The Routeburn Track - Day 1

Alright! Its high time that I got my butt in gear and wrote about all the rest of my travels up to this point. So this is the day. I am totally buckling down and going full-on to get this done! I've been getting further and further behind as I just keep having nice weather and things to do other than sit in front of a computer for hours on end. But not today! Today I write! So, 'bout that Routeburn tramp... No, sillies, there were no sleazy women hanging out along the trail, that's just what hiking is called here. Beginning the track with heavy packs. We started out on our way to the track early Monday morning. I left my car parked next to our hostel, hoping they wouldn't plan some unannounced street cleaning for which they'd tow cars parked in the wrong spot while we were gone. We hopped onto the track shuttle bus that continued around to several more hostels until we had a full load of us and then we took off up the road along the shore of Lake Wakatipu, all the way to Glenorchy, at the tip of the lake. From there, we continued on, passing the road to Paradise, up to the start (or end, as the case may be) of the Routeburn Track. Now, I know all sorts of serious backpackers will cringe at this confession, but I have to admit that I'm a big fan of eating fruits and veggies when I hike, so I'm willing to take on a little extra weight to have decent food that leaves me feeling happy during my trip. I usually manage to keep the extra weight reasonable, but somehow, our food load for this trip ended up over on the ridiculous side. My pack was so heavy! I have no idea how food and supplies for 4 days could weigh that much! I didn't bring any books other than my journal. I only brought one set of clothes for hiking and another warm, dry set to change into at night. My tent is not extremely heavy. Nor is my sleeping bag. And that's really all I had. Plus cameras and binoculars. I don't know. I still blame it on the carrots. I found myself eating a lot of carrots. Or should I capitalize that? A LOT of carrots, due to a little misunderstanding at the grocery store. I asked Anne whether she wanted a carrot each day for lunch. She heard did she want A carrot for lunch. So she said yes, and I dutifully grabbed enough carrots for each of us to eat one for lunch every day, plus an extra one to have with our pasta dinner one night. Anne assumed that I wanted all those carrots for myself and didn't say anything about the amount I was buying. It wasn't until we got on trail and had our first lunch and she said that she didn't really want a carrot that we figured out that she doesn't even like carrots! So now we had 9 carrots, a rather heavy vegetable, which seemed all the heavier, now that we realized that they'd take a lot longer to eat than originally planned. So I went to work. I ate them for lunch and snacks. We put half of one in the pasta dinner and I ate the other half. I ate one for breakfast. We even managed to give one away. The carrots turned into one of the jokes of the trip. "Packs are heavy, better eat a carrot!" Only when all was said and done and we arrived back in Queenstown, congratulating ourselves on how we'd eaten almost everything we'd packed, did Anne admit that she'd never eaten a single carrot, other than the half a carrot that we'd put in the dinner our first night. That means that I'd managed to polish off 7 and 3/4 carrots in the span of 4 days. These were big carrots, too. Luckily, as you can see from our photos, I didn't turn orange, although sometimes I felt like I was going to. Routeburn Flats Hut. So, we started out on our hike with those heavy packs. And, oh, the scenery was beautiful! The track follows the river for the first part of the hike. Burn is a Scottish term for river, so Routeburn literally means the route along the river, not terribly creative, but at least its descriptive. So we were hiking through mossy beech forests, with views of the beautiful, clear stream running down in the gorge below us. We stopped at a rocky beach beside the river for a break. I was looking at the map and realized that there was a tent sign at the Routeburn Flats Hut, but not the Routeburn Falls Hut where we were staying. Well, where I thought we were staying... I had booked my trip after Anne, and I originally booked to stay in the huts with her, but after finding out the prices, I called back the next day to switch to tenting. Well, the woman who helped me was very nice, but not very informative, I discovered. For starters, she didn't mention that when I switched from hutting to tenting, that I'd be in an entirely different site for the evening. We discovered this only after I looked more closely at my ticket. Oops. We decided to ask the Hut Warden if Anne could switch to stay in this hut instead of the one that she was booked into for the night. That was when we also discovered that Anne and I weren't supposed to cook together since I was tenting and she was hutting, unless we used my cooker, which we hadn't brought, since we thought it would be easier to use the ones in the huts. This was a different rule than other great walks huts. Oops again. Don't worry - it gets better from here. Better in that things stop going wrong, not funnier stories - sorry. So it was now around noon and we'd already reached our final destination for the day. Hmmmm. Well, we broke out the lunch fixings and had ourselves a nice lunch of crackers, pita, cheese, sausage, tomato, fruit and the first, infamous carrot of the trip. Then Anne took a nap and I went for a little birding hike around the area, using the ginormous bird bible that the Hut Warden loaned me. I saw a rifleman, a tomtit and a robin, which is entirely different from our robin at home. It is all grey. No orange breast! So that was neat. When she woke up, we both took a little wander around, hung out by the stream and talked. We watched a helicopter land at the hut when we were off, so we obviously headed back to see what that was all about. Not that we're busybodies or anything, but you can't help but be curious about something like that. Nothing too exciting though. Just a supplies run and dropping off a DOC worker to cut out the raspberry brambles. We had a fun evening hanging out with the other 3 people staying at the Hut. I really think that one of the greatest things about tramping is all the cool people you meet. I went to bed shortly after dark and slept 11 hours until I woke up at 7 the next morning. Yay for camping sleep schedules!