To Hanmer Springs and Back

The morning I left Boyle Flat Hut, I said a bright goodbye to Katherine and the others, lingering a moment in the doorway before stepping out into the cool hush of morning. The air smelled of damp earth, of pine, of the peak summer breeze. The track stretched ahead, flat and shaded, a gentle luxurious path toward town. I decided to listen to music instead of birdsong, telling myself I had earned a small indulgence.

At the Boyle Outdoor Center, I tore into a frozen pizza, barely pausing to let the cheese cool. A group of environmental science students sat nearby, and soon, I had drawn them into conversation, peppering them with questions about the land I had been walking through. They explained how the Boyle landscape was unique—how the land there falls away into sand drop-offs so sudden and dramatic that they look like something unfinished. The students said that the land is still deciding what shape to take. We sat talking for an hour, maybe two, before I hoisted my pack and turned toward Hanmer Springs.

Hitchhiking in New Zealand is a dream. The longest I’ve ever waited is fifteen minutes, and even then, it was only because the road was quiet. People stop. They don’t ask why you’re out there, standing on the shoulder with your thumb out. They just pull over, pop the door open, and say, “Where you headed?” I have never felt unsafe, nor have I met another woman on the trail who has. Hitching is part of the culture here, and man, is it convenient. 

The boys who picked me up were young, college-aged. Their names, if they gave them, are gone from me now. The one in the passenger seat wore a camo hat with Lakeview, Oregon stitched across the back. I asked him about his time in rural Oregon, and he grinned.

“I’m just a poser,” he said. He’d never been to the States, he just liked the look of camo these days.

It was a long ride, and they were talkers. The boy in the camo hat was moving to Melbourne, Australia the next day. The two childhood friends were embarking on one last adventure before life stretched out between them. They had the easy, rhythmic banter of lifelong friends, a language made up of inside jokes and half-told stories. They rattled off their South Island recommendations, but each one came tangled up in personal history.

“You have to go to Sheffield,” the driver said. “Best minced pie you’ll ever have.”

“Don’t listen to him,” the camo hat boy cut in. “Sheffield’s a waste of time. So-and-so got food poisoning there.”

And then they were off, bickering back and forth, arguing about the details of the food poisoning incident, about whether Sheffield was worth the stop or whether it was an unforgivable blight on the New Zealand pie scene. One memory unraveled into another, and then another, until we were no longer talking about pies at all. I sat back, listening, watching the landscape roll by, thinking how some friendships are stitched so tightly to the past that they can stretch across any distance.

The road to Hanmer Springs is long and winding, a ribbon of asphalt laid over hills that rise and fall like the breath of some great, sleeping thing. You drive through country that seems uninhabited but for merino sheep in their summer coats, their backs turned to the wind. There are fences, too, running up hillsides, though it’s hard to say what they are holding in, or keeping out. The air is sharp with the scent of pine, and when the road turns steep, the forest presses in, dark and close. Then, without warning, the trees break, and there it is—a town built in the lap of the mountains, steam rising from the pools like breath in the cold.

After getting dropped off, I found my way to Hanmer Springs Backpackers, where I checked in and climbed the stairs to the dormitory. I had barely stepped inside when a voice, low and familiar, greeted me.

“Hello, Grace.”

Tim. Lying on his twin bed, eyes still closed, as though he had been expecting me all along. 

“Tim!” I said, delighted. He must have heard my laugh downstairs.

Tim had already been in town long enough to know who else had arrived. He listed off names—most of them familiar, fellow hikers I had last seen huddled in the damp of Blue Lake Hut. Over the next few days, we slipped into an easy rhythm, falling into the simple pleasures of rest: late mornings, long afternoons at the bakery, lazy hours on the back porch of the hostel. There was nowhere to be, nothing pressing to do. We swapped stories and cream liquor, filling the hours with talk of families, of past selves, of the winding, unsteady roads that had led us here. 

By the time our break was nearing its end, Tim felt less like a friend and more like a brother. We could look at each other and share a knowing glance, a whole conversation in a flicker of the eye. Somewhere along the way, we had decided we would walk Arthur’s Pass together. Maybe I had been inspired by the ride into town, by the kind of friendships that refuse to fade.

On our last day in Hanmer, we finally went to the famous hot pools.

It was easy to tell the hikers apart from the tourists. The women from the trail wore sports bras instead of bikini tops, their bodies marked with awkward tan lines and the faint red of pack straps. In the water, people sat shoulder to shoulder, their bodies sunk deep, their faces turned up, eyes half-lidded. The heat worked its way into bones, into joints, into the places where time had settled in and made itself at home. 

The Hamner Spring’s tunnel slides.

Tim and I wandered from pool to pool until he spotted Lisa and Marcel—a couple he had been desperate to see again. He had spent a night sharing a shipping container with them, hiding from a storm, or a possum, I can’t quite recall the details. He had talked about them so often I already felt like I knew them. They turned out to be as wonderful as he famed them to be. We spent the afternoon like kids, racing down the tunnel slides, laughing so hard our faces turn red. When we left, we agreed to leave for Arthur’s pass around the same time. Tim and I left those two with a ‘see you later‘ instead of a ‘goodbye’. 

On our final morning in Hanmer, Tim and I went for one last cinnamon bun. Then we stood by the roadside, packs on, thumbs out, ready to hitch back to Boyle and pick up where we had left off.

As the road unfurled ahead of us, I gave Hanmer Springs a small wave of gratitude. It had been a gem of a town, and I had been lucky to find myself there.