One Great Walk

Enjoying the manicured trails of the Keppler Route

After sky-diving, road-tripping through the Catlins along the southern coast, and watching our Highlanders get thumped by the Crusaders in Dunedin, it was time to tramp again.  We had initially hoped to hike the Dusky Sound – a 4-day hike that, in our lonely planet ‘tramping in new zealand’ guidebook, first detailed the beauty on the hike, but then had lots of boxed text warnings about how hard it was, how potentially dangerous, how only experienced and fit hikers should tackle this one – those boxed text warnings are all it takes to get us excited about a hike.

Unfortunately, with this one, it’s also unspeakably expensive to get there and get back.  A ferry boat crossing across a lake to start the hike, and then we would have had to hire our own float plane to come get us and transport us back to civilization when we were done.  While that was an exciting prospect, it also seemed unnecessarily expensive, when there were so many other beautiful hikes that were slightly easier to get to… as in, drive up, park your car and start hiking.  So we’ll come back for the Dusky Sound another time (after we win the lottery and can afford our own float plane).

Not a bad view for our first campsite... across Lake Te Anau

Instead, we headed over to Fjordland to hike the Keppler Track – one of New Zealand’s 9 great walks.  No, seriously, that’s what they’re called – “The Great Walks”.  They are New Zealand’s most well-known, well-serviced multi-day hikes.  The trails are practically manicured sidewalks, and even the smallest streams have little bridges for crossing.  During the high season, you need to make reservations for some of these hikes months in advance – yet another reason that Amy and Dave love traveling in the ‘shoulder season’ – no reservations required.  We’re not so big on the planning in advance. 

The Keppler had the added advantage of being one of the few circuit hikes, meaning the hike started and finished at the same point (i.e., no expensive logistics involved) -- a 4-day, 3-night hike, covering 60km.  The hike is laid out beautifully – with 3 lovely huts evenly spaced about 15km apart, (about 5-6 hours of hiking each day).  But if you’re camping like us, they’re not quite as kind.  No camping is allowed in the fragile high-alpine zone where the first hut is.  So instead, you have an extremely short first day (1.5 hours), and then an extremely long second day – covering 23 km, and gaining and then losing about 1300 meters of elevation that day.  For those of you who don’t hike… that’s a fair bit of elevation for a day, if you’re carrying a 45-pound pack. 

The first day was almost disappointing in how short it is… you get all dressed up, pack up your pack nice and tight, lace up your boots, put on your gaiters… and the hike is over before you’ve even broken a sweat.  (Of course, Amy then breaks a sweat by dropping her pack, exchanging boots for sneakers, and trail-running back all the distance we’d covered).  The campsite the first night was a beautiful beach, along the shores of Lake Te Anau… which was dampened only slightly by our New Zealand nemesis, the sandfly, which has developed a taste for our exotic North-American flesh.

We woke up amped for the second day’s hike.  Given the short hike the first day, we had a lot of kilometers to cover on day 2 – the trail signs promised 8-10 hours of climbing and then descending.  And we did climb steadily – for 2 ½ hours... up some beautiful forest trails, breaking through the tree-line, and along a wind-swept ridge, to our first destination, the hut that marks the end of every-one else’s first day.  It was supposed to be a 4 hour hike, but we’ve learned two things about tramping in NZ:  first, that we’re fast on the uphills (slow on the downhills) – actually, learned that in Patagonia, and second, that the author of the NZ tramping guide is much more generous with predicted hiking times than the author of our Patagonia hiking book.  So, yea, we pretty much crushed that first section of the hike. 

A glimpse of what we might have seen...
if only the weather had cooperated

And all that climbing of course yielded unbelievably stunning views of the Fjordland landscape below… or at least it would have, if we hadn’t chosen the one day that week that was completely clouded over and fogged in.  Still, walking in the clouds along the mountain ridge had its own mysterious beauty and charm, and the clouds lifted for brief spells, offering glimpses of the stunning scenery we would have otherwise enjoyed.   And then a long, long descent to the campsite, tucked into the river valley.  (And yes, Amy still went for a 6 mile run after all that hiking). 

Don't look too close...
or you might see how full
the moon was that night!

Our third day offered some lovely walking along the Iris Burn river valley, and our favorite campsite of the trip, Shallow Bay.  It’s always nice when you can end the day with a refreshing dip in the lake… and the sunset that night was pretty incredible. 

One of our favorite things about this hike was all the birdlife that surrounded us throughout the trip.  There were a lot of curious little fellows, who would even daringly hop right onto your leg for a brief moment, accompany you along a section of trail, and constantly serenade you with beautiful birdsongs.  We’re not really into birding, so we had to guess a bit at the names.   Our favorite was a little black-and-white guy with no neck… we think this one is called the ‘chubby mcchubberstien’.  Another was the ‘fancy-tail’.  We later learned from an actual bird expert that our ‘fancy-tail’ is actually called the ‘fan-tail’… so that gives us hope that we might be right about the chubby guy as well.

Pretty spectacular sunset from our
beach campsite the third night...

After a lovely 4 days of tramping in the back-country, we headed back into civilization for our usual post-hike ritual:  binging and gorging on any food we can get our hands on (in this case, a meat pie for amy, a gluten-free carnivore pizza for dave, and milkshakes for everyone… and then a second meat pie for amy).  We hopped in Dougie and headed a few hours north to Wanaka, to prepare for our last New Zealand tramp, the Cascade-Saddle Pass, which of course has lots of boxed-text warnings.