Day One: Ascent to Routeburn Falls
Having finally packed our key essentials into our rucksacks (Paul's essentials somehow taking twice as much space as mine), we stuffed the rest into the boot of our car and parked it deep in the suburban streets of Queenstown to hide it from wannabe thieves, before retiring to bed.
We rose at 7am the following morning and caught a minibus to the town of Glenorchy at the far end of the lake. I don't imagine Glenorcy is ever a destination for anyone, comprising as it does just a couple of streets, a library the size of a garden shed, a small grocery and a large possum fur shop. Life does not look exciting here: the women of the town seemed largely preoccupied with their large broods of children, while the men (we were told) primarily engage in farming or hunting.
After a brief coffee break we were taken up a dirt track into the hills and dropped off at the Routeburn Shelter, the eastern end point of one of New Zealand's 'Great Walks', the Routeburn Track. This is also apparently where Peter Jackson filmed the scenes for Isengard in Lord of the Rings, although I guess a lot has changed since the ents defeated the orcs as Saruman's fortress wasn't really recognisable any more.
The track started with an easy ascent through temperate rainforest, a tangled mass of mossy evergreen beech trees vaguely reminiscent of Yakushima. The trees offered good shelter from the sun, but as a result we were only occasionally able to glimpse the vast, barren and snow-topped mountains which towered above us beyond the tree canopy. This part of the journey followed the Routeburn Gorge, which we crossed several times on very bouncy swing bridges, before heading up hill to the Routeburn Flats hut, one of four overnight refuges along the track. We only popped in for shade while we ate our lunch, but it did offer some superb views while we did so: the window looked out across a grassy plain bisected by the Routeburn river, with vast grey mountains rising up all around in the distance.
We realised during lunch that our provisions might perhaps be too ambitious, as the young Israeli couple near us were getting by with a white crusty loaf and primula cheese spread, while we were tucking into gluten-free, six-seed wholemeal loaf topped with cracked black pepper soft cheese.
We resumed the second leg of the day's journey and discovered it was entirely uphill (which I suppose we could have predicted, given the lunch hut was surrounded by mountains). The walk continued through verdant beech forest and I started to wish that there were fewer trees and more views. My hopes were in part realised when we come to a point where, in 1994, an avalanche had cleared a 50 metre wide tranche of mountainside, offering views down into the valley and all the way back to where our trek had begun.
We continued our ascent and before we knew it had arrived at the Routeburn Falls hut a kilometre above sea level, where we were booked in for the night. This was a little bit of a surprise as it was only 2:30pm and we had an entire afternoon to kill before we could even think about going to bed. We got round this by taking to our bunks for an afternoon nap.
The facilities in the hut were very basic. The dorm comprised an unlit room of 48 wooden bunks (all filled that night), next to which was an unlit toilet block with sinks and cold water (but no showers), where we were warned to take extra care at night as possums like to play in the cubicles. The kitchen was a large room lined with benches, with a series of sinks and hotplates against one wall and a single light bulb in the ceiling, which we were told is turned on at dusk and off promptly at 10pm.
I tried to wash myself in the sink after my nap, but as the sink was in public view this was not very easy, and I did not come as prepared as the two men who arrived in the toilet block, moistened their flannels in synchrony and then disappeared into their respective cubicles, to conduct who-knows-what mysterious ablutions.
Our dinner comprised a delicious and balanced combination of rehydrated beef teriyaki (recipe: add two cups of boiling water to packet, let stand for ten minutes) and a cup of flame grilled chicken noodle soup (recipe: add one and a half cups of water per packet, stir; no need to let stand as it is fast food), gobbled up with most of a packet of crackers.
Many of the other trekkers had also brought freeze dried food, but some particularly organised couples had carried individual ingredients up the mountain – each weighed out precisely and stored in a separate zip-lock bag – which they proudly assembled into meals which, due to the fact it was all one-pot cooking anyway, generally turned out the same as our freeze dried meal. The two exceptions were the family whose planning stretched to bringing a large bag of freshly made croutons to accompany their soup (which the son dumped entirely into his bowl) and the painfully thin vegetarian who appeared from the dorm room proudly carrying a carrot, a courgette and a tomato which he'd hoiked up the mountainside in order to make himself a bland and nutritionally unsound meal.
We called it a night at around 8pm and retired to our dorm, where sleep was a mere dream thanks to the constant talking, snoring, banging of doors and shining of torches. As one old man later commented, “It was more like being at the picture house.”
Day Two: Across the Harris Saddle to Lake Mackenzie
After finally getting to sleep, I woke to find that most of the bunks around me were already empty as everyone had gotten out for an early start. I woke Paul, we packed up our things and headed off on the track around 10am.
The path climbed up through the valley, meandered through grassy meadows and then ascended a tortuously steep and rocky valley wall, which would have been only half as bad if it were not for the baking heat. The Falls hut had marked the top of the tree line and, as there was not a cloud in the sky, I quickly found myself wondering why I'd wished away all of the tree cover the previous day.
Pausing behind a giant rock halfway up, we finally made it to the Harris Saddle at an altitude of 1,225 metres, just below which Lake Harris – the source of the Routeburn river – sits all glistening and pretty. We celebrated by stopping in the cool shade of the Harris Shelter for a brief brunch of salami and peanut butter sandwiches.
There was an optional steep side trek up Conical Hill from the shelter, which we'd initially thought we might quite like to do, but after nearly killing ourselves getting so far the idea of climbing yet more jagged rocks just for a view of the Tasman Sea (a body of water I didn't know even existed two days ago) seemed like folly. This was confirmed while we ate our brunch, when we overheard one middle-aged lady report, “Well I suppose it was a lovely view, though I was so tired I thought I'd puke.”
The trek thankfully descended after the saddle, following a steep valley wall through sub-alpine foliage, and offering some amazing views of the mountains and forests far below. The sun, alas, followed us into this valley, and so we took a lot of breaks when the rocks proved large enough to shelter behind. When back in the UK, I will have to remember to be thankful we still have an ozone layer.
After yet another climb up a rocky incline, we cut round into a new valley and saw far below us the tiny speck of the Mackenzie Hut – on the shore of Lake Mackenzie – which was to be our home for the evening. We descended the mountain in what felt like a never-ending series of zigzags until we finally crossed back over the tree line, and were embraced once again by the cool shade of the rainforest. This confusing and overgrown foliage again seemed to last forever, and we took a much needed rest break on a mossy stump until finally stumbling out into a clearing and finding the hut directly in front of us.
We arrived at around half three, which was only just early enough to secure a decent bunk bed. Only 16 individual bunks were provided here, with the remaining 34 hikers having to make do with one of several giant beds which were nominally divided into separate bunks and offered absolutely no personal space at all.
As the sun set, it beamed directly into my bunk and so – dehydrated and exhausted from the heat – I was sufficiently roused to retreat into the kitchen for a slap-up dinner of tinned sardines, crackers, seven seed sour dough bread and freeze dried Nasi Goreng (a meal whose description reached the epitome of vagueness: “Brown rice and vegetables in a mildly Asian style sauce”).
We took a stroll along the banks of the lake through yet another wild and overgrown beech forest to watch the sun settle just above the mountains. The lake water was clear and inviting and my body yearned to swim, having not felt the cleansing touch of water since Queenstown, but we watched as two young campers crept into the lake and winced as the glacial waters hit their testicles, and so we decided it was not for us.
We tried to go to bed, but a slightly feral old man on the bunk beside us – who reminded me of a muscular version of spimcoot's dad – instead regaled us with tales of his hiking accomplishments (including the somewhat egotistical claim that “Everyone says I could walk the hind legs off a donkey”), until we finally find the correct combination of words to politely express the desire that he shut up so we could turn in.
Day Three: Past Lake Howden to the Divide, and a shower in Te Anau
We woke up at around 6am and, figuring it was a good idea to make some progress before the sun rose properly, were out on the track by 7 o'clock. After a short ramble through yet more beech forest we ascended for half an hour and found ourselves looking down into a new valley which I initially thought was filled with a giant lake, but which we soon realised was in fact a dense carpet of morning mist far down near the valley floor.
We made our way quickly around the wall of the valley, met a very lovely waterfall and then descended down to Lake Howden, where the fourth hut on the track sits. We paused only briefly at the Howden hut figuring we were making such quick progress without the full glare of the sun that we ought to keep going. We thus disappeared again into thick rainforest and made a quiet descent down to the western end of the trek, at the Divide.
We had pre-arranged transport from the Divide shelter out of the Fiordlands National Park with a company called Tracknet, but that was not scheduled until 3:15pm. As we had set off so early – and walked so fast – we found ourselves emerging out of the undergrowth at 11:30am, and were somewhat surprised to see that there were absolutely no alternative means of transport (short of hitch-hiking) back to civilisation. Quite a few other walkers collected in the shelter during our tedious four hour wait, and I can't help feeling Tracknet might make life a bit easier with a couple more pickups. The fact is, the last leg of the Routeburn Track really does not require a full day's trekking.
The bus eventually dropped us off at the Lakeview Holiday Park in Te Anau, where we checked into an apartment and introduced ourselves to the three hallmarks of civilisation: hot showers, clean clothes and a Come Dine With Me marathon on the telly. We had dinner at a pretty shoddy pizzeria in town (but frankly were thankful for any food that didn't require any cups of boiling water stirred into it) before retiring to our real, comfortable bed in an attempt to watch Project Runway and – in failing to work out when it was showing – watching instead an utterly dreadful CSI clone called Criminal Minds, in which cod psychology is used to catch criminals (“Interesting, the killer used a knife to stab her. I think we're looking for an adult male around fourteen feet high called Henrietta”).
And to Summarise...
We'd heard lots of great things about the Fiordlands and had both expected the Routeburn Track to be an absolute highlight of our entire holiday, and perhaps by building it up so much we were setting ourselves up for a disappointment.
Our first issue was the lack of variety: anticipating seeing some truly open and dramatic scenery we instead spent a lot of time tramping through dark and damp beech rainforests. Even though the track notes tried to draw a distinction between the three different species of beech tree encountered on the track, this did not quite strike us as variety enough. This aside, we did see some stunning lakes, waterfalls and mountain ranges. Perhaps we had just set our expectations too high.
A second issue was that we never really got any sense of achievement, largely because the pathway was overly tamed – taking a map wasn't even officially recommended – and because we were only required to walk short distances each day. We didn't once have a full day of walking, finishing at 2:30pm on the first day and before midday on the last. The whole route might have better suited a two day trek – broken after the tortuous climb to the Harris Saddle – but without a night hut there this simply isn't possible. Alternatively, without carrying a heavy pack you could do the trek in a single exhausting but possibly exhilarating day, but that would be madness unless you could reliably predict the weather (as the various memorials to the dead we encountered during the trek will testify): you cannot afford to get caught unprepared for a storm in the Fiordlands, and storms come quick and without warning.
Despite these criticisms, Routeburn gave us a superb introduction to trekking in New Zealand (or 'tramping', as the locals insist on calling it) and we'd definitely want to do another track if we ever come back, although next time round we might do more research into distances walked and scenery on offer. The whole experience was also a very pleasant holiday away from the holiday, and tramping through the countryside let us really switch off and unwind in a way that sight-seeing and dolphin hunting – for all their wonders – really hasn't.
Always finish on a joke:
The very highlight of the trek came right at the end, when the entire shelter full of bored trekkers waiting for their bus was united in laughter by the inopportune comment of an older Yorkshire lady who had been trekking with her husband: “Peter, shall I hold your pole while you go to the toilet?” His brilliant response, once the laughter had died down: “We're not at home now, Brenda.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment