Our great walk

The Milford Track is supposedly the walk of a lifetime in New Zealand. Drew and I didn’t do it. There were severe storm warnings in affect – flooding of rivers, and the transportation costs compared to the cost of the Doubtful Sound boat trip swayed us in the other direction.

So we took another walk. The Humpridge in the most southerly reaches of Fiordland National Park. It is a privately-run track (which means the hut costs are slightly more expensive than Dept. of Conservation huts), and at this time of year, there are hardly any trampers on it.

Just two Canadians, and two fun-loving Kiwis from Wanaka. 14 mm per hour rains didn’t deter our start on a Friday morning. 19 kms in 6 hours (signposted to take 9 hours). Wet, wet clothes and no fire to look forward to in the ridge-top hut. The mountain beech forests however came alive in the rain and mist, and it made for some good laughs to be huddled in our sleeping bags in the dinning hall until bedtime.

The sun became our friend for the next two days as we tramped along the Hump ridge – incredible vistas of the Tasman Sea, Stewart Island and the beaches below. Sore feet after long days but on the second night, we were rewarded with a pot-bellied stove in an old school house from 1916 which now acts as a tramping hut.

After visiting the adrenaline-fuelled party-town of Queenstown (we stayed two days so Kirk could recuperate from a nasty head cold and visited her godmother’s niece Fiona, her husband-builder Chris, and the incredibly large one-year old Torquil; the most adrenaline-fuelled activity we engaged in was bowling), we drove toward Fiordland National Park.

Milford Sound gets around two million visitors per year. We opted for the quieter stillness of Doubtful Sound a little further south than Milford. It is the second largest fiord in the park, and being the winter season, we got a discounted rate for an overnight boat trip. The trip starts with a one-hour boat ride across Lake Manapouri (famous for a massive underground hydro-station which supplies 85% of the power for the aluminium smelter in Bluff, NZ). The lake was still and the sun shone brightly. The wind however, was strong on the observation level of the boat; we stayed out longer than anyone.

From Manapouri, we transferred onto a bus for the 45-minute drive along NZ’s costliest road ($2 per centimetre) to the harbour of Deep Cove. At Deep Cove, we boarded the 70-passenger Fiordland Navigator, and were quickly treated to freshly baked blueberry-coconut muffins. The boat slowly made it’s way through the south arm of the fiord, while the boat’s nature guide, “Dolphin Dave” (a former Dept. of Conversation employee) detailed in the driest voice ever, the unique eco-system we were passing through. Dave never really found us any dolphins to look at…just a couple of bottlenose who were too busy looking for food.

The trip included an hour kayak through a portion of the fiord. Not as wild as our experience in Abel Tasman but it was cool being able to touch the dark rock walls, and paddle underneath a few waterfalls. After a hot bowl of soup, we headed out to the end of the fiord, and into the Tasman sea. Much choppier than the protected waters of the fiord, we spent a few moments observing seals on an outcropping of rock.

Dinner was a feast. We slept like babies in our bunkroom (despite the loud snoring of another passenger in the next bunk; we’ve smartened up and carry earplugs for all of the communal sleep experiences).

At 6:45 a.m. we found ourselves eating again before heading to the observation deck to experience the early morning magic and stillness of Hall Arm, one of the narrowest fingers of the fiord. Kirk found it hard to talk because it was just so enthralling to stare at all the natural beauty. There are people lucky enough to spend weeks exploring Doubtful Sound by boat and kayak; to be so removed from televisions, shopping, suburbs, cars, maps and hostels, work…a lifetime experience. We tasted it for 24 hours.

The tricky aspect of many NZ Great Walks is the transport to and from the trailheads. The Routeburn is no exception. Rather than fork over big dollars for a pick-up 300 km away, we opted to hike in and out of this Great Walk from the same car park north of the picturesque village of Glenorchy.

Most trampers hike the first day to Routeburn Falls Hut, about three hours. But with a weather forecast of ‘pissing rain’ for Saturday, we hiked six hours through the Harris basin and over the Harris Saddle (1200m) to reach Mackenzie Lake Hut. Kirk was mighty impressed with this time as the sign-posted times for this distance (20 km) said it would take approximately 10 hours.

Our sweat was rewarded with amazingly brilliant sub-alpine views of snow-capped peaks, the Hollyford river below, and the Tasman sea to the far west. And, our hut experiences were much better than the Welcome Flats as there weren’t as many snoring trampers. We’ve also learned that our decision to leave many of the Great Walks until now, rather than in the peak tramping summer months has been a good one. You don’t have to pre-book, there are fewer people, and the hut accommodation is much cheaper. The only downside: you risk poorer weather, and the off chance of having no firewood. But Kiwis are tough. And so are Canadians.

The first stop after our Beaconstone departure was the natural wonder of the Welcome Flat hot springs.

26 kilometres south of Fox and Franz Josef glaciers, the hike to the hot springs is the first section of the technically-demanding Copland Track. We aggressively hiked the 17-kms to the springs in 5.45 hours – lots of rock-hopping alongside the Copland River, and many flood/swing bridges (we were lucky…it hadn’t rained in a while).

Our sore feet and backs were rewarded with four natural hot pools with temperatures hovering around 35 degrees Celsius. Relaxing in the hot water, surrounded by the Copland range and big blue sky is definitely one of our NZ highlights. What wasn’t as enjoyable was sleeping in the hut with 21 other trampers.

All good things have to come to an end. On Saturday April 28, we departed the eco-beauty of Beaconstone and the good company of Nancy and Grae. 31 days went quickly. But that’s what happens when legends are born: surfing at Tuaranga, coffee and cake at The Bay House, marathon card games, sunsets and star-filled nights, the beauty of the Paparoas, Jack’s pizza and meatballs, and a healthier, alternative way to live.

The original plan was to leave Beaconstone on April 9, hook up with my friends Wade and Lisa LeBlanc from Hong Kong/Nova Scotia in the tourist-swamped glacier town of Franz Josef, and then return to Beaconstone on April 15 for two more weeks of WWoofing.

Of course, things don’t ever work out exactly as planned. Poor Lisa works too hard and got a nasty infection just before leaving Hong Kong. They still flew to Christchurch but were held up there longer than anticipated. And with Lisa being as sick as she was, she was in no shape for any aggressive glacier climbing, so our much-anticipated hook-up was kyboshed. I’m only getting over it now…

On our way down the coastal highway, Drew and I explored the wild food (link to wild food festival website) town of Hokitika, or Hoki as it is locally known. Each year the town hosts a driftwood sculpture competition on the black-sand beach. Hoki also has this beautiful old library that is now home to the tourist information centre (what town in New Ziwi doesn’t cater to tourists?)

Hoki also claims to be the greenstone capital of the country. Pounamu, or New Zealand jad, is collected from many of the surrounding rivers and carved in town. There are at least a dozen galleries selling the stuff, and shoppers to have to beware about cheap imports. Drew bought me a jade necklace back in February for my birthday (in the shape of a koru, or fiddlehead, which means new beginnings) but he elected to carve his own pendant. He would do it after we hiked the Franz Josef glacier.

While we’ve welcomed the warmth and comfort of the futon beds at Beaconstone, we were also jonesing to camp again. So we opted for a campsite 33kms east of Hoki, at Lake Kaniere. It reminds us of lakes back home. With only a few dozen cottages on the eastern side, it was really peaceful, and while it is autumn, it wasn’t at cold at night as we anticipated.

Before hitting the glacier towns further south, we drove a few more kilometres east through a valley with lots of dairy farms to visit the aqua-blue waters of the Hokitika gorge. We were both blown away by the colour and chose to have our breakfast on some rocks before the rain started.

As mentioned before, we hit really shitty weather at the glaciers – 25 mm per hour – but they took us up regardless. Our guide Andrew was friendly and laid back, and because of the weather, our group wasn’t too big.

The ironic thing was the next day we planned to hike up the first portion of the Copland Pass to Welcome Flat hot springs – a series of naturally-occurring hot pools – but because the weather was so terrible, we changed our plans to head back to Hokitika so Drew could carve his own jade pendant. There I was, standing on the beach in Hoki, with gorgeous clear views of the snow-capped Southern Alps. The pendant came out beautifully. It is a replica of the silver star my dad brought back from Slovenia for me when my oma (grandmother) passed away last fall.

On the way back to Beaconstone, we stopped off in the boring town of Greymouth for the noon-hour Monteith’s Brewery tour. Like so many local breweries, this one has been bought up by a conglomerate so most of the beers are now brewed in Auckland, however they still do batch brewing. It was a really down-home type of tour where we were allowed to stick our heads over the open vat of fermenting beer (quality control?) and then pour ourselves as many pints as we could handle before the tour finished at 1:30 p.m. I, of course, was DD.