Glowworm Grottos and Fluffy Blue Dinosaurs

            I’m back from a very, very abbreviated hike on the Kepler track; walking approximately one sixth of the track, thanks to a knee injury from last week’s adventures in Milford.   The Kepler Track is a 60 kilometer tramp, and one of Fiordland’s three Great Walks, and is usually hiked over four days.   The trail climbs up the side of Mount Luxmore, follows an alpine ridge with views into the South Arm of Lake Te Anau, drops into the Iris Burn valley, follows the Iris Burn to where it empties into Lake Manapouri, then follows the Waiau River (famously rich in both vowels and brown trout) back to Te Anau.   The walk is famous for having great views over the alpine section, and is considered by some trampers to have both better and more varied scenery than any of the other Fiordland great walks.   

Waiau River, from a viewpoint near the Rainbow Reach shuttle bus stop

            In this instance, the best thing I’ve found about the Kepler Track is that, unlike the Milford Track, hikers can hike the trail in either direction, and spend as many nights in huts as they wish.    (On the Milford Track, everyone hikes in the same direction, and stays one night in each hut; no exceptions.)   

            The Kepler Track also has public transport, via bus and water taxi,  that accesses a few points on the trail, allowing trampers to trim a few kilometers off of the beginning and end of their hike if they wish.    I spent two nights at Moturau Hut, which thanks to the Tracknet shuttle bus, only requires six kilometers of hiking to get to.   The hut is very pretty, located right on the side of Lake Manapouri.   The place sort of felt like a lakeside resort, only without the resort.    I took most of the day to walk in, resting often wherever there was a convenient log with a view.   There were a few scenic vistas over the Waiau River, which doubled as the River Anduin in the Lord of the Rings movies.   Also, the wetland marsh that the trail crosses is billed as being similar to the nearby marsh that was the film location for the Dead Marshes.   (I’m told that the Hobbit movie film crew was back in Te Anau earlier this year, but I haven’t heard where, or what, they were filming.)   

Wetland boardwalk on the Kepler Track

            The next day at Moturau Hut, I walked a small section of the trail leading to the mouth of Iris Burn, but mostly I spent the day hanging out on the sandy beaches bordering the lake.   Right now, there is a lot more beach on the lake than there usually is, thanks to three weeks of dry weather, and an accompanying low water level.   Manapouri is very pretty, and is dotted with a number of small islands.   This lake was the center of a huge New Zealand environmental controversy in the 1970s, when plans were made to raise the level of the lake by thirty meters as part of a hydroelectricity scheme to power a smelting plant on the south coast.    In a dazzling stroke of engineering genius, the plan that was finally implemented involved not raising the lake, but lowering the hydroelectric plant – it is 200 meters underground, and the entire scheme was designed to produce electricity from the lakes, while still keeping their water level within natural levels.   It’s the second largest electric plant anywhere in New Zealand, and according to the signage at Lake Te Anau, there is no other hydroelectric plant like it anywhere in the world.  

Sunrise, Lake Manapouri

           The one epic failure of the Kepler trip was that the book I took with me was horrible, and there were only so many informative DOC publications in the hut…   I had ample time to read all of them.   I now know that there is a small kiwi population in the area of the Iris Burn hut, and the DOC is trying to increase their trapping program to entice kiwi to move into areas of the park closer to Te Anau.   Their aim in doing so is partly to allow more people to hear wild kiwi, without having to hike for two days to get into their habitat.   (There have occasionally been kiwi heard at Moturau Hut, where I was, off and on, but none that appear to stay in the area permanently.)   Also, the Kepler track is home to a colony of long-tailed bats, one of New Zealand’s only species of indigenous mammals.  The bats were discovered last spring by the kiwi researchers who, just for fun, took a bat detector with them on one of their kiwi surveys.   The colony is near Rocky Point, and that section of trail is now home to an intensive rat-trapping program – which has trapped as many as 70 rats in a month in the vicinity of the colony.   

            The Kepler Track is also close to the area where takahe were re-discovered in 1948, after being presumed extinct for nearly fifty years.   Takahe are a species of endemic, flightless birds, who graze on the high alpine areas in New Zealand’s more remote mountains.   At six pounds, they’re the largest living species of rail anywhere in the world, and have a huge red bill, and a natty blue sheen to their plumage.   Not having kept the ability to fly, the takahe have slowly evolved their way into something resembling a diminutive, fluffy blue dinosaur.   I was lucky enough to see several takahe at Te Anau’s birdlife park, which runs a breeding program for these birds.   There is still a beleaguered population of a few dozen wild takahe living in the hills above Te Anau, which has now been supplemented by introduced populations on four small predator-free islands.

Takahe; photo courtesy Wikipedia

            The first night at Moturau Hut was fairly busy – perhaps thirty people in the hut, a dozen of whom were American exchange students on spring break from a program in Wellington.   The next night, there were only five in the hut – most of the people who were walking down from Iris Burn hut elected to bypass Moturau Hut in favor of walking another six kilometers and catching the shuttle bus back to Te Anau.   This is the last week that the huts will be staffed.   Although the huts are available for use in the winter, DOC will be closing down the gas cookers and the plumbing.   Even around Te Anau, you can tell that it’s well and truly the beginning of the off-season.   I think Easter was probably the last gasp.

            I think Te Anau would be an interesting place to spend the off-season because it seems like there is a pretty active winter community.   I spent some time with a group of Anglican church ladies here - I set up their sound system for then on Easter Sunday, and they in turn invited me to a craft night. The ladies are already busy planning community dinner-and-movie nights, as  well as a ‘Christmas dinner’ to be held in June or July.   (This further strengthens my notion that holidays here ought to be celebrated during the season of the year they were originally meant to commemorate - i.e. Christmas in winter, Easter in spring – not on a specific calendar date.)   There are also community markets, and live concerts being advertised for the coming months.   On the whole, not a bad place to hang out, which is good, since hanging out is mostly what I’ve been doing the past few days.

            After returning from Moturau Hut, I visited the Te Anau glowworm caves.   The caves are on the far side of Lake Te Anau, accessible by a boat trip across the lake, followed by small-group tours of the cave itself.   Some aspects of the tour were pretty unique – it is not often that a visitor would willingly sit silently, for several minutes, in total darkness, all for the purpose of looking at bugs.   The glowworm cave itself was impressive – the passages were very narrow, and the bottom of the cave is still basically a river; this part of the cave isn’t old enough to have dried out.   There were a also number of small waterfalls, cascading from one pool to another.   The glowworm cave was discovered in 1948, and had already become a tourist attraction by the 1960s.   Judging by the early pictures, the cave was equipped with basically the same sort of set-up that is used today – raised wooden catwalks over the floor of the cave, and a boat  ride at the far end out to see some of the thicker constellations of glowworms.   

What the boat tours would look like with the lights on.   This is taken from Real Journeys' website, as photography, being disruptive to the glowworms, is not permitted inside the cave

            Our tour group crab-walked through a very low entrance, and through a few hundred meters of cave passages on raised boardwalks, arriving at the glowworm pier after about ten minutes.   There, we got onto small dinghies, and were ferried further into the cave in total darkness, lit only by the lights of the glowworms themselves.   We stopped under one of the thickest clusters, sat and watched for a few minutes, and then slowly boated back to the pier.   It must be interesting learning how to navigate a boat using only worm-light; I asked one of the guides later, and she said that they follow a rope that’s been strung along the wall of the grotto, using it to pull the boats along.   All other course corrections are made by shoving off of rocks, and bumping into things.   Of course, it would be hard to get terribly lost in the grotto – the passage isn’t very long, and there isn’t another exit, at least, not one above the water.   The whole cave system itself extends through seven kilometers of known passages, many of which can only be accessed with scuba gear.    

            Since the visitable portion of the cave is so small, and the dinghies only seat 14 people, there were actually five different cave tours making their way through the passages, all with slightly staggered start times.   The guides seemed pretty deft at juggling the groups around – but the guide I was with definitely sounded like she had been giving the same glowworm spiel dozens of times a day for a few too many months.    She wasn’t bad, or unfriendly by any means – just possibly a little too burnt out on glowworms.   Or a little too burnt out on tourists; sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Where the Waterfalls Are: Four Days on the Milford Track

            I’m back from four days on the Milford Track and two days in Milford Sound itself.   The trip was amazing, with this year’s unusually dry autumn weather persisting through the entire trip.   Planning for this trip, I was prepared to be soaking wet from the time I got off the boat at the trailhead, to the moment I arrived back in Te Anau.   However, there was only about two hours of rain while we were hiking, plus a few showers in the fjord the day after I finished the hike.   

Boarding the boat at Te Anau Downs

            The Milford Track starts out with a bus ride from the DOC center in Te Anau, followed by a forty-five minute boat trip to the northern end of Lake Te Anau, where we got off with out bags, took pictures standing next to the trailhead sign, and started on our way.   The first day’s hiking, starting as it does at around 3pm, is only about three kilometers – and less for the guided hike walkers.   (They stay in fancier lodges, and don’t have to carry food, cooking gear, or sleeping bags – but the downside is that their hiking days and distances aren’t broken up as logically as the independent walkers staying in the DOC huts.)   We passed the first guided walk lodge (Glade House), sniffed wistfully at the food smells drifting from the kitchen, and continued down the track through mossy forest towards Clinton Hut, and our foil bags of freeze-dried food.   Clinton Hut is perched at the edge of a wetland area, and there is a great view of the surrounding mountains from the helicopter landing pad next to the hut.   I stashed my gear in the bunkhouse, and joined about half of the hikers for a nature walk given by the hut ranger.   One of the things he pointed out was a set of kiwi tracks nosing through the mud near the hut.   This is exciting because kiwi are still quite rare, even in places as remote as Fiordland National Park, due to pressure from introduced predators, like stoats.   The Milford Track, among other places in Fiordland, has an intensive stoat and possum trapping program, designed to keep the populations of these introduced species at a level low enough that the native birds species are still able to raise chicks without invasive mammals eating their eggs.   Pink triangular markers indicate where the traps are; they dot the trail like randomly placed trail blazes.   I asked one of the rangers how many traps there were on the trail, and she lost count somewhere north of 200 - which is already an average of about six per mile.

            That evening in the hut, I made the acquaintance of six Australian women who were hiking the trail, and ended up whole-heartedly adopting me as a dinner companion and hiking buddy.   They were brilliant, and getting to know such fantastic ladies was definitely one of the best parts about the trip. 

            It rained very heavily that night, and we woke up the next morning hastily changing into waterproof layers, and wrestling with pack covers and plastic liners.   Because it’s late in the season, it would be dark when we got up in the morning, and dark when we finished eating dinner.   If you can imagine a bunkroom full of forty hikers, all wearing headlamps, scrambling around trying to pack their gear in the dark, it sort of looks like a wilderness laser light show.   This scene repeated itself morning and evening for the whole trip; it was actually quite entertaining.  

Getting organized at Dumpling Hut

            The second day turned out misty.   The rain the night before had been heavy enough to turn on the waterfalls coming down the sides of the valley, but not heavy enough to flood the trail.   The waterfalls are one of the many celebrated features of walking the Milford Track.   One of the purported benefits to hiking the track in very rainy weather is that the more rain the track gets, the more numerous and spectacular the waterfalls become.   That being said, really heavy rain can also completely flood out the trail, as well as the whole valley, in fairly short order.   Many of the low-lying sections of trail had yellow-topped metal poles set every twenty to thirty feet to show where the trail is during flooding.   According to the Mintaro Hut ranger, walking through thigh-high water in parts of the trail is not uncommon.   Occasionally, the flooding can get so bad that the trail is completely impassable, and in these instances, the DOC will either hold everyone in the hut for an extra day, or use helicopters to ferry hikers past the flooded sections of trail.   This is one of the many huge advantages to hiking one of the Great Walks.   For a modest fee of $50 per night, you not only get a decent mattress, a flush toilet, a gas stove, a friendly ranger, and an up-to-date weather report, but you also get access to helicopter transport should things go terribly wrong.   One reason that New Zealand is so good at running world-class wilderness hiking trails is that they have been doing it for a long time.   New Zealand was the first country in the world to have a Department of Tourism (started somewhere around 1903), which helped to establish and fund guided eco-tourism operations about a century before the rest of the world.    Actually, the Milford Track itself was once hiked exclusively by catered, guided parties.   This changed in the mid sixties, when New Zealand trampers began agitating that they have equal access to their own wilderness areas, without having to pay for the services of a guide.   In what must have been one of the most fun protests in the history of wilderness protest movements, a group of trampers hiked the Milford track independently, carrying their own tents and food, setting up what has become the model for independent walking on DOC-managed hiking trails.

Lake near the trail, in the Clinton Valley

            Contrary to Peter the hut ranger’s expectations, the rain stopped around mid-morning, the clouds burnt off, and we started seeing more of the tops of the surrounding mountains.   Except that calling them mountains might give the wrong impression.   Thousand-foot lengths of sheer vertical cliff face might be a more accurate description.   

            Blanche Edith Broughton was one of the first writers to popularize the Milford Track, after writing an article describing her experiences on the trail in the early 1900s.   She coined the phrase ‘the finest walk in the world’, which, a century later, is still frequently used to describe the Milford Track.   Ms. Broughton also described the surrounding country as a land dominated by the vertical.   The valleys in Fiordland are glacially-carved, and have the classic glacier valley profile – steep sides, with a wider, flatter bottom.   However, what makes Fiordland’s valleys unique is that the rock the glaciers carved through is very, very hard – hard enough that even over thousands of years, very little rock from those steep sides has eroded away.   Basically, this means that the valleys in Fiordland are just as steep as when the glaciers left – the sides aren’t just steep, they’re actually sheer cliffs.   This topographical anomaly is breathtaking enough, but the other defining characteristic of Fiordland’s valleys is the amount of rain they receive – about 8 meters on average in most places.   This sort of terrain creates waterfalls in abundance, most of them only active during or after heavy rain.   Even on days when the waterfalls aren’t going, its easy to see the marks on the cliff faces where they run; vertical stripes of slightly smoothed rock running down the otherwise greenery-covered cliffs.

            The bare places on the cliffs that aren’t waterfalls are usually old landslides.   Because the terrain is so steep, and the soil layer over the bedrock is very thin, landslides are a common form of plant succession.   Most of the trees that are able to grow on the cliffs do so because their roots are intertwined with other trees, which forms a supportive lattice.   However, when the soil layer becomes saturated with water, it can become so heavy that an entire patch of soil slides right off of the mountain, taking all of the intertwined trees tumbling downhill with it like a row of dominoes.

Lake Mintaro, near the second DOC hut

            For most of the second day, we hiked along the Clinton river, following it up to its headwaters below the Mackinnon Pass.   The trail is very forested, green, and enclosed, but it regularly passes through avalanche chutes, where the plantlife has been sufficiently obliterated as to allow great views up and down the valley.   (Avalanche chutes are only a danger in winter, when there is actually snow on the tops of the mountains.   The rest of the year, they are scenic little meadows, inviting one to take out a camera and enjoy the temporary absence of trees.)   However, in Fiordland, due to the steepness of the hills, the avalanches are a little different.   In winter, when snow from the summits avalanches down the mountain, the avalanches will hit the top edge of these vertical cliffs.   At this point, the falling snow can trap air underneath it, almost like a parachute.   When the avalanche hits the valley floor, the weight of the snow crushes into that trapped pocket of air, and the pressure causes the snow to explode outward.  This means that the tree-free areas at the bottom of these chutes can be pretty large, and they show up at very regular intervals.   The DOC has mapped something like 56 known avalanche paths that intersect the Milford Track, which is one reason why the trail more or less shuts down during the winter months.

Avalanche clearing in the Clinton valley.

            Towards the end of the second day of hiking, the track begins winding uphill through a birch forest, ending at Mintaro Hut.   We were up at 6:30 the next morning, ready for the hardest, and most rewarding day of the hike – walking out of the Clinton Valley, over the Mackinnon Pass, and into the Arthur Valley on the other side.   The weather was cold, windy, and misty, with the clouds breaking apart at intervals to give us glimpses of the surrounding mountains.   About twenty minutes out from the hut, the trail began switchbacking up the side of the hill, aiming for a low saddle between two 1800 meter summits – Mount Hart on the left, and the curiously named Mount Balloon on the right.   As we got higher, the wind became more intense, whipping the clouds up and over the pass we were trying to get to.   We stopped shortly before the ridge to put on more layers.    

  

Cloud approaching the Mackinnon Pass

           A few hours after leaving Mintaro Hut, we reached the saddle, and the large memorial cairn to Quinton Mackinnon.   Mackinnon, along with Donald Sutherland, were the first Europeans to cross the pass, confirming that there was a traversable route between Te Anau and Milford Sound.   At the time, Milford Sound was thought to have the makings of an important commercial port on the West Coast (which, with a half million visitors a year, it is - though perhaps not in the way the original surveyors had intended).   

Mackinnon memorial cairn, on Mackinnon Pass

            From the cairn, the track follows the ridge for another twenty minutes to a shelter at the side of Mount Balloon.   Along the ridge, a thick layer of hoarfrost was covering every blade of grass, almost like snow.   The mist was blowing around so much that the view from the trail seemed to change every few minutes depending on what the clouds were choosing to reveal at any given moment.     We all crammed into the shelter, gobbling snacks and warming up.   From the back of the shelter, it’s possible to look down the length of the Clinton Valley, which we had hiked over the previous two days.   The shelter’s long-drop toilet has bee built to take advantage of this scenery (it’s referred to as the ‘loo with a view’), although today frost had totally obscured the view from the window.

Hoarfrost coating the grass on Mackinnon Pass

            Shortly thereafter, we left the shelter, continuing down the other side of the ridge, and briefly escaping the wind as the trail sidled along below Mount Balloon.   The trail continued along the bottom of the Arthur valley headwall, eventually dropping back below treeline, following Moraine Creek and Roaring Burn further into the Arthur Valley.   

Sidling downhill below Mount Balloon.   The valley floor looks very far away...

            Once we were back below the treeline, the greenery gave the impression that we were close to the valley floor, although the truth of the matter was, we had lost only about half of the vertical height we needed to lose that day.   The trail along Roaring Burn was a mix of rocky trail, and boardwalks and stairs, showing off the Burn’s many small waterfalls.   

            When we finally got to the Quinton shelter (opposite the guided walks’ lodge; the posh accommodation thoughtfully keeps the DOC shelter stocked with tea and coffee) it was later in the day than we had planned, so we quickly slurped some tea, and dropped our packs off at the shelter for a blitzkrieg hike up a side trail to Sutherland Falls.   

            According to the hut rangers, Sutherland Falls is one of the main reasons why tramping on the Milford Track ever became a tourist activity in the first place.   (And the Milford track is still mainly a tourist activity – out of our group of forty, we had only one New Zealand resident.)   When Sutherland and Mackay first discovered the falls, they estimated its height at something around 4,000 feet, which would easily make it the highest waterfall anywhere in the world.   This staggeringly high waterfall was one of the reasons why people were first interested in hiking into the Arthur valley in the first place.   Unfortunately, Sutherland and company got their maths woefully wrong; the waterfall is only 580 meters (1500 or so feet), making it the world’s fifth-highest waterfall.   Despite this downgrading of its height status, people were still interested in coming out on the track, even before the Milford road had been built, meaning that the once you got to Milford, you had to turn around and hike back to Te Anau.

Approaching Sutherland Falls

            As we got closer, the trail approaches the falls in such as way that as we rounded the last bend, the view ahead sort of framed the falls, so that it looked like we were walking directly into a category 5 storm.   With the wind and the water, the falls had a significant spray zone.   We had been warned to bring rain jackets, and we had passed some dripping wet hikers who had walked behind the falls, or tried to.   (The DOC does not officially encourage hikers to do this.   The hut rangers seem to be of the opinion that since some hikers will try anyway, they might as well tell us the safest way to get back there.)   The Aussie ladies and I took some photos, and then hurried back down to Quintin shelter, to pick up our backpacks, and tackle the last four kilometers of trail to our third and final hut.

Wet and wild: with the Aussie ladies at Sutherland Falls

            Dumpling Hut is named for the adjacent Dumpling Hill, which bears very little resemblance to a dumpling; whoever named it had probably been out in the bush long enough that they were seriously fantasizing about food.   The final day of the track was long but flat, following the Arthur River towards Lake Ada, and Milford Sound.   The trail also passed a few interesting features – MacKay falls, which would probably have looked more impressive had we not seen Sutherland Falls the day before, and Bell Rock.   Bell Rock is a large, hollowed out boulder that in a previous life had been situated underneath the waterfall, before a rockfall jostled it out of the falls, and tipped it upside down .   It’s possible to duck under the lip of the rock and peer upwards with a head torch at the large pyramid-shaped hollow that the water gouged out.   

            A few kilometers past Bell Rock, we passed a section of rock cutting, where a 300 meter section of trail was carved out from the cliff face over a two-year period starting in 1896.   Prior to this, hikers had to be transported over part of Lake Ada by boat.   We were told that some of the rock cutting work crew had carved their names into the cliff, but after a century, the names must be pretty weathered; none of us spotted any carvings.    

Swingbridge in the Arthur Valley

            From there, we continued down the Arthur River, ending up at Sandfly Point shortly before the boat arrived to take us across the sound to Milford itself.   The trail marker at the end of the track is decorated by pairs of worn-out hiking boots –I noticed the sole of one of the boots was attached to its leathers with zip-ties.   We boarded the boat, chugged across Deepwater Basin to Milford Sound, and arrived at the Milford ferry terminal.   We disembarked, wet and smelly, amidst the crowds of day-tripping tourists  up from Queenstown, most of whom seemed to be in Milford only long enough to move from their scenic coach tours to their scenic boat tours and back again.   I said goodbye to my Australian hiking buddies, who were heading back to Te Anau that night, and walked another 1.5 kilometers from the boat terminal to the Milford Lodge hostel, where I stayed for the next two nights.   

Checking out the boots at the end of the Milford Track

            The next day, I joined a 7am sea kayak tour heading out to explore Milford Sound.   The weather was misty and intermittently raining, and the wind picked up as we worked out way further to the mouth of the sound.   Our guide Mark explained that although these trips are billed as paddling the length of Milford Sound out to the Tasman Sea, the trips have about a 50% chance of actually getting there, mostly due to winds picking up at the mouth of the sound.   This was the case on this trip as well, and after fighting our way into a headwind for a few kilometers, we pulled up on a handy beach, took a snack break and enjoyed the view.   As a bonus, a pair of dolphins swam by the beach shortly after we pulled up, giving us brief glimpses of their little curlicued dorsal fins.   

            As we left the beach, Mark decided to cross over to the other side of the sound, and work our way back towards the harbor until it was time for our water taxi to pick us up.   Crossing the sound in a twenty-knot wind was a little hairy – the waves weren’t huge, but there were plenty of whitecaps.   Fortunately, we were in Necky Amaruks, which are kind of like the Chevy Suburbans of tandem sea kayaks.   They’re huge, heavy, and it takes a lot of gas to get them going, but they are also big and sturdy enough to plow through many potential hazards with impunity.   Unfortunately, they’re built to be touring kayaks – they’re meant to be paddled with a load of gear in the hatches.   On day trips, the kayaks are so lightly loaded that the boat will be sitting much higher in the water than it was designed to be, and can catch the wind a lot more.   As was the case on this trip.  (On windy days, I’ve been known to put rocks in the hatches of my clients’ boats to try and get them to balance correctly.)   Once we got to the far side of the fiord, we had the wind at our backs, which made for a much easier time.   Overall, I got the impression that the sea kayak guides in Milford had a slightly more accepting view of the possibility of capsizes than the guides in Alaska, which probably has something to do with their much warmer water temperatures.    

            Back at Milford Lodge that night, I got a couple of unexpected birthday presents.   My Australian friends called the hostel to wish me a happy birthday, and the hostel manager in turn gave me a free glass of wine.   Plus, a friend from the Iceberg Lodge emailed me pictures from our snow-shoveling crew’s recent visit out to the lagoon.   The site seems to be weathering the winter just fine, although most of our buildings are buried in snow up to the rafters.  

            The next day, I caught a bus back to Te Anau, where I am currently resting and giving lots of TLC to my left knee, which decided to go on strike after hiking for four days and then being shoved into a kayak cockpit for six hours.   Unfortunately, this means I’ve had to alter my plans for hiking the Kepler Track – I will still be hiking it, but only a very small section.   Frankly, its not worth it to carry weight for several days with an injury, even if it’s a comparatively minor one, as I don’t want to risk doing anything that would jeopardize my ability to work this coming summer.   I am really looking forward to getting back to Alaska, and to the Lodge, but I also know that the beginning of the season – with all of the gear carrying, safety training, boat cleaning, show shoveling, trail maintaining, cabin cleaning, staff reunioning, and bonfire partying  - is going to bring with it a whole new set of bumps and bruises, as it does every year.

Land of the Long Flat White

            Since I have recently finished the work part of my working holiday, and will soon be leaving the Land of the Long White Cloud, I felt like it might be appropriate to compile a few observations about the country that thus far haven’t made it into any of my previous posts.   

            One of the more unexpected things about living in New Zealand  is that I had to learn an entirely different terminology for ordering caffeinated drinks.   I’m not quite sure how it happened, but New Zealand seems to be the sole country in the English-speaking world that has not adopted Italian terms for describing espresso-based coffee.   For example, espresso in New Zealand isn’t called espresso.   Here, an American trying to order a coffee is confronted with a confusing list of drinks that sound like they could be types of wall paint – flat white, long black, short black, et cetera.    Also, no one makes, or drinks, regular, American-style, filter-brewed coffee.   It doesn’t really exist here - I don't think there's enough demand for it to justify brewing up large pitchers as is normal in American restaurants.   If you want a regular coffee, your barista will make a shot of espresso and add hot water to top up the cup.    (This sort of drink is referred to as an Americano in other places, and now I understand why.)   Instant coffee, on the other hand, seems to be perplexingly popular here, even though it tastes just as bad as it does in the States.   Interestingly, the gourmet brands of instant coffee come in little bags that you dunk in hot water as though it were tea; this is something I have never seen before.  

            One thing I will miss about New Zealand is the burgers.   This might seem like a strange sentiment for a vegetarian, but it’s true.   Kiwis approach their burgers like Dagwood Bumstead approaches sandwiches.   Everything that could possibly fit between two buns gets added onto the plate.   This includes usual toppings like lettuce and tomato, but also includes more adventurous toppings like cole slaw, shredded carrot, beetroot slices, onion chutney, and fried egg.   Frankly, you could take the meat out of the burger entirely and not notice its absence. For a vegetarian, this is great, and is a direction that I wish the rest of the burger-eating world would embark on.

            If you are wanting to work in international tourism, or just work internationally in general, I have heard various theories on which language(s) are of most benefit to learn.   One friend proposed English and Spanish as the two most important ones, since between those two languages you can converse with pretty much everyone on three continents (North and South America, and Australia) as well as a good chunk of Europe, Africa, and Asia.   Mandarin is also a candidate, as the population of China is huge, and for New Zealand, the Chinese are actually the fastest growing section of the tourism market.   

            German, sadly, is a little useless (unless perhaps you are going to live in Germany) since every German-speaking person I have run into over here generally has better English than I do.   Ditto with most other European languages – people who speak Flemish, or Dutch, or Czech (the ones who travel, at any rate) all tend to be very conversant in English, a fact that my Czech friend in Haast attributes to the fact that Czech TV stations don’t dub English-language programs and movies into Czech (they use subtitles instead), so that most Czechs grow up hearing English frequently from a very young age.

            In my own opinion, the most useful language for a tourism person to know would be… French.   Not because there are a large amount of French-speaking travelers, but because, in general,  French travelers have atrocious English.   It was a huge help at the motel that my boss knew French; I envy her ability.   In a few instances, I had to resort to mime and vocabulary from high school French class to get through a transaction.   The worst part is explaining how the coin-operated showers work – that you need to put a certain coin in the slot if you want hot water.   Il pleut… et c’est tres fois…

            I am happy to report that limited English ability does not seem to hinder French people from travelling in English-speaking countries.   They appear confident that between their skills in English, and other people’s skills as mimes, eventually the communications barrier will be breached.   Sometimes it’s a long siege.   I think is actually very brave.   I certainly would have second thoughts about trying to travel solo in France with only the stagnant remnants of two years of high school French classes – yet many French travellers here are basically attempting the same thing in reverse.    

Mount Cook

            Like many things that begin in Haast, my four day trip to Mount Cook began in the rain, and the rain was heavy even by West Coast standards.    The highway out of Haast starts out by following the Haast River upstream for nearly fifty kilometers.    When I left the township, it wasn’t actually raining, although the skies looked pretty dark.   Halfway along the Haast river, I noticed that I was seeing waterfalls on the mountains that I had never seen before.   This was my first indication that I was going to be in for a wet drive.   I drove into the deluge about ten minutes later.   The waterfalls continued to be abundant and spectacular.   On one particular section of cliff, there were six or seven small waterfalls plunging down into the drainage ditch next to the road.   It almost looked as though someone farther up the hill had turned on a line of fire hydrants and aimed them all at the highway.   In deference to the Nissan’s bald tires, I was creeping along through the standing water at about 30 kph.   Fortunately, the rain started to slacken off as I started up through the Haast Pass itself, and although it was still raining hard, I was no longer quite so afraid of hydroplaning into a ditch.

            At the top of the pass, I met the first cyclists.   There were apparently at least two different escorted cycling tours on the highway, both of which had unerringly picked the rainiest day of the month of March to cycle up and over the 1500 foot Haast Pass.   There were probably close to forty cyclists on the road, all doggedly pedaling uphill in the rain at 5 or 6 kilometers an hour.   Highway 6 being what it is, there were very few safe places on the road to pass.   This did not prevent some cars from passing anyway – my refusal to do so unless I had a clear view of the oncoming traffic occasionally earned me an angry line of campervans lining up behind my rear bumper.    I also watched a red coupe nearly run over two cyclists in front of me.   The coupe passed my car, and kept accelerating as he swung back into the proper lane - only to come to a screeching halt in front of me when he saw the bikes I’d been following.   I physically do not know how the coupe avoided running them over – my best guess is that some guardian angel must have temporarily lengthened the road to give the coupe the braking distance it needed to stop.   I’ve heard cyclists complain that New Zealand drivers are criminally reckless about passing bikes, but even from within the comparative safety of an actual car, the drive was terrifying.   I didn’t want to stop, however, because I knew I would only have to re-pass the same bikes all over again, and I figured that sooner or later, I would catch up to the front of the pack.   That happened, but not until Makarora, when it got flat enough that it was actually possible to pass the bikes without risking death in the process.    I am ready to write to the New Zealand highways commission and suggest that they put in a bike lane over the Haast Pass – it would be far safer, and, one would assume, much less terrifying for the cyclists.

            After running through the cyclist/campervan Southern Alps slalom course, I stopped for lunch in Wanaka, and continued the drive through the MacKenzie country, and up Highway 8 towards Mount Cook village.   I was expecting more mountain driving on the way to Mount Cook, but the road was surprisingly, and welcomingly open, mostly due to the engineering work done by the Tasman Glacier during the last ice age.   The road to the town went through a classic, Yosemite-like glacier valley, with steep, high mountains, and a big, flat, U-shaped floor.   Basically, a few thousand years ago, the advancing glacier acted as a big bulldozer, flattening out the valley floor, and whittling away at the sides of the adjoining mountains.   When the glacier retreated, it left behind a big, broad, steep-sided valley that leads up almost to the foot of New Zealand’s highest mountain.

            I got to the village around 5:30, and checked into my hostel.   Just as I arrived, two girls were getting ready to go on a hike out to a local viewpoint.   Although I wasn’t quite clear on where they were going, I grabbed my boots, shoved a few hiking essentials into my backpack, and joined them.   We followed a footpath out of the village, past a public campground, and up into the jumbled collection of low hills that make up an old moraine from the Muller Glacier.   The entire walk was in the shadow of Mount Sefton, which is the huge, glacier-studded mountain that looms over the village.   About an hour later, we got out to Kea Point, which looks out over Lake Muller, at the foot of Mount Sefton.   Mount Cook, also known as Aoraki, was jutting up like a spire further back in the valley.  It looked stunning, and the sunlight out of the west was lighting up the snow on the summit well after everything else in the valley was in shadow.   

Kea Point, looking towards Mount Sefton

            At this point, it was 6:45pm, and I thought we had reached the end of our walk.    The girls said that they were going to continue on to the Hooker Valley track, to try and get to the end of the track to take pictures of the mountain at sunset, which would be at 8pm.   I felt obliged to point out the obvious fact that if they planned on taking pictures from the end of the track at sunset, they would then be walking back the entire length of the trail in the dark.   The girls weren’t deterred, and said they would just walk fast.   They didn’t have a flashlight, or any light source other than the screens on their cell phones and cameras.  I opted out, saying that I hadn’t eaten dinner yet, which was true, but  mostly I felt like there was a distinct possibility of this turning into the sort of hike that involves the New Zealand Mountain Rescue Association.   I walked with them as far as the Alpine Memorial, gave them my flashlight, and went back to the hostel. 

            I figured they would be back by 10pm; they actually got back about fifteen minutes before that, after hiking in the dark for an hour and a half.    The French girl thanked me repeatedly for lending them a flashlight; it sounded like they had a bit of a scary time getting back.   Her English was not very good; she kept talking about there being someone following them on the trail, and that he’d frightened them.   It didn’t sound like she was talking about a hiker, but I never was able to get the full story.    (Wouldn’t the presence of another person on a dark, deserted trail be comforting?   Have the sasquatch moved into Mount Cook National Park?)   The French girl left on a bus early the next morning, which was one reason why she was so keen to hike the Hooker track that evening, as she wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to go out there.

            I went out the next morning to hike Hooker Valley Track - the same trail that the girls had been on the night before.   Now having been out there myself, I sort of understand why the girls were willing to disregard common sense in order to hike this particular trail.   The Hooker Valley is possibly one of the best day hikes I have ever been on, and it isn’t even that hard of a track.   I’ve been on plenty of hikes in Alaska where there are great views and scenery – towering mountains, blue-grey glaciers, and alpine lakes - but generally, you have climb uphill for a few hours and a couple thousand feet in order to enjoy these views.   On this trail, the total elevation gain is only a few hundred feet, and you’re seeing glaciers before you even start walking.   As in, you can see glaciers from the carpark.   There aren’t many hiking trails that can make that claim.   The trail also crosses the Hooker and Muller rivers on swingbridges, which give great views of the rivers below.   The whole of the Hooker valley is very open, meaning that you’re looking at Mount Sefton and Aoraki for basically the whole hike.   Of course, it helped that the weather on this particular day was great, sunny and warm, with no clouds to speak of, so I could see all the way to the summits.   I imagine the hike would be slightly less spectacular with low cloud cover - but you’d still see a lot of glaciers and lakes.   As it is, being able to hike this trail on a perfect weather day is possible the single best thing I have done on this entire New Zealand adventure.

Swingbridge crossing the Muller outflow stream, with Muller Glacier's terminal lake in the background

            On the trail ahead of me was a small mob of schoolkids, who were up from a New Zealand school on a four-day extended field trip.   Every so often, I would pass a clump of kids rummaging around in the greenery to one side of the trail with clipboards and field guides in hand.   A few of the adult chaperones tried to apologize that the kids were walking slow; I just told them that I was in no hurry.   I couldn’t think of a short way to explain that they were my personal heroes of the day for bringing kids out to such an amazing place as part of a field trip.   My elementary school certainly wasn’t that cool.

Best.  Field Trip.  Ever.

            The Hooker Valley track ended at a terminus lake in front of the Hooker glacier.   Compared to the hanging glaciers on the mountains themselves, the Hooker Glacier was so covered with rubble from its own moraine that the ice was visible only as a faint blue line at the far end of the lake.   The lake itself was the thick, grey color of chocolate milk, courtesy all of the silt and sediment that the Hooker Glacier is grinding up and carrying downhill.   Most of these terminal lakes (there are three in the Mount Cook area) have formed within the past century, as the glaciers have retreated further and further into the mountains.   I learned on this trip that the formation of these lakes is actually changing the topography of the glacier’s outflow streams.   When an outflow stream flows directly from the front of the glacier itself, it carries with it enough silt to continually build up its own streambed.   Basically, there is so much silt and sediment entering the stream that the stream never erodes a deep channel, like most rivers do.   But now that so many of the Mount Cook National Park glaciers have suddenly developed lakes at their terminus, the lakes are acting as a giant settling pond for all of the silt and debris that would otherwise be carried further downstream.   So, the outflow streams, which now depart from the far side of the lake, have much less sediment in them than compared to a century ago.   And without this extra silt, the streams don’t have enough sediment to keep rebuilding up their own streambeds.   So, the rivers and streams downstream of the glacier are beginning to carve out proper channels for the first time since the last ice age.   This has the potential to dramatically change the look of the big broad, flat valley over the next few centuries, as the river channels get deeper and deeper over time.   New Zealand is a pretty awesome country for anyone even mildly interested in geology, because a lot of the landform-shaping processes happen in a short enough time span that you can see the differences just by looking at old photographs.

Hooker Glacier's terminal lake, with Aoraki/Mount Cook on the left.   The chocolate color of the water is from silt and other suspended debris.   The glacier's terminal face is faintly visible at the back of the lake.

               One very dramatic example of landform-shaping change has to do with Mount Cook itself, New Zealand’s highest mountain.   Mount Cook has always been New Zealand’s highest mountain, but the mountain currently is about thirty feet shorter than it was when it was first climbed in 1894.   In 1991, the summit of Mount Cook fell off.   It triggered a huge landslide involving 12 million cubic meters of rock sliding downhill for seven kilometers before coming to rest on top of the Tasman Glacier.   The event was witnessed by a group of climbers, who watched the entire landslide from the comparative safety of a hut on the mountain’s east face.   (The climbers would have been directly in the debris path at the time the landslide happened but for the fact that they had inadvertently slept through their alarm.)   The landslide wasn’t triggered by an earthquake (though the impact of the landslide slamming into the valley floor was picked up by seismographs in Twizel, 70 kilometers away), nor had there been heavy rain, strong winds, snow slides, or anything else that could feasibly have triggered such a massive event on the mountain.   Later inspection of the mountain showed that the entire summit of Mount Cook is very unstable; it’s possible that there could be another such landslide on the mountain at any time.

            The end of the Hooker Valley track gives a great view of how steep Mount Cook actually is – the western side of the mountain seems to drop down to the surface of the glacier in one long, near-vertical rock face.   I ate my lunch at the lake, and meandered back along the track to the trailhead.   On reaching the campground, I decided to take a different route back to the village, which turned out to be a bad idea.   The valley that Mount Cook village sits in is so flat, and wide, and treeless that it makes it difficult to judge distances.   It’s possible to hike towards the village for 45 minutes, and not feel like you are getting any closer to your destination.   The valley itself is interesting to look at, but not that interesting to walk through  – there’s only tall, yellow grass, interspersed with glacial erratics - giant boulders that were carried downhill by the glacier a few thousand years ago, dropped in the valley as the ice melted from under them, and remain there to this day because very few other natural processes have the ability to move rocks that big.   But mostly, the valley floor is wide, and flat, and grassy.   As in, you could photoshop a zebra into your vacation photos, and it would not look terribly out of place.

            I had planned to hike up to the Red Tarns in the afternoon, but I ended up getting slightly lost trying to find where the trail actually started.   Instead, I hiked the trail I did find, which meandered through a birch forest on the lower slopes of the mountain immediately behind the village.   By the time I found the Red Tarns trailhead, my legs were not up to hiking the whole length – the trail is straight up, and whoever built it apparently had a moral aversion to switchbacks – so I stopped about halfway.   Although I never saw the tarns themselves, I got far enough past the tree line to be able to look back across the village, and the huge valley that encompasses it.

            Back at the youth hostel, I watched The Return of the King with a few other travelers, which was cool both because it is a great movie, and also because the day before I had driven through the general area where most of the Pelennor Field battle scenes had been shot.   (They still apparently offer tours of the Twizel-area farm that hosted the shoot, where you, too, can don plastic sword and shield and run screaming downhill to do battle with CGI’ed Nazgul.)

            The next day, I dithered over whether I wanted to pay $150 to go on a guided kayaking trip of Tasman Glacier’s iceberg-filled terminus lake, or just drive out there myself and hike near the lake for free.   I decided that going out on a kayaking tour of an iceberg-filled glacier terminus lake was likely going to feel too much like work, since this is basically the job description for what I do in Alaska.   Also, part of the reason for living in a foreign country for six months is to do things that I can’t actually do back home.   I decided to just go and hike on my own, which turned out to be a good call.   Partly because Tasman Glacier’s icebergs were not all that the kayaking company’s promotional material had made them out to be.   There are not very many of them, and they are not that big.   Mostly, the icebergs looked a little sad, sitting all morose and silt-covered as they melted their way into oblivion.   Of course, since it’s the end of the summer here, there is probably less ice in the lake right now than at other times of the year; the lake probably looks more dramatic in spring.   I think I have turned into a glacier lake snob; the Iceberg Lodge’s lagoon has ruined me for all other glacier terminus lakes.   

Tasman Glacier's terminal lake.   Beautiful, but somewhat lacking in icebergs.

            The second reason I was glad I didn’t kayak was that by 10:00am the wind had picked up noticeably.   By noon, it was gusting at around 50 knots – not strong enough to blow you off your feet, but strong enough that you had to factor the wind gusts into account in order to walk around.   In those conditions, I doubt anyone was running kayaking trips, (and if they did, the trips would have sucked – paddling into a headwind that strong is never fun).   Aside from the lack of icebergs, the lake itself was pretty cool, mostly because the lake is bordered on three sides by enormous moraine walls – cliffs of jumbled rock several hundred feet high.   Also, the moraine is recent enough that there aren’t any plants growing on it, giving Tasman the surface-of-the-moon quality that one finds in recently retreated glaciers.   

            Unfortunately, the strong wind wasn’t local to the glaciers; by the time I got back to the main Mt Cook road, I could see a line of clouds being pushed over the summit ridge of Mount Sefton.   The wind continued for the entire drive south to Wanaka, shoving the Nissan back and forth across its lane with alarming intensity.  Every time I got out of the car, I expected the wind to be worse than it was, just based on how things felt inside the car.   In fact, it wasn’t a very substantial wind,  but neither is the Nissan a very substantial car.   The next day in Wanaka, the wind was still blowing hard, but I was able to pick up a couple of hitchhikers for ballast.   Between them and their camping gear, I estimate we added around 400 pounds in weight to the car.   I dropped them off in Haast township, correctly interpreted the look of dismay on their faces at how small Haast township actually is, and offered to take them another three kilometers down the road to Haast Junction.   They were going to try and catch a ride up to Fox or Franz Josef, the closest towns to the north of us.   Another indication that very few people want to stay in Haast any longer than it takes to buy a coffee and top up their petrol.

Hooker Valley Track