Te Araroa, Days 24 – 30: Wanaka to Twizel

Guess what – yesterday was my one-month trail anniversary! Since I started out on January 1, I’ve hiked 395 miles – about 350 on the Te Araroa, and another 45 on the Routeburn and Caples Tracks! Milestones are truly the spice of life, are they not? I have also eaten 6 jars of peanut butter and commandeered the computer stations of 4 public libraries – which, by the way, greetings from the Twizel Community Library, where I am nestled in a room containing two desktop computers and the staff kitchenette. The library is actually in a wing of the Twizel Area School, which appears to contain the entirety of primary and secondary classes (kindergarten to 12th grade in US terms). If you ever find yourself in Twizel, please be aware that both the grocery store and the liquor store close at 8:00 pm, and plan your activities accordingly. Preamble concluded.

From the town of Wanaka, where last I regaled you from a trailer park, our little gang walked northeast 18 miles to the town of Lake Hawea, located on the south bank of a lake called… Lake Hawea. This area of New Zealand was heavily glaciated between 23,000 – 18,000 years ago, and is characterized by a series of deep and massive glacial lakes surrounded by the sheer shoulders of the mountains. In some areas, the glaciers have scoured the mountainsides, sandpapering their slopes into rounded mounds and generating steep boulder- and scree-fields that slump from the hilltops all the way down into the creek beds. In the distance, snow-covered peaks rise even higher up into the sky, snaring tattered cloud fragments. After a month here, I still cannot stop hungrily stuffing my eyeballs with the sight of these incredible landscapes.

In Lake Hawea, the Hot Creek Water gang decided to book a room – with BEDS! – in a holiday park, take hot showers, and sleep ourselves giddy. The next day’s hike out of Lake Hawea would take us up 1200 meters (nearly 4000 feet) of elevation to the summit of Breast Hill and then down the other side into the steep valley of the Timaru River. I told the gang that I planned to set out early so as to complete the climb before the hottest part of the day, and then smashed around the room at 6:30 am futilely trying not to wake everyone else up as I dropped basically every heavy thing within reach onto the floor one at a time while cursing under my breath. Have I mentioned that I’m an excellent roommate?

Re. the walk up Breast Hill – I have developed a style of hiking up steep mountains that involves willing myself to take at least 50 steps at a time (60, 70, 80 or more steps at a time accrues special bonus points), after which I’m allowed to stop, turn around, and look back at the view behind me while the lactic acid burn in my legs ebbs away. One benefit of this approach is that I get to talk to numerous people as they pass me on their way up, and because Breast Hill is a popular day hike for local masochists I have several pleasant conversations en route. I talk with a couple who both work for the Department of Conservation (hereafter DOC) in their wildlife research division. They work on two endemic bird species – kea and kiwi, respectively – and I recognize an opportunity to pester them with all of my pent-up bird questions. Kea and Kiwi confirm for me that there is only one species of swallow in NZ, the welcome swallow, and that all the browner-looking swallows I’ve seen likely look different from the textbook blue-hued bird because of dietary differences. I also verify that the bird that attacked me right before I met them was a New Zealand falcon. Handy info, that. I had been walking along peacefully when I noticed a small hawk hovering in the wind ahead of me. It flew, and then – shockingly – seemed to disappear. As I looked around myself like a stupid idiot, the bird was actually executing a classic Top Gun maneuver, floating directly above my head and prepping for a dive-bomb. Suddenly there were talons in my face and Tom Cruise isn’t even around to mourn over my ravaged body and say, “Talk to me, Goose!”

The day’s hike concludes at Stody’s Hut, an old shack with corrugated metal walls and roof, a tarp pinned down over an earthen floor, and a tiny doorway through which taller hikers have to stoop in order to enter. Over the past few days we have begun to encounter larger numbers of southbound hikers, and since there are already several SOBOs at the hut I decide to pitch my tent in the grassy patch around the bend. I make some new friends, among them Sabino, originally from Tasmania but now an NZ resident for the past several years, who has spent a few seasons doing trail and hut maintenance work for DOC. Unlike many of the other walkers out here, who are wearing lightweight trail running sneakers, Sabino has heavy-duty waterproof hiking boots with thick soles. Over the course of the next few days I see his boot tracks on the trail in front of me and it makes me smile to know that he’s just ahead of me somewhere.

About which – Sabino hikes like a tank. A tale, to illustrate: From Stodys Hut we descend to the bottom of the Timaru River valley and then walk against the current, up the Timaru River itself, to Top Timaru Hut. I slosh up to where the river emerges from a rock-walled canyon, spilling explosively from gaps between boulders and then running quickly down a narrow channel. I try unsuccessfully to swim/climb/grapple up this, decide I don’t want to die alone, and then backtrack downstream to find a trail up a cliff, through the woods, and back into the river on the other side. Later, I tell Sabino about my circumnavigation of the Death Flume and it turns out that he just walked straight through it without thinking much about it. Tank.

The next two days, from Top Timaru to Lake Ohau, are solitary but easy walking, about 32 miles total. We’ve all spread out and are walking at our own paces, so the days are quiet and, for me, full of ambling reflection. From Timaru it’s up to the top of Mt. Martha, then down among the rolling hills of a ranch, and finally across the Ahuriri River, whose vast basin with its stepped-back embankments looms like a chasm into some rocky underworld. A hot wind blasts up and over the lip of the gorge. I cross at the most upstream point I can access so that when the current hungrily tears at my thighs and walking poles, pulling me insistently downriver, I have room to maneuver my way to the other bank. Again, later, I learn that Sabino just splashed right across. Way to deflate my drama balloon, man.

I meet up with Harold again at Lake Ohau and we walk the next section, into the town of Twizel, together. Upon arrival in Twizel I take off my shoes and achieve total foot dissociation. I look at these swollen feet and think, these do not look like mine, nope. I would not recognize these in a foot lineup. They appear to be attached to my legs so I decide to keep them for now. Then it’s off to dinner where I prop these strange feet up on a bar bench and we bump into some other semi-feral hikers, with whom we talk in voices that are evidently a little to loud to be entirely polite to the other customers.