October 31
Fat Camp Begins
Sunday 5 pm: Te Anau
Te Anau, population 1,785, has two small grocery stores. Along with those, the town boasts a couple of souvenir shops and a barge-load of hotels and hostels. The town is lonely for social company, perched on the edge of a deep, glacier-carved lake and, at its west shoulder, rubbing against a colony of mountain ranges bordering the Tasman Sea.
Stephen and I rolled into Te Anau at 5 pm and headed straight for the grocery stores, hungry and not sure how early they might close on a Sunday night. To our amazement, the aisles were crowded with people and a third of the store seemed to be dedicated to dehydrated gourmet meals (too expensive for us at $9 a pop). A local Te Anauian in the checkout line behind us looked back, having just escaped the mad hive, and swore to his wife that the store had never been so busy.
The nearby Kepler Track had been declared passable 3 days ago. The snow and risk of avalanches puts the mountainous hike off limits in winter. People were flooding into Te Anau, base camp for not only the Kepler but also the Routeburn and Milford tracks, all 3 considered Great Walks of New Zealand. Kilometres of hiking trails fill the country, but these 3 are all in Fiordland National Park, a World Heritage Site.
The beauty is hard to experience any easier way than hiking– a horse cannot manage the precarious trail and a plane cannot show you the tiny new ferns or let you feel the soggy alpine marshes. We actually had to manoeuvre across a few tricky stretches of snow.
November 3
Trouncing the Geriatrics
Tuesday 6:15 am: Luxmore Hut
The scenery was awesome, the company abundant at times. Every ‘hut’ we stayed at had bunks for 40-50 people, running water, gas stoves, flushing toilets, snoring hikers and carnivorous sandflies. We had views of a spectacular fiord from our bunkhouse the first night and woke at 6 am to gabbing keas (pesky alpine parrots) and the packing of a noisy Irishman. For all this we paid $30 a person a night – a 50 percent increase from 3 years ago because of the spike in numbers of foreign tourists.
With the day sprawling before us, we ate a leisurely breakfast of tea and rehydrated USDA eggs. Four and a half hours later, having just kept ahead of a solo sectarian, we were having lunch at the next hut – Iris Burn: the end of the recommended one-day hike – with 3 other early arrivals. The day was still sprawling.
All 5 of us had packed too lightly. Without books or magazines or vodka we couldn't play travel Scrabble all day and night. We decided to skip on to tomorrow’s hut. Four hours later we weren’t skipping, but we were almost tired enough to fall asleep to snoring and mosquito lullabies. We finished the Kepler early Wednesday, with 15 minutes on a nearly retired plastic surgeon.
November 5
Kayaking with Owen Wilson
Friday: Milford Sound
Tendrils of the Tasman Sea creep between mountains all along the Fiordland. Hiking the Kepler, we’d seen a beautiful fiord already, but the Milford Sound (incorrectly named as a ‘sound’) is known as the most spectacular and most accessible fiord. We decided to check it out at sea level. Owen Wilson showed up as our kayak guide. (Oddly, he denied being Owen Wilson, but Christy is convinced.) Unfortunately, we didn’t get to talk to him as much as we would have liked as he was busy towing a tandem two petite Asian girls were having trouble propelling. We also forgot to get a picture. Sorry!
The day was rainy as are about 300 other days in the fiord every year, but that ensured that plenty of waterfalls were in action.
This capped off our experience in the World Heritage Area.
Sloshing around in Squeaky Shoes
A couple weeks later: The Copland
After healing for a week, we chose a hike much more off the beaten path. Our kayaking guides (Owen actually) had suggested the Copland track, which has natural hot pools waiting for you at the end of the 17 km trail. We followed a range of mountains alongside a turquoise blue, mountain-fed river through tropical vegetation, avalanche alleys and up creek beds to the snow line. It’s a one-way track unless you have glacier gear to get you over Mt. Cook, so we trekked 17 km back with our packs the next day. It was definitely beautiful enough to enjoy the same views twice. Of course, we'd imagined getting to the hut at the end and enjoying the peace and quiet with a few other hard-core trekkers only to find that it was full of German exchange students on a guided tour, making a huge mess and giggling all night. Another early morning.
The End, for now.
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