Up (as in to the mountains) and Down (as in south)
Last you all heard, I was in Greymouth, near the north end of New Zealand’s west coast, preparing to head south.
Before departing Greymouth, I had some important business to take care of.
First, I had to re-write my ‘blog entry. This was due to the fact that after having spent over three hours on it the previous day, it somehow vanished. This had me in a rather irritable mood. Fortunately, my other business, a tour of the Monteith’s brewery cheered me up.
Monteith’s has a reputation for being “the beer of the West Coast,” though most of it is brewed in Timaru (south of Christchurch on the east coast and in Auckland, on the North Island.)
The Monteith’s brewery tour was pretty standard, but did have a couple of interesting features. The first of these was their open vat fermentation tanks. Most breweries keep their fermentation tanks sealed, but these had open tops so that you could see the process in action, and smell the powerful yeasty aroma throughout the building. The second interesting feature was the coal fired boilers. Coal mining has always been a major industry on the West Coast, and the plentiful supply made it a natural choice for warming up the brew kettles, heating the buildings and so forth.
Another part of the tour was the post tasting open bar. After trying a bit of each of their six regular-run beers, we were invited up to the taps for to serve ourselves our favourites for ten minutes. While ten minutes may not sound like a lot, I did manage to enjoy plenty of my favourite, Monteith’s Dark.
All of this left me ready to head south. My planned destination was the Fox Glacier, some 240km distant, but I feared that I wouldn’t be able to hitchhike my way there leaving at 15:00 as I was.
My fears very nearly came true. I’d hoped that the drizzly weather would have people feeling sorry for me, but it didn’t seem to be so. As I waited by the side of a road, I started chatting with the workers who were busy cleaning out the nearby catchbasin. So caught up in our conversation was I that I didn’t realize I’d spent about 20 seconds trying to get rides from the cars in a passing funeral parade. (To be fair, it wasn’t all my fault. A hearse in NZ is simply a white station wagon, and the cars didn’t bear the little flags or signs that identify funeral cars in Canada. Indeed, it was only the catchbasin worker’s comments that alerted me.)
After about 30 minutes of waiting, I got my first ride from a Swiss-Kiwi who brought me to the intersection with the Christchurch road. So far, so good. Now at least anyone on the road was headed down the West Coast.
My second ride came from a teacher of kids with behavioural problems, who took me 30km further south to the town of Hokitika. My third took me another 40km south, this time with a very friendly sawmill (another of the West Coast’s major industries) worker. I should have known without asking what his profession was, as most of the fingers on his right hand weren’t there. I took my leave of him in the tiny former gold-mining town of Ross.
All of this was well and good. I’d been getting lots of rides, but was making slow progress in my journey south, and I was now stuck in a tiny town with only one place to stay. Coupled with the facts that sundown wasn’t too far off, and the rain had begun to take itself seriously, prospects didn’t look good.
Thankfully my saviour came down the road in the guise of a pickup truck driving kiwi named Allen. Allen was headed to the town of Haast, well beyond my destination to do some whitebaiting. Whitebaiting is a practice peculiar to the West Coast of New Zealand, and involves using guides and fine mesh nets to catch schools of tiny smelt as they swim upstream to spawn. So small are the fish that they’re often sold by the litre, and are eaten whole, usually fried into a patty with an egg and flour batter.
Whatever his goals in Haast, I was overjoyed to get picked up by Allen. He kindly stopped a couple of times so that I could better secure the cover on my pack in the back of his truck, he offered me apples from a large bag he had in the cab, and even declined my offer to help pay for his fuel.
During our ride south, we discovered that he knew someone I’d seen on the Heaphy track, a tall, skinny, heavily bearded aging hippie type fellow who had been waited on my his Japanese wife and her friend in the Perry Saddle hut. A small world indeed.
After about two hours drive, Allen let me off at the tiny Fox Glacier village where, though I was happy to have arrived, I spent a desultory night wondering if I’d even be able to see the glacier the following day, much less do any tramping in the surrounding mountains.
The Fox Glacier is one of two almost identical ones (the other being the slightly more touristed Franz Josef, just to the north) that spill out of New Zealand’s Southern Alps near Mount Cook (12349 feet high. Thanks Dad!) About halfway down the South Island’s West Coast, they are the only glaciers at this latitude that come anywhere near as close to sea level.
As it turned out, my fears were only slightly validated the next morning. The rain had eased up, and low cloud and misty drizzle took turns filling the sky. After a lengthy walk up the main road, then up the glacier access road, I found myself at the start of an actual walking track to the Chalet Lookout. While not the closest approach to the glacier, this point was meant to provide the best views and, more importantly, the first chance to get rid of my main pack at the trailside (I wasn’t keen on dropping it off on the side of the road, but in the bush near an infrequently used walking track on a rainy day seemed safe enough to me.)
After crossing the Fox River on a historic suspension bridge, the trail headed uphill towards the glacier. It ran through temperate rain forest, of which I’d already seen plenty. The walk did contain one, or rather two and a half very memorable points, namely the unbridged river crossings that lay between me and the glacier. Both the first single crossing and the second, of two parallel channels, took a lot of thought (to find a route) and courage building (to get over the quickly rushing water below, even if it was only a short hop across) before I could get past.
After all of this, I was pleased to arrive at the viewpoint where I was greeted with a blurry view of the glacier through the rain. Although the view in my photos is blurrier still, I feel like I must include a photo of it since it took so much effort to get to.
After heading back down the trail, collecting my pack and returning to the main road, I found myself with time to spare. I’d took up a hitching spot just after the turnoff to the glacier and just before a single lane bridge so, while virtually everyone slowed down, no one seemed to be stopping for me. I entertained myself (and did something of a public service) by seeing how many sandflies I could kill, and by forming a catalogue of the most and least likely types of vehicles and drivers to get rides from while hitching.
I’m very pleased to say that my rankings were almost immediately invalidated by an Australian and his young son in a rented campervan who stopped and offered me a ride all the way to my destination, the tiny town of Makarora near Mount Aspiring National Park, where I hoped to do some tramping with nice mountain views.
I took a seat at the back of the campervan and did my best to make conversation with the two occupants of the front seats. Luke (the son, perhaps seven) and Will (his father) were on Luke’s first trip outside of Australia, and were headed to Wanaka, a larger town about 50km past Makarora.
I spent the ride admiring the mountains as we crossed the Haast Pass (the first REAL mountains I’d seen since arriving in New Zealand,) reading my guidebook and admiring Luke’s collection of stones and seashells.
My reading during the drive led me to conclude that Wanaka would actually be a better place enter the park from, so I ended up heading all the way there with Will and Luke.
Wanaka is a gorgeous town, set on the side of a large lake, surrounded on all sides by snow capped peaks. The view from the park in the centre of town would be worth a stop all by itself. Another cool feature of the town is the millennium walkway, a path lined on one side by 2000 ceramic tiles, inscribed with historic events occurring between the years 1 and 2000AD (things are a bit thin early on, but I still did get great enjoyment out of the ones describing medieval British history.)
Aside from those who want to enjoy its beautiful setting, Wanaka is also very popular with skiers and snowboarders who enjoy the many nearby resorts. Which explains the huge numbers of (primarily Japanese) guests at the hostel I stayed at. It was by far the busiest place I’ve yet stayed at in New Zealand, made all the more memorable by the high proportion of residents with casts, slings and neck braces.
The next morning showed some promise for tramping. The rain had stopped and the skies were trying to clear, so I headed down to the Department of Conservation (DOC) office to get the latest weather update for the park, arrange transport to the trailhead and purchase a ticket to spend the night in a hut.
Unfortunately it was not to be. The DOC office opened more than 25 minutes late, the shuttle buses couldn’t get into the park due to flooding of rivers from the previous days’ rain, and the skies never did get entirely clear.
On the positive side, it took next to no time to come up with a new plan. When the DOC office finally did open, I went back and talked to the staff there to try and find SOMEWHERE that I could do some walking with nice mountain views. While we were discussing my options, I mentioned that, while I knew it was closed, I would have liked to have walked the Routeburn Track (yet another of the Great Walks) since it had nice alpine scenery AND was a shortcut to Milford Sound (another destination on my list.) To this, the DOC staffwoman replied, “yes, it is a long drive around, but at this time of year there’s no wa- Oh! Wait! Yes.”
Shortly thereafter, I left the DOC office armed with a promising weather report, a trailguide for the Greenstone and Caples tracks, and an entirely new plan: I would hitch to Queenstown (the next major centre down the road) and thence to Glenorchy, the jumping off point for the Routeburn, as well as the parallel Greenstone and Caples tracks.
I’ll spare you all from yet another description of my days’ hitchhiking, and just say this: Long waits, two lifts, one bus, thanks to the guy who was going up to Cardrona snowboarding and to the Aussies Anna and Barry.
A couple of notes about the trip:
The tiny town of Cardrona, halfway up a mountain pass from Wanaka, is popular among skiers, and features a lovely (about) 130-year-old hotel/pub.
Queenstown is a large town/small city in a beautiful location. Unfortunately it is also THE centre for “adventure tourism” in a country that’s known for it. Adventure tourism includes such activities as parasailing, zorbing (bouncing/rolling down a hill inside two concentric clear plastic spheres), jet boating, and, of course, bungy jumping. (Bungy jumping was invented not far from Queenstown.) This has all been done in a semi-tasteful fashion, but you can’t really disguise the fact that the town’s overrun by tourists and the accompanying tourist shops, restaurants and services. The final thing I’ll say about Queenstown is: Stay just long enough to buy some food and take a quick look around so that you’ll know how much nicer Glenorchy is when you get there.
Glenorchy isn’t a large town (about 200 residents) and while good for its size, its tourist facilities are still a bit limited. But with a setting and a quiet, unspoilt atmosphere like this, who needs anything else?
I spent the afternoon wandering around a DOC trail and boardwalk to the north of the town and being dazzled by the spectacular views of the mountains and the sound of nothing but the wetland’s birds calling.
The walk back to town produced even more lovely views of the town itself, and of the mountains, as the setting sun just behind them lit the clouds just above.
It was at this point when what is certainly the most unexpected moment of my travels occurred. I was standing in the Glenorchy store, chatting with the proprietor (and substitute DOC warden while their office is closed for the winter) when a familiar face walked in. I knew I knew him from somewhere, and said so, but couldn’t determine just where. After listing off the places we’d travelled and finding nothing in common, we were about to give up when he said, “just as a wild guess, McGill University?” As it turned out he, Oliver, had studied mechanical engineering at McGill in Montreal from 1995 to 1998, while I had been studying civil engineering at the same time. We didn’t know each other terribly well, but well enough to know the same people and to have recognized each other. To add to the coincidence, he was also planning on walking the Caples Track the next day, with two women he’d met at the Glenorchy Hotel.
I spent the evening with him chatting about our recent histories and meeting the two ladies we’d be walking with the next morning.
The morning came and Oliver and I set out, accompanied by Suzy (a young… I’m guessing 18) American from St. George, Utah, and Michelle, perhaps about my age from Navan, Ireland. It looked to be a perfect day for walking, sunny and neither hot nor cold. Before beginning, of course, we had to get to the start of the trail. We’d all planned on hitching to the trailhead, 20 some km away.
While the women got the first ride, Oliver and I still came out best. The ladies took two lifts to get there, meanwhile we beat them by a good 20 minutes thanks to Elizabeth and Thomas, an Australian couple who had retired to NZ. They were driving around in their BMW SUV, exploring the region and figured that the direction we were going was as good as any to explore in.
After a bit of waiting, we were all reunited at the trailhead, ready to start our walk.
The Caples track was the first of my multi-day tramps in New Zealand that wasn’t one of the Great Walks. Nonetheless, it is a fairly popular walk. It runs roughly parallel to the Routeburn and Greenstone tracks nearby, and is often combined with one of them to make a circuit. We, however were walking this one alone, to its far end at The Divide, a mere 28km from Milford Sound, another area of great natural beauty, and probably the South Island’s top tourist draw. While 28km may sound like a fair distance in New Zealand, it must be judged in comparison to the almost 400km drive necessary to get from Glenorchy to Milford by road.
The start of the track came as a very pleasant surprise. Not only was it a relatively pleasant walk (it’s rated as a “moderate” tramp, as compared to the “easy” Tasman and Heaphy) but the sights were right up there with any I’d yet seen in NZ. Passing along the floor of the glacial Caples Valley, sometimes on meadow flats, sometimes just inside the edge of the forest, this first section of the track would be a superb day walk.
After a couple of hours walking, we all stopped for a leisurely lunch and read in a clearing in the forest. While lazing about here, we were joined by an Englishman named David who walked with us for the rest of the track.
Shortly after this, we came upon our first crossing of the Caples, almost before noticing it. This was because it had briefly disappeared from the valley floor and dipped into a very deep, narrow gorge. The angle of the sun and the position of the rocks were such that the river seemed, almost eerily, to be lit from below.
Carrying on past the gorge and the Mid Caples Hut that followed it, we were treated to still more beautiful views of the valley, river and mountains, as well as of the bright orange-red lichens that thrived on the rocks along the track.
Eventually we arrived at our resting place for the night, the Upper Caples Hut. While it was beautiful outside by the river, the sandflies were so vicious that we all headed inside after only token efforts to enjoy the outdoors.
Due to a warning that there had been outbreaks of bedbugs at huts in the area (though this was unlikely hear due to the plastic covered mattresses) I spent the evening on my air mattress on the floor.
The next morning saw a thick layer of frost on the ground outside, but still hardly a cloud in the sky. All five of our group headed off onto the track at various times in the morning, and walked together on and off throughout the course of the morning. The first few minutes of the trip were a climb up through the trees that really got the heart pumping, but then the track settled down to a leisurely walk through the beech forest that I’d become so familiar with. The only real impediment to progress was the occasional loss of the (generally well marked) track, followed by a bit of work to find the proper route.
All of this changed mid-morning, when the track took a quick turn upwards, and started to climb rapidly towards its peak, McKellar Saddle, at 945m, some 500m above our starting point. Throughout this section, I was hardly able to enjoy the prettiness of the Caples River, growing ever smaller and faster as it neared its source.
While I like to think I’m in reasonable shape, the walk up to the saddle, especially the last bit near the tree-line verged on exhausting. With the vegetation slowly changing around me, the trees becoming thinner and more stunted, I pushed on ahead of the others, intent on getting it over with as soon as possible.
Upon reaching the top, I had to pause to regain my breath, eat a quick lunch and to look out over the lovely sub-alpine wetland, ponds and mountains that formed the landscape of the saddle itself.
As it turned out, I’d needed the rest. Despite heading downhill after the saddle, the walking got no easier. The track went down at what seemed an impossibly steep angle, through mud, tree roots and slippery exposed rocks. Each step required careful bracing and thought. The walk down was almost as taxing as the walk up. Finally the track reached the bottom, near Lake McKellar but not before a few tricky stream crossings over slippery, flexible, logs. After this seemingly purgatorial hike, the clearing in the brush that lead to the grassy flats at the end of the lake looked like the gates of paradise opening up.
Thankfully, the track regained its sense of moderation after this, and it was only an easy hour’s walk to the Lake Howden Hut near the end of the track, and at its intersection with the Routeburn. At this point, I bid adieu to my walking companions, who arrived at the hut not to long after I did. We sat inside, saying our goodbyes as I left my recently stream-washed clothes outside to dry and be attacked by still more sandflies.
The rest of the group carried on to the very end of the track at The Divide, intent on hitching into Te Anau or Milford this evening, while I planned on one more night on the track. After their departure, I occupied the rest of the afternoon with a walk up to 174m high Earland Falls on a portion of the Routeburn that wasn’t snow-covered. While the whole of the track was lovely, the Falls, at the end of my walk were definitely the highlight and probably provided me with my favourite self portrait thus far.
After rushing down the hill, stopping only to pick up a handful of snow from the trackside, I picked up my pack again at the Howden Hut and carried on to the Divide.
Despite the fact that The Divide, at 532m (the lowest crossing of the Southern Alps) is 176m LOWER than the Howden Hut, the walk started with a tough uphill section. I hadn’t counted on this, and after three, albeit packless, hours on the Routeburn AND a full day on the Caples, it was no fun at all. After what seemed like an eternity (but was, in fact, only 15 minutes,) the track finally reached the top and wound its way down to The Divide, some 45 minutes beyond.
I spent the night in the shelter at the divide. While it was really meant as only a day shelter, it kept any (non-existent as it turned out) rain off, and with a therma-rest and a -7C sleeping bag this was more than enough. To my surprise, I had company. Or at least I think I did. Two men with Scottish accents appeared after I’d crawled into my sleeping bag, and set up their own little camp under the shelter. But given that they arrived after dark and left as I was only semi conscious the next morning, it’s possible I just imagined them…
The next morning I woke, packed and waited. Waited for the 09:15 bus that I’d arranged to pick me up from The Divide to take me on to my cruise in Milford Sound. At 09:45 I’d just given up on it, and was getting into a car I’d flagged down when the bus pulled up. The driver was very apologetic and explained that their office staff obviously didn’t know how long each section of the drive was supposed to take.
We proceeded down the road, making a few stops to admire the most rugged mountains I’d seen in NZ (anywhere?), as well as to look back at the entrance of the 1200m long un-lined Homer Tunnel after we’d driven through it. The tunnel slopes down at 10% grade throughout its length, was unpaved until 12 years ago, and unlighted until 5 months ago.
We also stopped to take a look at my first Kea. Curious fellows, these olive green coloured birds are the world’s only alpine parrot, and have been known to tear apart shoes, convertible car tops, and pretty much anything else that interests them as well as (if you can believe it) to occasionally kill sheep.
After about 40 minutes of driving, we reached our goal: Milford Sound itself. More properly called a fjord than a sound (they spell it “fiord” everywhere in NZ, but I like the look of it better with a “j”) Milford’s beauty is consistently raved about by pretty much everyone who visits. And despite its remoteness, it gets a LOT of visitors. Over 400,000 a year. So popular are cruises and flights through the sound that there is discussion of building a monorail from Glenorchy, through the Greenstone Valley to ease access.
But there’s usually a reason why places get so many visitors, and especially when they’re as remote as the Sound, that reason is usually because they really are true wonders.
As Milford Sound is. It’s hard enough to fully appreciate the grandeur of the place with the human eye while you’re actually present, much less by looking at photos and reading a description by a not-so-superbly-gifted writer.
But I’ll try. The scale of the place is almost impossible to fathom. A gigantic water filled natural amphitheatre, Milford Sound is surrounded on three sides by peaks hundreds of metres high, and impenetrable waters sink a further 300 metres below the surface. Aircraft, large boats, even waterfalls 150m or more high are simply dwarfed by the immensity of the mountains, rising straight up out of the sea and then towering above. To give a tiny idea of its scale, try to find the boat (a sizeable vessel with room for several hundred passengers) in this picture.
The Sound is dominated by hanging valleys, whose entrances lie hundreds of metres above the water, by huge cliffs, five hundred metres and more high, and most especially by Mitre Peak, a 1600m tall mountain near the end of the sound whose triangular peak forms perhaps the most famous view anywhere in New Zealand.
As remarkable as Milford Sound is, it was remarkable that I got to see it in such beautiful sunny weather. As it was explained to me, 6 hours without rain is unusual in this part of the country, much less the 60 or so I’d experienced over the past few days. The place averages over 6000mm of rain a year, so it was incredible that I’d caught it in this condition. However, while the views are wonderfully clear on a day like this one, I did miss out on seeing the torrents of water that cascade down the walls of the Sound during rainy times… Ah well, I guess I’ll have to go back.
After cruising the Sound for a couple of hours, it was time to head for Te Anau, the last town on the road access to Milford. On the way back, we took a quick stop at The Chasm, a spot where soft bedrock has been eroded by a river into a deep, narrow gorge containing all manner of bizarre and beautiful formations, including one that looks spookily like a stylized human face.
The day ended with a trip to our bus-driver/tour guide’s venison farm to feed, take photos and otherwise cavort with his (pet) deer and sheep.
Whew. It’s been an exhausting few days, especially since I seem to be coming down with a bit of a cold.
Since there’s no obvious individual to thank this time, I’ll send out my gratitude to the New Zealand Department of Conservation. They’re responsible for the maintenance, access to and upkeep of pretty much all of what I’ve enjoyed most in New Zealand.
One more NZ entry to come!
Tags: New Zealand
Llew