Otago Peninsula

Toroa Int'l House (the set of flats where I'm living in Dunedin) had a trip planned for yesterday to the Otago Peninsula. Toroa has been really good to us in terms of organizing free local trips like this for those who want to go.

We first went to Taiaroa Head, site of the only mainland Albatross colony in the world. Some people paid $25 for a tour of the Albatross Centre, but most of us could not afford it and instead wandered around the point, enjoying the beautiful views and watching the seals on the beach.




On one side of Taiaroa Head is Pilots Beach, a tiny (seriously tiny, maybe 50m long) beach where we relaxed for a while.



Prashna (one of my flatmates) and I decided to explore further along the coastline, so we climbed up onto the rocks and followed the shoreline a short ways.



We found a really nice natural sitting area on the rocks by the water and sat down in the sun, with the wind howling around us. We both fell asleep for a few minutes and after some time relaxing decided to head back to the bus. Good decision.

As we were walking up the road to the parking lot, taking our sweet time, the bus came down toward us with everyone on board, about to leave for Sandfly Bay! He stopped to let us on, and we continued on our journey. We thought we had 30 minutes more than we actually did, so we were very lucky. Had we missed the bus, we would have had no problem hitchiking.

We arrived at Sandfly Bay, a different location on the peninsula, about 45 minutes later. Once the driver had parked the bus, the passengers broke out singing the Birthday Song for the second time (they had done so before leaving Toroa earlier). Turns out Vania had made me two Swedish mudcakes (really chocolatey chocolate cakes) for my birthday and brought them on the bus. With the help of Toroa staff and some students, everyone on the bus, including the driver, got some cake and juice, and napkins which were very much necessary.

The cake was delicious and after satisfying our sugar cravings, we began the 15 minute walk down the beach. It took about half an hour to reach the penguin hide (little hut with small viewing windows so the timid penguins can't see you) at the far end of the beach to watch the yellow-eyed penguins come ashore at dusk to sleep on land. I'd been there three times aleady, even slept a night there, but it was fun to go again with this different crowd of people.

As we walked along the beach, we saw a penguin walk from the water up the beach and inland a few hundred metres ahead of us. When we arrived at the track to the penguin hide, there were three Americans taking photos of a pair of Hooker sea lions (an endangered species, also known as New Zealand sea lions) at a distance much shorter than recommended by Dept. of Conservation guidelines for encounters with such animals. The stupid guys were trying to get as close as possible to these sea lions for photos, and sea lions being territorial, massive, much faster than they appear, and prone to anger, the Americans were not very welcome by the large beasts.



They finally gave up with their photos and eventually left the beach. One of the sea lions then decided to move further inland, crossing the path that leads to the penguin hide and going quite a ways inland to sleep in the grass.

We spent quite a long time in and near the penguin hide, and I got to take care of Tom, an energetic little boy who came along with one of the staff members. He was quite disappointed that I couldn't go back to his house with his family to hang out :-)



We saw two yellow-eyed penguins. There aren't many, as YEPs are an endangered species. The most I have seen on one occasion so far was five plus one dead on the beach. Apparently, in the middle of the winter (June-July), there are more penguins at the beach, sometimes 15-20.



We also saw a sea lion come ashore from the water and make its way up onto the beach to rest.



As the sun was setting, the last few of us decided to leave the penguin hide and head back to the bus.



There were five of us: me, Mark (Toroa's maintenance man/gardener), Namiko (Japan), Khaing (Burma), and Rosalit (Mexico). We walked along the beach and after some time noticed a grey seal (Mark thinks it's a female sea lion - I have yet to come to a conclusive answer) sleeping not too far from us. We had seen it from the penguin hide as it chased after three other Toroans who left the hide before us.

With seals and sea lions, it is important never to stand between them and the water as that is their escape route and if you stand in that space they tend to attack. This seal was far from the shoreline so we could not go around back of it and decided to walk near the water and see if it noticed us, as it appeared to be asleep. Wrong choice.

This seal saw us and decided to come over and pay us a visit, and not a very friendly visit, though we found it humorous nonetheless. As it 'ran' toward us, I took photos until I decided it was too close for comfort and retreated. Mark, Khaing, and Rosalit took this opportunity to run past behind it near the water as it was chasing me and Namiko.



We decided to go inland along a sand dune valley and then loop back around to the beach again. As Namiko and I walked inland calmly, the seal waited and watched, glaring intensely after us.

We found a place to turn to loop back to the beach and I began to climb a steep but not too high sand dune. At the top I turned around to offer my hand to Namiko, and about 4-5 metres behind her, trying to climb up the sand dune, was the angry seal.



It tried to climb up but the hill was too steep and it slid back down all the way to the bottom of the ravine. After another attempt it eventually ran off further inland and over a ridge out of sight.

The sunset was beautiful and the ride home in the bus at night was nice. All in all, we had a very relaxing outing and it was a good 21st birthday.

Stewart Island - End of our Trip

Day 5:

We woke up as usual at 6am and after a breakfast of instant oats we left Doughboy Bay Hut for what would be a very taxing day. After five minutes of walking along the beach, the trail left the shoreline and shot straight up a mountain. Climbing being my weakness, I fell far behind Tom and Andrew fairly soon. A neverending and bloody steep ascent, my legs were burning like mad as I tried to keep a good pace. Eventually I gave up keeping a good pace and took my time, sweat still pouring off my face.

Unfortunately for me, as I stepped on a root while climbing, my boot slipped and I couldn't keep my balance; I fell backward into a large pool of mud, reinjuring my knee in the process. I had badly stretched several knee ligaments last June and my kneecap had slipped quite painfully in February, which is what happened again this time on the mountain. Luckily, I had remembered to grab my knee brace right before getting into the car in Dunedin. While I lay on my back in the mud grimacing in pain and trying to relax, I managed to get my pack off and find the knee brace. After strapping it on I found a can of V, an energy drink I had brought along in case I needed a boost. After sculling that, I got up and continued on in pain.

About half an hour later, I finally caught up to Tom and Andrew. I had been hoping to find them cooking lunch, but I only had a couple minutes to breathe and drink juice before we continued. Soon we reached the top of the mountain and I regained my energy as we walked along the gentler slopes along the peak, through marshes reminiscent of Lord of the Rings.

Never before coming to New Zealand would I have thought it possible to find marshes on the peaks of mountains - then again, it isn't every day that I walk along the tops of mountain ranges.







We walked along the top of the range of mountains for some time before finally starting the descent. The descent was definitely as steep as advertised. After a couple hours of constant downhill walking, interspersed for brief periods of time with relatively flat but muddy track, the mud gave way to sand. we had reached the shoreline, and after crossing a few dunes, we were walking parallel to the shore but on a track slightly inland.



Andrew had been going quickly and Tom waited up for me as I had lagged to take photos of the guys ascending one of the sand dunes.



When Tom and I began walking, Andrew was nowhere to be seen. After a minute of walking we heard him shout for joy and assumed he had found the beach. We then reached a fork in the track and chose to follow the track that was labelled rather than the one that apparently led to the beach. Wrong decision.

Andrew had taken the beach-bound path, and after realizing we were not catching up, came back to the fork, then decided to go back and continue on the beach rather than try and find us on the inland track.

After a few minutes on our track, Tom and I decided we didn't want to walk on this inland path for two hours when the beach was so close. I suggested we cut directly through the bush to the beach and Tom led the way. Good decision.

Those five or ten minutes of bushwhacking were the most fun five or ten minutes of tramping on the entire trip for us. Imagine walking through a cement wall thirty metres deep, but the cement was not quite set. The bush was crazily dense and in many places very prickly as well. We were walking along the tops of fern trees (these things grow quite tall so, walking along the tops of them - literally stepping on the very top of each one like stones across a river - we couldn't tell where the ground was) and using full body weight to push giant plants out of our way. Looking around, it was as if we were ants in a world full of dinosaurs, a scene straight out of Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Grass twice as tall as us and other giant plants surrounded us on all sides. At one point, Tom sank into a pit nearly as deep as he is tall and as I followed, I barely managed to leap over it and land on another fern tree. I cautioned Tom not to fall off a cliff, as I had a suspicion we'd reach one when the jungle met the beach, and soonafter he rolled out of the jungle onto the edge of the small cliff.

The 'cliff' was really only about ten feet high, and we both slid down it and began our walk along the beach, spotting Andrew several hundred metres ahead of us. We took our time walking along the beach, playing with shells and dead animals, and generally enjoying our amazing surroundings.







The walk along the beach did not appear particularly long, but turned into about two hours, which was what we were told to expect. What a bloody long beach, and we only covered a bit under half its length.

We finally found an inlet that ran inland and decided to take that route, as we saw some footprints in the sand leading that way. All three of us were in agonizing pain from the day's hike, and all we could think about was reaching Mason Bay hut and eating and sleeping. These last few minutes of the day seemed like an eternity. We finally reached the hut and after lying down on the porch for a while, cleaned ourselves up a little and began cooking.

That evening, we decided to go searching for Kiwis, an endangered flightless bird native only to New Zealand and the namesake of this country's inhabitants (Kiwi fruit were also named after the bird, as the fruit have a similar appearance to the bird, albeit much smaller in size). After unsuccessfully waiting and watching for the usually nocturnal bird to appear (the only place they ever venture out in the daytime is on Stewart Island), we gave up and headed back to the hut.

Along the way, Andrew and I decided we would make some soup before bed, as we were starving again. When we arrived at the hut we discovered that no one had the soup. And with the soup, the remaining rice and several other soups were no longer with us. It turns out that one of the guys (couldn't have been me, I never took care of that bag of food - really) accidentally left the bag behind at the last hut. With two more days of hiking ahead of us I was not pleased at this new development - afterall, I was already starving every day with the amount of food we had.

Day 6:

We woke up extra early at 530am, hoping to beat the other trampers who were at the hut and heading the same direction as us that day. We left Mason Bay hut before 7, our earliest start on the trek. The day had two sections: the first was a supposedly 3-4 hour stretch of flatland covering 14km. Andrew's ankle, which he rolled many times (as we all did) in the previous days and on this first stretch several times, was really bothering him on this easiest part of our trek, and I had no energy at all. This was the first time it actually rained on our trip - amazing, as Stewart Island is renowned for the constant rain (much more rain than in Vancouver for instance). It took us three and a half hours to reach Freshwater Inlet hut, the place where we were dropped off by the water taxi on Day 2 of our trip to begin our 6 days of tramping.

Soon after arriving, an older gentleman who had been there since the day before came by and told us there was a kiwi nearby. We immediately got up, tired as we were, and walked the two minutes to where he said we might find it. Shortly thereafter, we did indeed spot it, just after 11am in broad daylight. After foraging around in the underbrush, mainly ferns, looking for food in the ground (hence the Kiwi's long thin beak), it began approaching the trail from which we were watching it.

It came right onto the path where Andrew was, just on the other side of him from where I was standing with my camera. I told him to move one way and, distracted by this strange bird looking up at him not two feet away, he moved the other way instead, blocking the PERFECT shot of the kiwi on the middle of the path with a clear and contrasting background. I got a few photos of the bird in the bush, but only good enough to prove we saw it.



In this one, you can see it in the centre - the brown round thing that could be mistaken for a porcupine perhaps. A very dumb bird in our estimation, but very interesting indeed. If the animal had a voice, it surely would have been saying "dum dee dum dum" as it walked along, in all honesty appearing like something out of a cartoon.

The rest of the day's hike was long and tiring. We went up and down and up and down as usual, and eventually reached the point in the track where it met up with a Great Walk. Great Walks are designed for tourists with no tramping experience, and for much of the remainder of the walk the mud was avoided as nice modern boardwalks were in place.

We reached the large North Arm hut in the evening, ahead of suggested times, and promptly set to work cooking some food. I got the powdered milk going, and drank 7 cups of it myself. We made instant noodles which added 2 cups more liquid to my system, and I finally topped that off with a cup of green tea. 10 cups (2.5 Litres) of liquid was good for my tired body, but I had to get up twice in the middle of the night and climb off my bunk to go out into the bushes and relieve myself. The possum right at the door when I left was hard to scare off as I didn't have my headlamp with me, but a few feigned kicks did the trick. While Andrew was outside in the middle of the night taking a leak in the bushes, he nearly had a heart attack when a sudden explosion of noise hit him - he turned just quick enough to see the tail end of a deer sprinting off into the dark.

Day 7:

We cut a lot of time off the suggested time for this day, our last on Stewart Island. As it was a Great Walk section of track, nearly the entire thing was boardwalk. This made hills much easier; where we previously dealt with mud and roots we now had nice steps to ease the effort. I still fell behind for most of the day, as I had little energy left, my high metabolism unable to deal with the rationed food supply. Despite this, we arrived in Halfmoon Bay, the town of Oban, in good time to relax. We changed our ferry time to an earlier one, ate some chocolate from the corner store, and then walked into the nice looking restaurant attached to the hotel.

Covered in mud and still wearing our gaiters, stinking of sweat and breath reeking from reduced frequency brushing, we put our bags down and sat down in the nice restaurant. Andrew and I each ordered an $18.50 pizza, and I also ordered a $4 plate of bread and we all got the orange juice we had been craving for days.



When some wealthy-looking people left the restaurant with their food unfinished, Tom kindly grabbed their child's half finished coke and gave it to me (turned out to be a raspberry and coke, delicious). I poured it from his glass into mine and Tom put the glass back. The waitresses weren't looking, but seemed to notice later when they came by, as none of us had ordered any soft drinks, and coke differs greatly in appearance from orange juice or water. They probably thought I had pulled out some rum and poured myself a drink.

After stuffing ourselves, talking for ages and generally trying to waste time in the warm comfort of the restaurant, we paid our bill and went back outside.



A while later we boarded the ferry. Andrew got seasick (but didn't really puke - the photo was a joke) so he and I went to the outside deck and stayed there a while til he felt better.



The three of us discussed entrepeneurship and ideas for making money, as well as our philosophies behind wanting to earn loads of money. We all have the same goal - get rich so we can give it away - interesting.

Arriving at the ferry terminal in Bluff, we waited for the crates with our bags to be unloaded. Lucky for us, the first crate to be opened contained our bags - right on top! We returned to the car, still parked with no ticket in a 5 minute parking zone, 6 days later, and changed into clean clothes for the drive home.



We drove into Invercargill and stopped at The Warehouse, a big box store akin to K-Mart or Zellers, where we loaded up on candy. I spent about $15 on candy, including chocolate and gummy candies of all sorts. On the drive home we gorged on candy until we all felt a bit sick, and played great roadtrip music from Andrew's iPod at high volume. We even stopped at one point to take photos of really cool sunrays poking through a hole in the clouds.



Finally, we reached home. I took off my mud-covered clothes and took a shower. It took about 45 minutes to get all the mud off me, as the layer closest to my skin had hardened and welded itself to my skin.

It was an amazing trip. Sorry for the long drawn-out posts, but it's really difficult for me not to add so many details to what was, for the three of us, one of the most interesting and adventurous weeks of our lives.

Stewart Island (continued)

Day 4:

We woke up at 6am and left at about 8 that day. This was a very difficult day, and it's good we started early. At 16 kilometres and just over ten hours, it was an arduous day to say the least. We went up and down and up and down the mountains, along the peaks, and then finally back down to sea level. While I have fairly good endurance and can walk as fast or faster than Andrew and Tom on flat land, the uphills are particularly difficult for me. I fell behind qute often on the uphills but every once in a while Tom and Andrew would stop and wait for me to catch up.

We had some interesting crossings this day as well - in particular one stream about 6 feet wide. About 11am, we found this stream and there was no way across. The water was a solid 3 feet deep and none of us felt like wading through it. Nor did we fancy the 6 foot climb down into the stream and the 6 feet to claw ourselves up the other bank. Both banks were steep muddy slopes and we could see the marks of hikers who had less luck than us navigating this crossing.

Tom jumped first then Andrew threw each of our 3 heavy packs across to Tom who caught and threw each one further up the path in a single fluid motion. It worked nicely and we were on our way, having caught it all on video.

Just after 5pm, we reached the top of the last mountain of the day and stopped for a few minutes and some photos. What a beautiful place it was, looking down towards Doughboy Bay and all around us mountain peaks.

With high spirits, we began the long and mostly extremely steep descent to sea level. An hour later, nearing the bottom, we stopped for a minute to breathe and enjoy the view. Andrew realized at this point that he no longer had his camera - he apparently put it down at the top of the mountain and forgot to pick it up when we began our descent. He and Tom decided to try finding it while I continued on to start the rice cooking. They left their bags in the bushes and I went on alone down the remainder of the trail.

About 10 minutes after I had arrived at Doughboy Bay Hut, Andrew and Tom arrived. I had taken my sweet time once I was alone, stopping to take photos and enjoy the scenery and lack of rush. They had gone full tilt partways up and back down the mountain with no success in locating the camera.

Down at the hut, I walked up to my calves in water and did my best to clean the mud off, without much success. I cleaned my shoes and gaiters and returned to the hut where my legs began to itch crazily. I coated them in Andrew's anti-itch powder but this didn't help. About half an hour later they finally returned to normal. We made rice with broccoli and carrots for supper and went to bed after Andrew got 'attacked' by a possum. In reality Andrew's screams sent the possum running, and possums are not dangerous or scary, but Andrew assures us that the possum ran at him. Sure Andrew, sure.

The hut was fairly full, as two people were there from the previous day and two others arrived after dark, making seven of us. The other four were all going the opposite direction on the track.

In the middle of the night I awoke as usual to relieve myself outside and there were two possums there this time. I scared them off just by looking at them :-) It's nice knowing there are no predators in New Zealand (except the human type of course).

To be continued...

Stewart Island

[Photos in this entry ARE NOW WORKING (all 1 of them hehe) thanks to Mike who provided a link to www.net2ftp.com which I can use to upload my files to my webspace now, getting around this annoying proxy deal at my university.]

Last week Andrew, Tom and I went to Stewart Island.

Day 1:

We awoke early (we were soon to discover that 8am would no longer be considered 'early' for us) in the morning and went to the local tramping (hiking is called tramping in New Zealand) store for some last minute purchases. We then returned to our flats and packed our bags. At 2pm, we drove to the grocery store and loaded up on food. By 3pm we were on the road in Tom's car.

We drove to the Catlins, a really neat area of the south coast between Dunedin and Invercargill full of unique landscapes, wildlife, and very windy (often gravel) roads. We spent some time meandering around, then decided to drive down to the beach at Tautuku Bay where we found a spot to camp. While there were no signs banning camping there, I doubt many people do so. The car got stuck in the sand a couple times and Andrew and I had to get out and push. Being from snowy Minnesota, Andrew is well acquainted with pushing vehicles out of snow.

Our tent was the oddest one I've ever come across. A rental tent from the university's rec services, it had no instructions. While this would usually be no problem, this tent was rather 'unique' to say the least. With many years experience of setting up different tents between the three of us, none of us could quite figure it out. It was not only an assymetrical design, but also had a seemingly mismatched rain fly. After about an hour of trying to get it right, we settled for something close to functional, cooked up some spaghetti with 400ml of sauce and 1kg of ground beef, and went to bed.

Day 2:

Our sleep had not been very good, as the 3 person tent seemed smaller than the 2 person tent I had rented a few weeks earlier in which we had 4 people. Andrew and Tom both snored and there were quite a few mosquitoes and sandflies in the tent. However, we rose early and in high spirits nonetheless. After eating a breakfast of leftover spaghetti, bread, and honey, we were once again on our way.

We reached Invercargill fairly early, then drove down to Bluff, from where the ferry to Stewart Island departs. After driving around looking for parking, we were told we could park in the 5 minute parking. We had 2 hours left before check-in, so we drove to a nearby coastal trail and spent an hour and a half walking down and back. On our return we parked in the 5 minute parking and got ready to board the ferry.

The 1230pm ferry left at 1245pm, and arrived exactly an hour later in Halfmoon Bay, Stewart Island. As we disembarked ahead of most of the crowd, a man from the ferry company standing on the wharf asked us if we were looking for Barry (or maybe it was Kevin? I don't remember his name) and we had no clue. He said we were though, so we followed him around the corner and there was a stout mariner in knee high rubber boots yelling to us to run and jump in his car. We ran, threw our big backpacks in the back and leapt into the 4x4 with speed. He drove as fast as he could to a different little cove where his water taxi was waiting and we jumped in.

In a matter of seconds, the engine was started and we were speeding through the water. We were barely on time, and with the water only at 1-2 metres deep the mariner and his boat would become grounded if the tide caught him. We sped up a waterway that reminded me of the mangrove inlets on Langkawi, and got dropped off at a Dept of Conservation (DoC, pronounced 'dock,' not D.O.C.) hut, "Freshwater Inlet Hut."

We put our gaiters on, and began our trek.

Within literally 2 minutes on this first day, we jumped over our first stream. Four hours and ten minutes later, we had completed our first day of tramping, a tramp suggested to take five hours. We had crossed small streams, larger creeks, bogs, marshes, one or two mountains, and in total 10 kilometres.

I never knew walking could be such a mental excercise. We had to watch every step we took to avoid tripping or sinking waist deep into mud, both of which would happen regardless on occasion. In the marshes, we constantly had to make our own detours from the path as waist deep cold muddy water separated one floe of land from another. It felt like jumping from one piece of floating ice to another, except with grass instead of ice. We'd often sink up to the knees on landing a jump, and several times one of us needed another person to pull us out of the mud.

We ended the day's walk in the dark on a steep downhill track covered in slippery roots. We had our headlamps on and arrived successfully at Fred's Camp Hut, where we met a pair of hunters. They were quite rough around the edges but great characters nonetheless for a night's conversation. Their two younger friends came in after we had arrived. They had spent the day fishing and shellfish hunting and had brought back many huge mussels and abalone. Outside the hut there was a deer carcass hanging in the trees for the blood to drain. We cooked some rice and vegetables and they offered us mussels and abalone, which Andrew and Tom enjoyed thoroughly. I'm not a fan of seafood, especially shellfish, so I declined the offer. They also offered us a leg of venison which we accepted, but we left in the morning before they had really prepared themselves for the day, so we didn't end up taking them up on the offer. It was raining in the morning, so we waited until 1130am to leave when the weather improved.

Day 3:

The day's walk was filled with mud, mud, and more mud. The photo of me thigh deep, stuck and fallen over in the mud with my backpack on, was lost as it was on Andrew's camera. More on that later. We definitely got tired this day and were relieved to arrive at Rakeahua Hut after five and a half hours of walking. We had covered 12 kilometres of marshes, rainforest, mountains, and many a creek once again.

At some of the larger creeks, which could even be called rivers, there were no ways to cross with dry feet without great feats of balance. On one particular crossing, we had to walk along a wet log, swing around a smaller tree that was sticking up diagonally over it (this is not so easy with a large backpack weighing 40+ pounds), then slowly lower ourselves to a sitting position, straddling the log, and shimmy along the log in this position to where one section had broken off. This 'splinter' was lower, and we had to lower ourselves into a standing position on this splinter, then walk along it for a couple steps, and then step onto a small but living tree and pull ourselves up onto the other riverbank. It was an interesting process for me, and I was happy to go last, so that Andrew and Tom could advise me. This was one of many examples of clever thinking and entertaining crossings.

The log, looking from the start toward the other side:

The hut was not unoccupied as we had hoped; there were four people already there, and only six bunks. Tom volunteered to sleep on the floor with our three ground mats stacked as a makeshift mattress. However, it turned out that two of the people were actually sleeping in a tent outside to hear the birds at night, so we each got a bunk. The four people were in their sixties I'd say, two from Kaikoura who slept in the tent and two from Tasmania who had come to visit their friends. The gentleman from Kaikoura was quite arrogant it seemed, and his wife was one of those people who has to offer her advice on how to do everything to every stranger she meets. Luckily, the two Tasmanian friends of theirs who slept in the hut were quite nice people and I had a lengthy conversation with them as they had spent a few years in BC (Queen Charlottes Islands and Kimberley) and the Yukon in the seventies.

To be continued...