The Great Walks Summary

The Great Walks

There were many things needed to prepare myself for this adventure. Though they were all important, I will not bore you with all of them, just the most important one. Food! I needed to buy food that would provide me with the proper nutrition to walk for days on end as well as tantalize my tatse buds.

If there is one thing I learned from my previous adventures, it's that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
taste good and are light to carry, but they leave me hungry and wanting to hunt and eat the local
wildlife. This is not good. So after hours in the supermarket, I found my new hiking food of choice;
Wattie's BIG EAT Butter Chicken. It's a tin can full of awesome tasting curry that can be eaten warm
or cold. Amazing!

So, with a backpack full of tins of butter chicken, and the usual sour gummy worms, chocolate muesli
bars, and six kilos of frech fruit, I was ready for the famous Milford Track.

The Milford Track is said to be the best multi day tramp in New Zealand, and in the top ten in the world. To ease the confusion; tramping is what New Zealand folk call Hiking. I reckon it sounds like a form of prostitution, but when in Rome...

The first day of the Milford was beautiful! It was a sunny day with panoramic views of the surrounding mountains and rivers. And as a bonus it was only a couple hours before reaching the first hut. The Milford is different from most tramps as there is no camping allowed. Everyone has to stay in huts run by the Department of Conservation. I was very impressed by the huts for a couple reasons. First, they were very clean. Second, they had flushing toilets! No need to poop and bury or stinky drop toilets. But there was one downfall. Sand flies. Millions of them. After arriving at the hut by 3pm, the rest of the day and night was spent swatting the blood suckers. And thus began the three week long "Great Sand Fly Massacre." Everyday, all day, the aerial attack by the vicious blood sucking beasts of irritation continues for the duration of the Great Walks. Not that I agree with killing Earth's creatures, but I'm sure Gandhi and the Dalai Lama would have done the same in this situation.

I have been traveling for the good part of eight years now, and I have gotten very accustomed to sleeping in a dorm room atmosphere. The huts were much different than the typical dorm room. Hostels/Backpackers are usually full of young travelers. The huts were full of older trampers. Through the years I have found that a lot of older people snore. The oldies in the hut were no different. Out of the 20 or so people in the hut, half of them snored. One of the gentleman not only snored loud, but with such force I actually thought I saw the roof move. Unfortunately, it wasnt just the men. At one point in the night, three of us woke as we thought we heard one of the women choking on something. Ready to save this woman from what sounded like certain death we approached her with a sense of urgency only to realize the sound was a combination of her upper lip hitting her forehead and a wad of mucus slapping against her tonsils.

The second day of the trek was 17km of Jurassic Park like forest, minus the
dinasaurs. Fiordland National Park, where the Milford track is located, is
amazingly preserved and protected. Beyond the path, the area remains untouched and in its natural state. Although it was beautiful, I find walking through a forest for six hours very repetitive and lackluster. After the 45th stream and 20th waterfall, I resorted to conversing with fellow trampers to entertain myself. Not too many people were in the mood to talk as there was a steady incline to the day's trek. But the people I did manage to talk to/harass agreed that Batman is a better superhero than Superman. He isn't as powerful but atleast he isn't an alien. They also agreed that people who snore in the hut should be tied to cattle and dragged out.

The third day was a doozy. It was an seven hour day that started with a steep two hour hike up to Mackinnon pass. Apparently it's very scenic but on this day it was too cloudy to see anything but the painful climb ahead. Without anything to look at, i sought to find more people to talk to. There were a lot of interesting working their way up to the pass. I met an English couple that were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. The wife wanted a pearl necklace but she got a "torturous tramp" instead. I liked them, they gave me a cookie.

There was an Autralian gentleman that was a preacher. Apparently if I pray to Jesus I wouldn't have to tramp alone as he would find me a nice Christian girl to tramp with. It worked for him. That was a long, long, long conversation.

The people I found most interesting were fast walkers so it took me a while to reach them. There was a group of 70 year old Japanese couples that were the most remarkable of the day. They were so prepared for tramping, I was amazed! Not only did they fly up the pass like mountain goats with highly fashionable attire, they didnt even break a sweat. They had so much high tech equipment, Captain Kirk would have been envious. Talking walking sticks, commando like walkie talkies, and my favorite hand held air conditioners!

As we reached Mackinnon Pass the wind kicked in. I continued over the pass into the clouds. The wind was blowing so hard, it actually blew a lot of the clouds away, revealing the stunning mountains surrounding the pass. The best view so far!

As agreed by all the non-snorers the night before, we ran the final few kilometers and made sure we got our own hut in order to let the snorers enjoy each others' sounds of death without disturbing us.

The fourth and final day of the Milford was a nice stroll through a valley. Sandfly Point marked the end of the track. The thought of there being a "Point" named after the horrible creatures brought noticeable fear in just about everyone's eyes. Proceeding to the point with caution and worry, we realized Sandfly Point had less sand flies than anywhere else on the track. Go figure....

I'm not sure if I would rank the Milford Track among the top in the world, but it was
very beautiful and a lot of fun. I definitley recommend it to anyone who is planning a
trip to New Zealand.

MAVORA & KEPLER TRACKS

A couple days before I started the Milford, I walked to the start of the Mavora just to check it out. It was a really nice day so I decided to walk for a while. Ten hours later I had finished the Mavora. It's amazing how fast time goes when you think about certain things like Saturday morning cartoons.

It was a nice walk along the Mavora lakes. But the view never really changed. There was the lakes and a few mountains in the background. Nice.

A friend from my days in Dublin, Sunni, decided to join me for the remainder of the walks. The Kepler we were told was the most challenging of all the Great Walks. Unlike the the other tramps which had some flat bits, the Kepler was either a steep hike up or steep hike down. But the views were stunning! And a big bag of chocolate dipped chocolate chip cookies helped ease our pain.

The first night was spent in another smelly, crowded, sand fly infested house of snorers. However, it was a such a long day of hiking the sounds of nasal fury or the swarm of sand flies feasting on my head couldn't disturb my much needed sleep. I also found that the combo of a can of butter chicken, peanut butter, and sour gummy worms has a soothing effect.

The second day was spent walking along the mountain ridge line, eating cookies. It was another lond day as we were trying to finish the walk in three days instead of the suggested four. On this night we were in a tent. Although the weather was fantastic all day, as soon as we got in the tent it sounded like there was a monsoon outside. It got a lot darker in the tent as well. Eventually we realized it wasn't rain. The tent was engulfed by millions of sand flies. This made leaving the tent for any reason, especially for bladder control, very difficult. Maybe the huts weren't so bad after all...

The third and final day of the Kepler was 22km of anxiousness. We were anxious to finish the walk so we could take a shower, eat something not in a can, sit without swatting flies, and drink a nice cold beer. Not that we didnt enjoy the picturesque mountains and pristine forest but by this point, a tree is a tree! We had two days to rest and eat as much as possible before we start the Routeburn Track.

Da Beard...

This is the thanks I get for taking them on the adventure of a lifetime.....

The shoes Sunni walked in!!

It looks inviting, but it's cold enough to shrink vital organs to microscopic levels!

A couple more friends joined Sunni and I for the Routeburn track. Ben, an English lad who was deported from his country for being a hooligan. And Charlie, one of my flatmates that grows tulips for a living.

The first day of the walk was very mild. It was a short walk through beech wood forest alongside a beautiful turqoise river. Our campsite was an amazing spot at the base of the mountains we would be marching up the next day.

Although it was mostly sunny all day, the clouds were looming throughout the evening. Sunni's biggest fear was getting wet during the night and my tent is a $30 piece of crap. It rained all night long and continued in the morning. The tent held up for the most part, but barely.

The second day was a steady trudge up and over the mountains. It was windy, cold, and worst of all rainy. This was suppose to be the most scenic part of the tramp. We couldn't see squat! At one point we were walking in the clouds and couldn't see more than 5m in front of us. Every so often there would be a break in the clouds and we would get a glimpse of the magnificent mountains surrounding us.

I'll try to keep the rest of this story short. The rest of the tramp was torture. It rained continueously causing most of my body to resemble a prune. I was the idiot of the group who decided to have faith in the weather and didn't have a waterproof cover for my backpack. Not only did the tent get wet, everything else including my sleeping bag, mattress, and my one clean pair of underwear got wet. Not to be too dramatic, but we were in tramping hell!

After finishing the Routeburn the plan was to start the Caples track back to where we started. We were tired, wet, and in no mood to attempt the Caples which is said to be the steepest of all the walks. Instead, we started the Greenstone Track which is longer but flatter as it runs throught the Greenstone valley. It was a 32km walk to the first campsite...

After six hours we could see a hut in the distance. Thinking the end was near, we stepped up the pace only to come to a sign that read, "Mid Greenstone Hut closed, Greenstone hut 2.5hrs." My legs collapsed under me and I dropped like a bag of potatoes.

Moral was low as we started walking again. I started hallucinating. With blurred vision, I saw huts everywhere. Trees started talking to me. I couldn't tell you what they were saying, but they were definitley talking. I wasn't the only one is such misery. Charlie collapsed on a rock. To make things worse, we were running low on water. There were streams everywhere, but they were full of cow floaters (poop). To say this day was painful would be a severe understatement!

We eventually made it to the hut. With 15 or so blisters, my feet were still in better shape than Ben's. The back of his feet looked like Freddy Krueger got to them. Amazingly, Sunni was the only one of us without even one blister. Maybe using plastic bags as sock is the way to go?!

After a very good nights sleep, we started the last day. We had 5 hours to go...

Finishing this tramp was one of my happiest moments in recent memory. But it was a fantastic experience and I'm glad I did it!
And I'm ecstatic I got share such an amazing adventure with Sunni, Ben, and Charlie. Even though they will probably never hike with me again.

It any of these three tell you I snore, It was only because I had a sinus infection!!! And it was a gentle sounding snore, kind of like a light ocean breeze that would put babies to sleep, not the roof shaking kind....

ROUTEBURN & GREENSTONE TRACKS

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