Kepler Track - Day 2

Day 2 began relatively early, as lots of the other backpackers started rummaging around the bunk room and woke us up. We left Luxmore Hut around 9ish after a camper's breakfast of muesli bars and tea, and began what we thought would be a somewhat easier walk than yesterday - at least that was what it looked like on the map....

The morning began quite overcast, although it soon brightened up.

Luxmore Hut from further up the mountain path.

The peak of Mount Luxmore - we steadily climbed round and up almost to the top. We didn't opt to leave the path and climb all the way up, for reasons made clear below....

Unfortunately about half an hour into the day, as we began climbing Mt Luxmore, Craig's knee suddenly gave way. Luckily a passing trekker lent Craig one of her walking poles for the day - otherwise I don't think he would have made it.

A rest stop with a view.

Quick - hide from the Ringwraiths!

The walk today was mainly along the alpine ridges - usually Anne was miles in front, I was in the middle, and Craig was miles behind. At least being so exposed we could all still see each other, even from the other side of the mountain ridges...

One of the negatives about being spaced so far apart from each other was having to take awful self portraits like this one...

Craig having a much needed break.

The path goes up...

The small black dot is Craig.

Finally we start the downhill slog...

Unfortunately it involved climbing down several precarious staircases like this. Not fun when you have a massive backpack on making you very top heavy - I'm glad it wasn't windy!

All the staircases - with Craig at the very top.

Lake Manapouri in the distance. (Where we will be tomorrow.)

After this view point, we reached the bush line, and went steeply downhill through forest once more. I was keeping up with Anne now, but we lost Craig altogether. We would have stopped for him to catch up, but I was also in agony by this point - my legs do not like steep downhills, and I'd developed open pressures sores across my hips from the rather ill-fitting backpack.

We came from up there somewhere...

All in all, Day 2 was definitely the toughest day. What should have taken us about 6 hours, from Luxmore Hut to Iris Burn Hut, ended up taking us about 10hrs. Anne and I reached the Hut a good hour before Craig, dumped our stuff and had a quick break before going back up the hill to see if we could find him. After dinner, we were all so exhausted we collapsed to our bunks by about 8.30pm.

Kepler Track - Day 1

The weather was gorgeous for our first day on the Kepler Track. Unfortunately we got off to a slow and rocky start with Craig managing to drop his hoody in the car park and having to go back and find it before we even got onto the track. Half an hour into the walk we also discovered my waterproofs, which were attached to the outside of Craig's pack, had also fallen off - Craig ran back to find them and eventually discovered they were back at the Control Gates, right at the start of the track... At this point I resolved to keep a much closer eye on everything attached to Craig's massive rucksack. (There was quite a bit of potential for things falling off!)

The track begins at Te Anau Control Gates at the south end of Lake Te Anau, which you can see above. These gates control the water flow into the Waiau river down to lake Manapouri.

From there the track follows the edge of Lake Te Anau through beech forest.

The first leg of the journey was an hour and a half walk (5.6km) to Brod Bay, where we would stop for a quick lunch. This part of the track was the easiest of the day...

Beautiful Brod Bay was a lovely spot for lunch - so nice that I didn't really want to leave! The only annoyance were the sand flies, but then they are an annoyance everywhere.

From Brod Bay, we had to walk up to the bush line. This section of the walk was 8.2km of uphill. The track started to climb steeply, with lots of switchbacks, and the lake got further and further away.

My sister, super fit freak that she is, quickly disappeared into the trees, leaving me and Craig far behind. Every now and then we'd catch up to her as she would wait somewhere for us, but she would quickly disappear again. We came across one obstacle - the fallen trees below - which required a bit of maneuvering to climb through.

Eventually, after what seemed like hours and hours of zigzagging, Craig and I finally made it to the Limestone Bluffs. I was really intrigued by these cliffs jutting out of the forest. They just seemed so out of place to me.

I don't think Craig was too happy about seeing these stairs, but he made it up them!

A few more switchbacks later and we eventually reached the bush line and came out on top of the hills! Anne was waiting for us here and we took a break to admire the view. Less than an hour left of walking to go!

Somewhere behind that middle hill are my parents!

Lake Te Anau and the town itself in the distance - it seems so far away, and yet we started there only a few hours before.

The views just scream Lord of the Rings!

The view back from the way we just came....

And finally Luxmore Hut comes into sight!

We reached the hut at about 8pm and the place was pretty full, which meant we struggled to find bunks and had to sleep in separate bunk rooms. It was great to put the packs down though - but it felt very strange walking around without them.

After we'd made our dinner of reconstituted freeze-dried meals and had a bit of a rest, we decided to venture out to see Luxmore Cave, a 10 minute walk away.

The lake at sunset - my camera doesn't really do the view justice.

Luxmore Cave is a 2km long cave - although only the first bit is really accessible, unless you would like to crawl through water to get to the end.

We made it as far as we thought safe, which included a little bit of crawling and scrambling, before the cave opened out in a little cavern.

Thought I should put at least one photo of me up, hideous though it is! This was the little cavern we were able to stand up in after crawling through a narrow tunnel. I went a little further, but it was a bit too narrow and small for my liking.

We walked back over the hills in the dark, and when we arrived back at the hut, we discovered 3 keas (alpine parrots) hanging around on the deck. I didn't take any photos, unfortunately, but it was great to see them up close. It was about 11pm when we finally went to bed, and I had to wake the guy up who was on the mattress next to mine, because he was lying diagonally across the bunks. Moron! Eventually I fell asleep to the sounds of keas calling and Craig snoring...

Kepler Track - Some Information

New Zealand is well known for having great places to hike. New Zealanders generally refer to hiking as tramping, but that just conjures up images of homeless people every time I say it. My friend Craig, my sister and I have all been wanting to hike the Kepler Track for quite a while now and so we booked onto it from Sunday 21st to Wednesday 23rd December.

The Kepler Track is a 60km circuit in the Kepler Mountains close to Te Anau in Fiordland. It normally takes about 3-4 days to hike, although every December there is a race called the Kepler Challenge, in which people actually run it! The winner this year finished in 4h 56m 24s - absolutely crazy!

The Kepler Track is one of the New Zealand Great Walks (as designated by the Department of Conservation, I think). The highest point is the Luxmore Saddle at 1400m and the lowest point is the track by Lake Manapouri at 180m. Whilst many NZ tracks have evolved from old Maori or pioneer routes, the Kepler Track was established pretty recently - in 1988, to ease the strain on the popular Milford and Routeburn tracks. It is apparently named after Johannes Kepler, as are the surrounding mountains. He was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer from the 17th Century. I've no idea what he has to do with this area of Fiordland!

The Kepler Mountains are made up of metamorphic and plutonic rocks from deep in the earth's crust, on top of which are sediments such as limestone, formed when the area sank below sea level before being raised again. There were also lots of glaciers in the area for thousands of years, which carved the U-shaped valleys, fiords and lakes you can see in the area now.

The forest is mainly beech (silver and red) and podocarp, such as rimu and totara, with lots of ferns and mosses on the forest floor. Above the treeline the landscape is mostly covered with snow tussocks.

We opted to do the track in 3 days and 2 nights - mostly because of the exorbitant cost of staying in the track huts ($45 each per night!) - rather than over 3 nights which would have allowed us a slower pace. This meant we would start at the Lake Te Anau Control Gates (as most people do) but would finish at Rainbow Reach, cutting out the last couple of hours of track (which I've walked before anyway). Day 3 would be by far the longest distance, so it makes it a bit easier to finish at Rainbow Reach.

I will post my photos from my 3 day Kepler Track hike in the next 3 posts to follow shortly. Hope you like!

Graduation!!

I'm a bit late posting about this, as my Graduation was on the 12th December, but better late than never I guess!

Finally, after starting my Nursing degree back in the UK in September 2004, I had finished! It has been a bit of a long journey, particularly as I had to do one year more than I hoped when I got to New Zealand, to satisfy the requirements about 'cultural safety' etc.

The best thing about my Graduation was that my family were all there! It is not very often these days that we are all together, as I only get to see my sister once or twice a year. Luckily she scheduled her flights to fly into New Zealand a couple of days before Grad, which I was very happy about! She had her Graduation earlier in the year back in the UK, which I could not attend as I was in the middle of my course, but I was very grateful she could come to mine.

The Graduation itself didn't start until the afternoon, so my parents arrived at around midday and we went out for lunch at Capers, one of my favourite cafes in Dunedin. It was pouring down with rain, so I opted to skip the Graduation Parade down George Street, in order to have more time for lunch.

Here we all are at Capers - dad is clearly already tired from the 4hr drive! Then they dropped me off at the Town Hall and I caught up with the end of the procession and headed into the Marquee.

The weather felt even worse waiting inside the marquee - the rain was battering it so much the frame started to move! I thought the whole thing was going to collapse on us! Luckily it didn't and we were filed up with our little numbered stickers on our sleeves and led into the Town Hall to bagpipe music.

The Town Hall quickly filled up and the Graduation began. It wasn't quite as long and boring as I had dreaded and I was quite excited to get up on the stage, although the moment seemed to go so quickly I can barely remember it now! My sister videoed me crossing the stage, but got rather excited and so the video jumps around a lot!

Our guest speaker was a female drain layer (!), and she was actually quite entertaining, at least for the first 15 minutes of her speech. Finally though, it was all over. I headed off to find my family and go to the Nursing Department's Graduation Function.

Woohoo, I finally had my degree!

There were actually two Nursing Functions we went to that evening - the first was a prize giving where we all received our transcripts and Otago Polytechnic badges.

The second was supposed to be a dinner function that I had opted to buy tickets for, mainly because I hadn't been organised enough to book a meal anywhere else in town. The food however turned out to be pretty average (in fact it was basically little appetisers and no real food at all). There were also barely any of my classmates or lecturers there, so it wasn't really that much fun. We were all still pretty hungry so I ended up taking my family to Eureka instead and getting yummy dessert! Should have just gone there in the first place!

By the end of the day I was pretty glad to get out of my bright blue robes, although we had an early start the next morning because I had booked a Graduation photo session so we could get some nice family photos. So I had to don my sexy outfit once again...

All in all, my Graduation day was pretty fun and relaxed. It was great to spend the day with my family as it happens so rarely these days.

Of course, the funny thing about graduating here is that although I now had my Bachelor of Nursing degree, I still had to wait another week for my Registration Exam results. So even though I had the degree I still could not work as a Nurse. Luckily I passed the exam! I had been slightly worried about it, as due to my concussion I had had to put in an application for extenuating circumstances. It was all good though, and now I can put the letters BN and RN after my name!

Wellington Trip, Part 7 - Final Days

I had planned my Wellington trip so that I could do most of the touristy stuff during the week and then spend time with my friend Rebecca at the weekend when she was off work.

On Saturday we went to Otari Wilton's Bush for a nice walk in the sunshine. The reason I wanted to go there was because it had a canopy walkway, although to be honest it wasn't quite as impressive as I'd hoped. The Reserve itself though was beautiful.

Otari-Wilton's Bush Reserve consists of 100 hectares of native forest and 5 hectares of plant collections. The area has been protected since 1900 when a local landowner Job Wilton fenced it off, thus protecting it from being logged and farmed like the land around it.

One of the things I have really enjoyed about Wellington was its wealth of green spaces. I've visited Karori Reserve, the Botanical Gardens, Otari-Wilton's Bush and walked through the Town Belt - all these places are within minutes of the city centre. I barely felt like I was in a city at all. All these green spaces and the coastline as well - Wellington has so much beauty!

After our walk, Rebecca took me for a drive around the coastline of the peninsula. We had lunch in a cute little cafe courtyard in a little suburb (I can't remember the name exactly) and then continued our drive round to the Red Rocks Reserve.

In the distant I could just make out the Kaikoura Ranges of the South Island. We didn't go into the Red Rocks Reserve itself, as it required either driving a 4x4 (which we didn't have) or walking several kilometres. This area was really nice though, and there was an informative display in the visitor centre (really a big open shed-like building) about the history of the place.

During the evening Rebecca and I met up with a girl called Steph, who I had met at the hostel, and we went out for dinner at a really nice Asian restaurant called Monsoon Poon, then coffee at a funky cafe. None of us were particularly in the mood for a big night out, but the evening was fun nonetheless, and it was great to see the busy weekend nightlife of Wellington compared to Dunedin!

On Sunday, Rebecca and I were being particularly lazy and spent the morning watching the Shortland Street omnibus... but then we decided to make the most of the afternoon sunshine and took our books to the city beach to read and relax. It was really nice just to chill out like that. I really liked the beach, which had warm, safe swimming water, compared to the pretty rough beaches of Dunedin.

Finally it was time for me to fly back to Dunedin. I was actually pretty sad to leave, I'd had a great week exploring Wellington in beautiful, warm weather, which was completely unexpected (everyone warned me about the rubbish weather Wellington has, but apart from the first night I didn't see it at all!) I definitely recommend taking the time to see all Wellington has to offer, rather than just spending a night here, as so many backpackers seemed to do. There were still things I didn't have time to do - I wanted to go out to Matui/Somes Island and Kapiti Island, for example. Well, there is always next time!

Wellington Trip, Part 6 - Botanical Gardens and the Weta Cave

I was pretty exhausted after my hike along the Southern Walkway and so that night I opted to spend relaxing at the hostel. I didn't particularly like the hostel much - earlier in the week it had been full of school kids and so there weren't that many people in my age bracket around. That Thursday night however, I ended up drinking bourbon and cola with some of the hostel staff (mostly backpackers short of money), because it was someone's birthday. He was turning 38, and trying to chat me up... Needless to say I eventually had to escape back to my dorm room.

On Friday morning I travelled up the Cable Car to the Botanical Gardens. The Cable Car has been running since 1902 to give access to a new suburb for all the new people coming to live in Wellington. Otherwise it would have been a steep walk uphill through scrub land. Now the area is, of course, completely different.

Above is the iconic red tram slogging its way up the hill. There are two trams that run up and down the track every 1o minutes.

I spent all morning wandering around the Botanical Gardens. I wanted to visit the Carter Observatory but it was closed for renovations. I did however discover the human sundial close by, which was surprisingly accurate. Below are a few photos of various parts of the Gardens.

I really liked the Peace Garden, with a lovely little waterfall and some welcome shade (it was getting bloody hot by this point!)

The Lady Norwood Rose Garden was in full bloom, full of roses and people admiring them. I took the opportunity to snap a few photos of the pretty flowers.

The Botanical Gardens were nice, but to be honest I was feeling pretty hot and tired (and achy from my long walk) to fully enjoy them. I did like some of the funky statues scattered around the place though.

During the afternoon I decided to go to the Weta Cave out at Miramar. No, this wasn't a cave full of insects but rather the face of Weta Productions, the company who did the special effects in Lord of the Rings. It was a pretty long bus ride out there but it was worth it. The Weta Cave had a little one room museum with pieces from various movies they had worked on, as well as a shop containing pretty expensive but well-crafted merchandise. The selling point for me though, was the brilliant movie in their little cinema. I used to think that Weta was the company that did computer graphics, but I learnt that they had many other faces - including creating weapons, armour, prosthetics, creatures, miniatures, costumes and props.

Having travelled all the way out to Miramar I realised I didn't have any cash to catch the bus back... which meant I had to walk a few kilometres back along the bus route until I found a cash point. Finally making it back to the hostel, I met up with my friend Rebecca, who I was going to spend the weekend with. We spent the evening watching movies on the sofa and catching up. Yey for girlie time!