Rachel and Mike in Australia

Over Christmas and New Year’s, we spent 2 and a half weeks on the South Island of New Zealand (gotta love the Aussie attitude when it comes to vacation time–4 weeks is standard!). We had a fantastic trip. The island is much greener, mountainous, and sheep-filled than Sydney. Many of the mountains were carved by glaciers, some of which still exist, so there are massive lakes that are an incredible glacial blue color.

The southwestern part of the country is largely Fjordland National Park, which includes the famous Milford Sound. We did one of the New Zealand ‘Great Walks’ in Fjordland, called the Routeburn Track. The Routeburn is a 3-day ‘tramp’ through a remote area of the park. It’s a relatively easy walk covering 32 km (~20 mi) and 800 m (~2600 ft) elevation.

There are several Department of Conservation ‘huts’ along the way where you sleep and which are equipped with running water, wood stoves, and bunk rooms. We started the hike on Christmas Day and lucked out with a gorgeous afternoon of hiking (following a cloudy/rainy morning).  For Christmas dinner we had carried up wine, ham, cranberry sauce, and some fresh veggies. I was expecting people to be on the trail with Santa hats and in a festive mood at the hut. I don’t know if it was because most of them had hiked in the wet morning, but most people weren’t acting as though it was any different than any other day. Luckily my elfish nature had though ahead and brought candy canes and Christmas poppers, so I did my best to spread some Christmas cheer!

The second day of the hike we weren’t as lucky with the weather – it was solid rain and clouds, so we missed out on some of the best vistas. We were basically hiking up or down a stream or waterfall rather than a trail, and 95% of the day we were above the treeline, so there was no shelter at all from the rain.

It should have been miserable, but it was still gorgeous. Perhaps the thin air helped by keeping us a bit light-headed? It was like hiking in a cloud forest in some science fiction movie.

We were rewarded at the end of it by the hut ranger who, rather than just a 5 minute weather briefing, treated the hut to a ~40 minute impromptu stand-up comedy routine. He told us to expect more of the same weather on our last day, but when we woke up the sky was overcast but not raining, and as we hiked, the clouds cleared, so we got some welcome sunshine to dry out our coats, boots, packs, etc.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 14th, 2010 at 6:03 am and is filed under Travel, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.