above the water, with a pleasing view of the breakwater.

The menu suggested "trust the chef" so we did. The array of sharing plates included whitebait, some very-far-from-home proscuitto Parma with figs, mozarella, roquette (in truth, the proscuitto was the best this side of Italy: warm, mature, nearly melting in texture....), sea-run salmon (disloyal moment: NZ salmon is better than Tasmanian), John Dory.....it was a fine lunch.

Having learned that Richmond, just up the road, had been subject to major flooding from all this light rain, we decided to head straight back to Smith Farm rather than risk being washed away. Yes it cost us some more wine tasting opportunities, but to compensate we got the chance to walk up to (all right, near) the local waterfall and check out some great fungus. The walk starts by traipsing through the sheep paddock, with eager sheep hoping you have some food that isn't grass. Based on the size of these sheep and the pig we mentioned earlier, the grass around here is extremely fattening. We'll have to stick to cheese and wine ;-)

The walk then crosses a cow paddock. Thankfully we'd been warned that the cows will charge you to "say hello". It doesn't feel particularly friendly when you have a few 300-400kg cows runnning at you. A quick hand up in Crocodile Dundee style seemed to work...

Normally this is a gentle walk to the falls but given the amount of rain, we had to wade through the higher than usual stream half a dozen times with wet and muddy paths inbetween. Apparently these paths have glow worms at night. It was precarious enough in daylight so we'll have to trust them.