Jaded

Jaded

I walked the Greenstone and Caples tracks with Mitzy, a European exchange student who was staying with us. He was an indoor type of boy. We thought taking him for a tramp would help to get him out of the house. We also thought it would be a good test of character. It was. Except he failed the test. Mitzy is from Austria, the country that gave the world both Marie-Antoinette and Adolf Hitler, and on a bad day he could show features of both. He was tall and handsome, could be polite, knew all the best coffee houses in Vienna, and all the night clubs. He was fun to be with. He had strong opinions on every subject. He was from the flat bit of Austria, in the east, from the city, not all that familiar with the outdoors and the mountains.

          We set off from home, driving to Kinloch and down to where the Greenstone comes out into the lake at Elfin Bay. We stopped in Queenstown on the way to purchase our hut tickets. My wife dropped us off at the road end. We walked past the side track to Lake Rere, once a popular day walk, to the start of the eastern or southern ends of the Greenstone or Caples tracks. We were soon into the bush. We moved slowly with our heavy packs, stopping occasionally to listen to the sound of the birds. From the distance came a loud screeching sound. Probably an owl, I thought. It was unusual, I explained to Mitzy, to hear an owl during the day. The sound drew nearer. It was my wife, coming quickly up the track behind us. We had left our hut tickets in the car.

          We decided to dodge the middle section of the Greenstone valley in favour of the Caples. The Greenstone is an older route, travelled obviously in the old days by Māori transporting the precious stone, but is long and featureless walk upstream from the Greenstone Hut. The upper Caples in contrast is a narrow tussock-covered valley, edged by clumps of native beech, surrounded by steep snow-capped peaks, well worth the walk, and the view from the McKellar saddle to get back into the upper Greenstone is worth the climb. There is a swing bridge halfway up the Caples Valley, near to the first hut, high above the river. Mitzy fortunately wasn't bothered by it. He did complain about the weight of our packs. I had made sure before we set out that we had all the right gear to keep us safe. We had some heavier food, including fresh bread and fruit, for the first day. We stopped to eat some apples, partly to lighten the load. I explained the importance of carrying out our rubbish, including apple cores, not wanting the native vegetation to be spoilt by new trees growing from the seed. Mitzy looked around dismissively and threw his apple core into the bushes. He told me the place would look better with some nice apple trees.

          The track down off the saddle was in those days poorly formed, waiting to be rebuilt. Workers had brought in heavy machinery near to do the job, assembled near the bottom of the valley. The top section involved scrambling down a dry waterfall, then there were some steep drops down the mountainside to reach the valley floor. At least it would have been easier going down, we thought, than coming up. Near the top, we met two young women, who I think were from Israel, coming the other way, laden down with heavy packs, breathless and sweating after their long climb, their anxious faces showing their concern about the prospect of more effort ahead.

          "How far is it to go?" one of them asked.

          "Not far," I answered. "We've just come off the saddle".

Their faces brightened.

          "I love you," one of the women called out. Then they carried on with their own walk.

          Once back on the flat, we had to backtrack to the McKellar hut. The track was muddy and we needed to make our way round the edge of several bogs. Mitzy continually demanded to know how far away the hut was. It was like a pedestrian version of "are we there yet?" To encourage him, I showed him on the map where some of the bigger creeks were shown crossing the track. As we approached the hut, and came to yet another creek, a little one not shown on the map, he complained, "you told me the creek we crossed half an hour ago was the last one."

          The hut was filling up fast. There were three young men, also as it turned out from Austria, also from the Vienna area, also struggling to cope in the area with their limited skills in the bush. They had used up all their fire starters trying to light the big chunks of wood in the hut to start the wood-burner. It was getting cold and dark. They were risking serious injury trying to create smaller pieces with an axe. I showed them the dry brushwood that had been stored in the shed behind the hut, and how to find more to replace it. We lit the brushwood and soon had a good blaze going.

          Later a group of teachers from Timaru arrived. They were obviously used to each other's company. They were playing a game of what they called "non-contact" Scrabble, though there were some heated exchanges over what qualified as a word. We met three hunters, one of whom I recognised from Cromwell. They had shot more meat than they wanted to carry out and kindly gave us some back steaks to cook up. Completing the list of characters were two women from the Czech Republic who had done a few different tracks in New Zealand. Somehow, we all fitted into the available bunks.

          We needed to back-track up the muddy path to the junction with the track down from the McKellar saddle, a necessary repetition Mitzy was not completely happy with, then it is a short walk to the Greenstone Saddle. A sign marks the start of the Fiordland National Park. The saddle is also a low and easy way to cross the South Island's main divide, something that has not been lost on people wanting to build a road from Queenstown to Milford. So far, conservationists have managed to hold out against the idea. The valley opens out after the saddle, skirting Lake Gunn and arriving at Lake Howden. This has been one of my favourite parts of New Zealand from childhood. I first came here with my family when I was seven, with my wife when I was forty-seven to walk the Routeburn, and now on this walk with Mitzy. The track concludes with a short walk, and a popular day walk, from the main road into the site of the former Howden Hut.

          The highlight is Key Summit, so called because it is the watershed for the three major river systems in this part of the island. To the East, where we had just come from, is the Greenstone, flowing back into Lake Wakatipu and eventually down the Clutha to the Pacific Ocean. To the North is the Hollyford, flowing into the Tasman Sea at Martin's Bay. To the South is the Eglington, flowing into Lake Te Anau, then into the Waiau River, through Lake Manapouri, and out to the sea at the south coast. On the flat bit near the summit, lies a group of small tarns. Who knows where the water in each of them is going to end up? To the West is the impressive snowy face of the Darren Mountains— Christina, Madeleine, Tutoko. They are on the other side of the valley, and several hundred feet higher, but it feels as though you could reach out and touch them. The view across to the mountains, with the tarns in the foreground, is one of the most beautiful sights in the accessible parts of New Zealand, and one of the most photographed. Mitzy wanted to put himself in the picture, he stood on top of a rock and raised his arms. "I am the ruler of the world", he said. He is not the only Austrian to have that fantasy.

          We walked out to the road and waited to catch a bus to Te Anau. Mitzy had worn some old boots belonging to his father. By the end of the trip, they had fallen apart, and he threw them out. He had painful blisters on both feet. At least we had been fortunate, I thought, in Fiordland to have had several days of fine dry weather. Mitzy didn't think so. He opened his pack and threw his rain coat on the ground. "I knew I wouldn't need this," he said. The bus pulled up, Mitzy picked up the rain coat, climbed aboard, and we headed off to the relative comfort of a motel with my wife and family in Te Anau.