Ready, Set, Hike!
Day 9 – St. Arnaud to Pichton
With only a short drive before we got to Pichton, we set out early from St. Arnaud. The drive was brief and included only one intermittent stop in which we got gas at Blenheim. I bought some breakfast there but the lady working had no idea how to make any type of coffee and so even though I ordered a cappuccino, I only got black coffee. As we drove around the north part of the island, the roads became noticeably more crowded and the land quite a bit more populated. Pichton was a relatively small town that seemed to mostly revolve around its role as a Ferry port and jump-off point for the Queen Charlotte track and other resorts in the bay. We stopped at the local YHA and checked it out, but Tory didn’t like it much so we moved on. We went to the DOC office to make some arrangements for accommodation on the Charlotte track and the water taxi. The DOC office was amazingly helpful. Once all our reservations had been made, we found another hostel across the street and moved our stuff in there. The hostel wasn’t the nicest we’d seen. The shower’s had a limit of 9 minutes of hot water, laundry was expensive, and we ended up staying in a 12-person dorm room. Nonetheless it was cheap and the people were nice. We grabbed lunch at the nearby subway then checked out the town. Most of the businesses were on two main streets. We found a grocery store and got some groceries for the track. I also found the post office, for at some point I intended on sending home some of my stuff. The prices, I discovered, were quite outrageous though so I had second thoughts about sending anything. I decided to jump on the Internet while Tory went to look around for a better Internet place. Eventually he came back to the place I was using. Once we were done on the Internet, we went back to the hostel for a while. We also stopped by the ferry line to make our reservation for the day after we would get back from the track. With that all taken care of, we got things in order for the track the next day. A little later we went out to a diner for dinner. I had a hamburger and got a lot of harassment for my choice of vegetables and toppings. Because the water taxi left around 8 in the morning, we wanted to be in bed at a reasonably early time. I went up to do a bit of writing in the TV room and got a little way into writing chapter 12 in the novel, but the finale of the Bachelorette was on so I kept getting distracted. Once that was over around 10:15, I headed to bed.
Tags: Hiking, New Zealand, Pichton, Queen Charlotte, St. Arnaud, Travel
gregbilsland
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