Some laundry done, and sleeping in a warm room. These are the things we would find you miss when you hike a lot. But we knew where we were going (The Takitimu Mountains) and had a ride to the trail head (Kevin). So off we went.
It's only about 80km from the South Coast, but the terrain is dramatically different. Dryer, but with less prominent topography.
And like much of the beautiful hiking in New Zealand, the trailheads are accessible by car, if you are willing to drive 15km down a dirt road. This one starts just after the bridge.
This is Kevin, by the way. He's been hiking and driving around New Zealand about as long as we've been in the Southern Hemisphere. He has a bit of an obsession with the flora of NZ, including its mushrooms. He started collecting a few within minutes of beginning the hike (they were pretty tasty, actually).
This was also our first experience with hiking not on well formed tracks, but on what are called "Marked Routes". This means there may or may not be an actual trail, but rather than maintain the trail at all, DOC only bothers to put up markers periodically to keep you from getting lost. These can be orange topped poles like above, or orange triangles nailed to trees (much like the Appalachian Trail uses white painted blazes on trees.)
We were hiking in the middle of the Waterloo Station (I think a Station in New Zealand is the equivalent of calling something a "ranch" in the States). It's full of tussock downs (Tussock is a native grass, growing in massive clumps, sometimes as tall as a person, and very annoying to hike through.)
But as you can see, in the distance is the actual mountain range, and as majestic as any other in New Zealand.
Crossing rivers is still usually done by suspension bridge.
Along one of the smaller ridgelines, a complete cow carcass. We would see a few of these, as well as plenty of cows in the lowlands of the Takitimus. Maybe, like the States, you can lease grazing lands on National Park land, or maybe part of the mountains are privately held.
The three of us decided to make for a small hunting bivy up the in mountains, and then depending on weather, try to hike along the tops of the mountains the next day. This required a 10km hike along a very poorly marked route, which seems like it was a real trail at one point, but was starting to be allowed to return to the bush. In other words, over grown and muddy.
That lovely clearing you see? Alpine or sub-Alpine marsh. Not really muddy, per se, but the mossy ground would easily swallow your foot well above your boot, which would then fill with mossy water very quickly. We skirted the edge.
Kevin told us that this peculiar little flower is carnivorous.
Evidenly, bugs get caught on the little dewy drops, and then digested.
We did make it to the bivy around 6PM. What's a bivy, you may ask? Typically, in New Zealand, a bivy is a very basic hut. Four walls, a fireplace, and usually a couple bunks. Not much else. This was such a hut, with only two beds.
But wait! you say. There are three of you!
That is correct. Molly and I shared the bottom bunk. Which wouldn't have been too bad, except it was a pretty narrow bunk. And we were starting to find Kevin's particular personality traits (like his social awkwardness, lack of sense of personal space, and general strangness) only got worse when forced in a tiny space like the bivy. We would have loved to have stayed outside, but sandflies were rampant. We would only learn after this hike that sandflies breed in fast moving streams, and as we were staying in the fork between two alpine streams, the sandflies were relentless. Even in the hut, we had a keep a fairly smoky fire going non-stop to keep them away.
The next morning, a decision was made. Kevin still wanted to try hiking the tops of the mountains, but because of a much more overcast sky, and a need to get away, we made some excuse about not wanting to stay in another bivy (which was true) and hiked in the opposite direction from him, back down the valley. 10km, through the mud again.
Which is how we got here. Back to Waterloo Station, and then turning northward to try to reach the north edge of the Mountains in a couple days. From there, we would hitch to Te Anau. We ended up making a good decision, as it rained pretty hard off and on all day.
At first, the hiking was pretty good. We had two options: follow the newly created route for Te Aroroa (the long distance trail crossing both islands), or a jeep track for 5 or 6 km. Most of the notes we had seen at a previous hut said that the Te Aroroa trail was muddy and unpleasant, so we choose the jeep track.
Saw some more cows.
Cows in New Zealand are remarkably skittish for an island nation with no large predators whatsoever. Most cows in the States couldn't really care less if you walk toward them, but you so much as look at a cow here in the wrong way, and it runs away.
We thought that our good luck in trail selection would continue, and then the road ended at a creek bed. The valley was glacially carved, which means that the space between the mountains was pretty flat, and the river flowing down it had plenty of room to meander back and forth. Hence, the road ending and we started needing to cross it. Over and over and over again. After about a dozen crossings, we ended up here.
Becketts Hut was slightly nicer than the Aparima Forks bivy from the previous night. Four bunks, plenty more room.
And in the morning, with clear skies, a great view. Also, because this hut was off any sort of beaten path, we got it to ourselves.
You'll note that the bones from this cow aren't chewed on whatsoever. Again, no natural medium or large predators here. If a cow dies, it stays put until most of it just rots away.
So the problem with being off the beaten path is that there is often no path at all. The first 5 km from the Becketts hut took us more than 5 hours. Again, lots and lots of stream crossings, no markers, and lots of annoying tussock. Anything that wasn't tussock looked like this. Or was full of logs to jump over. Or prickly bushes. Eventually, our trail re-connected with Te Aroroa, which at least had the advantage of being marked, and of at least a couple hundred people hiking this year, which tramped down the grasses and ferns a bit.
And after a rather steep and steamy climb, got these views.
Those mountains in the distance are the end of the Southern Alps, and behind them, the Fjords.
Ahh, finally back to flat land. A wonderful hut, and one accessible by the road. The dirt road you see lead, after about 5km behind me, to the highway to Te Anau. We were lucky to have arrived relatively early. Because you could, in fact, just drive to this hut, and it only had 6 bunks, it filled up by 4PM.
Which actually ended up being good for us. After we claimed our bunks, and had just barely gotten dressed after a naked dip in the stream to clean up, four Germans showed up in a van. They had all just finished Te Aroroa a few weeks before, and were now driving around New Zealand seeing other hikes and touristy parts.
Like most Germans that we had encountered, they were pretty standoffish, at least. But finally, after a frew hours of awkwardly pretending that we didn't exist, we started chatting with them. And got a bunch of great ideas for places to go hiking. In fact, pretty much all the places I will blog about in the next few days were places they had hiked on Te Aroroa and recommended highly for us to do. And they were right about how they were the pretty parts of the trail.
So after a nice talk around the fire, Molly and I went to bed. We had booked an AirBnb in Te Aroroa the next evening, and wanted to try to get to town early. Our host had kayaks, and we were keen to try to borrow them ASAP.
Early the next morning, we hiked to the road.
Yep, the cows were still pretty scared of us.
The problem with hitching to a place where lots of tourists go in New Zealand, particularly early in the morning, is that tourists really don't pick up hitchhikers. Nor do tour buses. Te Anau is the last town before you really get deep into the fjords, and so everyone touring the South Island stops there for at least a bit. We saw at least two full tour buses for every car going by, and every car going by had that 'just a bit too clean and new looking to not be a rental' look, which was confirmed by the fact that no one picked us up for several hours. At last, a nice woman who owned a 5,000+ acre ranch with around 10,000 sheep on it picked us up. She was heading into Te Anau to buy some groceries.
Sadly, we didn't make it early enough to rent kayaks that day, but the next day promised better weather anyway, and our host showed us how to get the kayaks to the lake, and let us pay him cash at half his going rate to stay an extra day, so we weren't too worried. We also decided to splurge: We hadn't made it to the fjords with Molly's parents, so we booked a day on Milford Sound--3 hours kayaking, and 3 hours on a boat cruise down the length of the sound. It wasn't cheap, but the fjords are supposed to be breathtaking, and the shuttle service to Milford promised they would drop us off on the way back at another trail head. Perfect! We could keep hiking our way North by using the Greenstone Track.
And tomorrow, we'd get to kayak on Lake Te Anau, for free. Life seemed (and was) pretty good. And on top of that, we had a decent structure of a plan for the next month of our lives. Which we really hadn't had for a while now. Rather than lurch from one hike to the next, we could actually expect what was coming up. Not too shabby.
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