Saturday
My pre-walk fitness regime begins and ends by throwing half a packet of fags and the lighter I found in a Christchurch hostel in the bin. Bad move, because I'm going to need a lighter for the stove to heat hot water for the tasty freeze-dried meals and powdered coffee I'll be living on for the next three days. Karen arrives on a bus from Queenstown. We've been winding each other up about probable death from exhaustion and exposure up there on the mountains, and she's brought a silver foil emergency exposure blanket. I've got my raincoat.
We stay with Karen's Outlaws on their deer farm. Lyn picks us up, and when we arrive Lex is busy telling filthy jokes to their American guests. Outside in the paddocks, the red stag are roaring, a deep & throaty rasp to chill your blood and only slightly less disturbing than the high-pitched bellow-shriek of the elk. Little half-blind Ruby the fallow deer is much less threatening and comes to the garden door to be fed her bottle of formula.
Sunday
Lyn drops us off at the Control Gates, the entry to the Kepler Track. The gates control the flow of millions of gallons of water out of Lake Te Anau rather than the entry of walkers onto the track, as I imagined. The first section of the track skirts the edge of the lake northwards through a beech forest as far as Brod Bay, flat and easy over springy woodland tracks. We overtake several other walkers stopping to adjust their packs and I'm thinking this'll be a doddle. Brod Bay is just where it stops being a doddle: the path heads straight up the side of the hill towards Mount Luxmore, an 880m ascent that relentlessly zig zags upwards through more forest. The pack-fiddlers breeze past us. Occasionally the trees part to give us a view back down to the lake and town, and about halfway up there are some limestone bluffs, improbably sheer and bulbous in the hillside, which break up the to-and-froing as we skirt a slowly rising path in front of them.
Paradoxically, though this is a wilderness walk in a pristine and protected national park, you're much less in need of a map here than you are in the English countryside: a 60,000:1 will more than do, and in fact you don't really need more than the track leaflet, because unlike in the English countryside there is only one path. It's broad and well-maintained, and you set out at one end each morning and arrive at the hut sometime in the afternoon: you'd have to be pretty stupid to get very lost. The feeling of conquering territory is also slightly undermined when after an hour and a half of climbing we pass a couple coming down with their child in a three-wheeled buggy.
As we near the bushline, the forest gets cooler and stranger: the trees are shorter and twisted, and a strange, almost glowing, pale green lichen festoons the branches like it's halloween up here. Shortly afterwards, we suddenly burst out of the forest and we're above the bushline. Strictly, 'alpine' doesn't begin until 1500m, but at about 1000m we're now on the alpine section of the walk. Trees have been replaced by tough little bundles of tussock grass, and views stretch around in all directions, the craggy peaks of the Murchisons and the South Fiord of Lake Te Anau visible. I have a proper sense of exhilaration.
Fuck this long-winded shit, Hemingway. Just show us the bloody photos.
Less than an hour later, the Luxmore Hut suddenly appears round a corner. For your $40 a night on a Great Walks backcountry hut you get a mattress in a communal bunk room, flush toilets, cold water, and gas rings to cook on. It's still early afternoon, so we claim our bunks and hang out in the kitchen and on the balcony, admiring the views. We cook some of that tasty freeze-dried food and I look with envy at those people who've brought broccoli and steamed it; or tasty noodle soups with boiled eggs floating in them. I feel very much like a beginner.
The hut's almost up to its capacity of fifty: a mixture of europeans, asians, Israelis and a scattering of kiwis. Karen's efforts to get some early kip are stymied by the hut warden, Vanessa, who gathers everyone in the kitchen for the obligatory 7.30pm hut talk and ticket collection. Wave clouds have formed in time for the sunset, and we get a gorgeous german-measles sky to obsessively photograph.
Monday
Breakfast is a muesli bar and another muesli bar, washed down with the instant coffee. On the hut balcony, kea, cheeky and fearless mountain parrots, are strutting along the fences, and a bandana'd Scotsman is trying to get one to sit on his arm for a photo.
The view of the lake and shore has disappeared as a layer of cloud fills the valley below, leaving only the Murchison peaks visible, poking out of a puff-pastry white blanket. The cloud doesn't lift for most of the day, giving the rest of the alpine section an eery and isolated feel.
We set out with a gentle climb into more mist… if we're more than a hundred metres apart it gets hard to see each other, though the cloud parts occasionally to give us a hint of a view. About an hour along the path we pass Mount Luxmore, and taking my backpack off reduces the gravity to moon level for about first 50m or so. The peak is 1472m, the highest we'll get, and the view is white in every direction. With a map and a compass we figure out where Te Anau would be if we could see it.
The path skirts the sides of hills where even the tussocks won't grow now, huge scree slopes where the friable mountain rock has crumbled into gravel. As the slopes approach vertical, the path remains roughly horizontal, sometimes tilting towards the invisible valleys below just a little too much to be entirely comfortable.
There's more climbing than we expected, making this the toughest day of the walk. At Forest Burn emergency shelter, the saddle crossings begin, and we roller-coaster across sharper crags, then the saddles proper, where the slopes fall sharply away either side of the now-skinny path. In the cloud it's a strange isolated feeling, but the absence of a view at least mitigates against vertigo.
At Hanging Valley emergency shelter the alpine section ends and 900m of ankle-hammering descent begins, at first down plank-and-chickenwire steps strung out over the crags and then back into the halloween fairy-forest bush again. Karen, like an agile little mountain goat, fairly sprints ahead while I plod down like an elephant and a man carrying his child on his back passes me.
The sound of running water, the Iris Burn, indicates that we're almost on the forest floor, and sure enough, there's the Iris Burn hut at last. Warden Janet is painting the washroom floor, so personal hygiene can only be satisfied by filling a bucket from the tap and taking it out to the woods. I can't find Karen, and tell Janet she may have gone missing, but we avoid a full helicopter rescue scenario when Janet points out that there's a bunkroom I've missed, and of course there Karen is, getting a little rest.
Freeze-dried sweet and sour lamb for dinner, oh yum; we eat opposite fresh-faced 21-year-old Jonas the German who takes the piss out of my 'backcountry' packet meals and asks if we have Kathmandu headlamps like the other old people as well. In return, I give him a sachet of lemsip I've been carrying, which he nervously drinks after examining what it contains (he wants to be a doctor when he grows up).
Down here by the water the sandflies get serious. Evil little bloodsucking bastards, they don't even have the decency to dip a straw into you and take a sip: instead they cut a little hole in your skin and then slurp like a cat from the bloody sump. It means you can sometimes catch them at it, but they're not shy of biting anywhere, even on hard skin, and the bites itch for days with a peculiar intensity. On a more charming wildlife note, everyone is woken up at 3am by the ferocious hoot-squawking of the locally resident kiwis.
Tuesday
Jonas is still ill at breakfast: he drinks another lemsip out of an empty tin of pineapple chunks. But he'll make it out today or die trying. Today is literally a stroll in the woods. We more or less follow the line of the Iris Burn towards lake Manapouri, through more beech forest and wetland. Back to long strides and springy-soft forest floor. The forest floor is carpeted with lush green ferns, the tree trunks are mossy and despite this being the third day of unheralded dry weather, it feels cool and damp.
On the other side of the burn is the Big Slip, an enormous triangular chunk taken out of the hillside by a landslip in 1984. The hills here are so sheer and rocky that once the bare rock is exposed it can take over a hundred years for the process of moss, ferns and other vegetation breaking up the stone into soil so that trees can grow again.
On our own side a landslips has done for a good section of the path and we have to take a steep climb up along the earth still held in place by the roots of trees which provide irregular steps. We're used to our packs now, and they're getting lighter with every meal we eat, but it still feels like a donkey harness when you're going uphill. We stop for lunch at Rocky point, watching Iris Burn babble past. Ruddy brown streams run down to join it, full of iron oxide from the hills, and spotty toadstools in the ground are the bright red colour of ripe apples.
The burn broadens and braids across a gravel bed, and eventually we're on the shore of lake Manapouri, at Shallow Bay. The path comes down to a sandy beach then shies away from the water again and back, and eventually we're at the Moturau Hut. Most people, like Jonas, walk the extra hour and a half from here to get to Rainbow Reach and catch the shuttle back to Te Anau, so Moturau is smaller and has a more friendly atmosphere; it's for people enjoying their time here rather than racing through. One party has even come from Luxmore today: when they arrived at Iris Burn at lunchtime they pressed on through. Some race properly: hut warden Connie tells us about the Kepler Challenge, a mountain race in December covering the entire track: the record is just under five and a half hours.
Waiting for the hut talk, I go down to the beach below the hut, dressed collar to cuff and slathered in insect repellent. Manapouri is glassy, lakewater lapping on sand with only the gentlest of ripples. As dusk falls without a sunset the dark water seems cold but so placid it's inviting, as if once below the surface temperature, air and everything else would cease to matter.
Wednesday
We're out of here today, so it's an 8am start. It's also hut warden changeover day today; normally they walk out, but Connie has a dodgy knee after a misdiagnosed cartilage operation, so she'll be getting a water taxi right from the shore below the hut. Everyone else is off early, most to get to Rainbow Reach for the early shuttle back to town, but we, the Scotsman and his girlfriend, the two asian girls, American Mark, and the Toronto Geordies are going all the way back to the control gates. Through the last stretches of forest we leapfrog each other again and again, looping round to, and then following, the Waiau river which flows against us from Lake Te Anau and into Lake Manapouri. Eventually, we sight the control gates where we began on Sunday, and trudge up to them, much smellier than when we started on Sunday.
The walk's not over yet… there's another 45 minutes along the lake into Te Anau, but in Te Anau there is coffee made like proper coffee, and there is ice cream, and there is a place to sit in the shade, and there is a lift back to Lyn and Lex's where the stag are still roaring and this time I get to feed Ruby, and then I am allowed to stuff myself with an enormous pile of wild pork steaks, not one of them freeze dried.
