Thursday 25th November 2004 (Wanaka)
I have just spent my third night at the Mountain View Backpacker in Wanaka. As far as facilities go it doesn’t rate that highly, not enough toilet and cooking facilities. However, the staff are good, the atmosphere friendly, and it’s only a short walk from the centre of town. On Tuesday morning I was sitting in a cafe having a latte when I felt my chair rocking gently as though one leg was shorter than the others. It was the same sort of queasy feeling one has after having one too many drinks the night before. It was then that I noticed that the cars outside were rocking backwards and forwards and for the first time I realised that we were in an earthquake. The cafe rattled and rolled for a bit but nobody rushed outside. It was a great experience to witness. It later turned out that it was 7.2 on the Richter scale but was quite a way south west of the South Island. The only other time that I have been in an earthquake was some twenty years ago in Jordan. I was staying in a good hotel and the water in my wash basin started slopping from side to side. Strange I thought.
Since Tuesday it has rained quite a lot but the great thing is that the snow has come down to the treeline and it gives me a visual impression of how conditions would be for Sonja and Alexander. The Routeburn had yet to open last week because of the winter snow and this extra drop will no doubt have kept it closed. However at the moment this is no problem because I have been happy holed up in Wanaka for a few days. At this time of year it is relatively quiet and still retains that village atmosphere. I have found a wonderful library which is very modern and yet intimate. There is an ideal workplace where I can set up my computer. One of the staff came up and said that, like myself, she was a longtime Apple user. Another non-believer in the Great One. I have made very solid progress on the book during the two four hour stints that I have spent in the library. It is certainly not easy but when I re-read what I have written I am sufficiently satisfied. It’s going in the right direction. It was only last night that I realised again that what I am trying to do is serious. It’s not just a matter of making a bit of progress on the book, having a great holiday, and then jetting back home. I really do have to give this book my best shot since there are not many other options open to me on the job front. At least I must stick with it until I have completed every part of the storyline. I have no idea how many pages it will be but that doesn’t matter. It will be as long or short as necessary, either a long short story, or a short long story!
Sunday 28th November 2004 (Te Anau)
Well Alexander Stewart had made his bookings for both the Kepler and Routeburn tracks. The Routeburn only opened yesterday and so the timing could not have been better. I start on the Kepler on Wednesday and finish on Friday 3rd December. Unfortunately the Routeburn didn’t have any places for the 5th and only one for the 6th, so I plumped to go on the 4th December. This means that I won’t have a whole days rest between the two walks and so it will/could be a bit of a struggle, especially if I pick up any blisters on the Kepler. However, the six day straight through trek will be fairly realistic of Alexander and Sonja’s Pelorus adventure. Hopefully this will give me a particularly good feel for the fatigue that they will have both felt.
I had a really productive time in Wanaka spending at least three to four hours per day at the library. Slow progress but I feel that I am improving and expanding on the storyline all the time. I may well stay a few days in Wanaka on the way back north since the backpacker was very friendly and the library was perfect. It was a strange coincidence that a Danish girl, M, with a very strong Irish accent, confided to me that she was feeling homesick. Shades of Sonja! I don’t know if I radiate that sort of confessional persona or it’s simply that I look like some sort of father figure. But I certainly don’t mind the trust put in me. Her thirtieth birthday was due in a day or two and I guess that it was quite a milestone and perhaps she was reflecting on her life to date. Another sweet girl, Melissa, a Canadian, said that before she started her ten month trek throughout South-East Asia she had hoped that it might have helped her understand life a bit better, but it had not. I unhelpfully said that even at my age I hadn’t sorted my life out and therefore couldn’t really assist her on that one. So homesickness and the purpose of life. Two interesting questions.
Te Anau is as pleasant as ever at this time of year. Relatively quiet, which is I’m sure how the locals like it. However, this must be about the only time of year, namely summer, when the shops can make any reasonable income. As Jet would say, “Life is difficult!” Happened to share my bunkroom with an English guy named Andy, and three girls, one Dutch and two German. They are very special people, backpackers, and this is something that I have always recognised. Very tolerant, resourceful, inquisitive and with very pleasant characters. Of course, you run into the occasional pain but not very often. Andy is a fireman, late thirties, who like myself keeps coming back to New Zealand. He can’t quite make the decision whether or not to move here permanently, and perhaps may not. He’s off to do the Milford Track tomorrow and by coincidence we will be on the Routeburn at the same time. Nice guy and have shared a couple of pints together.
Wednesday 1st December 2004
I am now sitting in the Luxmore Hut on my first day of walking the Kepler Track. The weather forecast was bad but in fact it was a beautiful day for walking, neither too hot or too cold. Yesterday the track between Luxmore Hut and Iris Burn Hut was officially closed because of snow and therefore I have been very lucky to have the opportunity to make the alpine crossing. To have had to turn around and head back to Te Anau would have been very disappointing. The walk up was beautiful and better than I remembered it the last time that I was here with T. Perhaps I was too busy trying to keep up with her pace or too concentrated on doing the right thing on our first day alone together? The track from the Control Gate start to Bark Bay follows the lake shore. There was a stillness about the place even though there was plenty of birdsong. Forget your New York shrinks, just send the patient on a walk here for two hours. The floor of the beech forest was carpeted with a light green sphagnum moss and this made everything very special. On leaving Bark Bay the stillness became even more pronounced since there was no longer the sound of waves lapping against the shore. The climb through the forest was steady and relentless. I stopped to rest a number of times and to take on water. Wonderful refreshing water. Had it ever tasted so good. As the track climbed higher and higher the forest floor covering changed to ferns and higher still the trees were covered with mystical pale green and white lichen. Once I had passed the limestone bluff I thought that I had just about cracked it but it took far longer than I had imagined to break out of the forest and into the alpine tussock grass above one thousand metres. I was basically at my limit and virtually running on empty when I passed that very clearly demarcated line. It is very reassuring that the climb demands quite a considerable effort and cannot be achieved by just anybody, even though it is only officially classified as a moderate walk. It is certainly hard enough for me with a loaded pack.
I had a few more ideas about the storyline on the climb. One is that Alexander is into tree hugging and at various times on the climb he places his hands against some mighty standing beech or on an enormous sawn trunk crossing the path and just stands there deep in contemplation for a few seconds. I certainly did this on a couple of occasions. Sonja thinks that this is all rather odd but Alexander explains that part of his ancestry originated in Ireland where trees used to be very sacred objects. And also his Maori friend, Rita, told him to talk to the tree spirits to ask their permission to enter their domain. I’m not sure if this is the first time I thought about including Alec and Pat’s Maori friend Rita into the story but hopefully it adds another more spiritual dimension.
Another idea that I had is to actually produce the book on my computer in PDF format and possibly sell the first part of the book online. I may even give the first chapters away online for free as a teaser in order to market it more widely and hopefully word of mouth on the internet will increase demand to buy the whole printed book. I could create a specific website for this, possibly, pelorus.com, advertise on my agmachine.com website, or in outdoor magazines. If people wished to read the complete book then they would have to buy a hard copy although a secure PDF payment system would eliminate printing costs. However, I like the idea of people holding a hard copy of the book in their hands better. Each copy would be personally signed by myself and would have a unique identification number, making it very personal to the purchaser. Payment over the internet could prove to be a problem although I could get some help on that one. An even better option would be to use the Amazon.com route since this would take out all the security and set-up problems. I would first have to sort out the unique book registration number (ISBN?) or whatever it is called. A website for the book could allow people to send their comments (whoops!), add photographs, exchange track experiences and so forth. It could actually create a community, perhaps a blog.
The idea that Alexander may have an estranged daughter Minnie, possibly named after Minnie Driver, from a failed and bitter marriage may have possibilities. Perhaps his former wife lives overseas and this makes contact difficult apart from occasional photos, letters and cards. The USA might be a good option since custody laws are quite strict and his daughter might not have been able to visit him in the United Kingdom. Perhaps Alexander finally comes to see Sonya, not as a potential lover and partner, but as the embodiment of the father/daughter relationship which he never had. This would allow the love relationship between Sonja and Craig to be developed, which would be far more plausible. Perhaps after the first walk Sonja goes first to Wanaka to catch up with some friends, returns to Pelorus where her affair with Craig really starts, and then travels on to Milford and subsequently meets up with Alexander in Te Anau. Craig tries to persuade Sonja not to go on the Pelorus track but to stay with him but she decides to keep her word to Alexander, of whom she has grown quite fond. Craig admires her willingness to keep to commitments. All this could be done in say three to four days. Perhaps during that period Alexander stays in a backpacker in Te Anau and this gives me a chance to describe some of the characters who stay at backpackers and backpacker life in general.
Sunday 5th December 2004
It’s about seven o’clock in the morning and I am sitting in the freezing cold at Lake McKenzie Hut on the Routeburn Track. I’ve already had a warming breakfast of Thai chicken curry and hot tea. There is snow low down in the surrounding mountains and fortunately the sky is pretty clear at the moment. Yesterday evening it snowed quite heavily at the hut level and the warden said that he didn’t rate our chances of going over very highly. However just before dusk the sky cleared just like magic and the magnificent snow covered mountains came into view. I had seen them before but I think it staggered a few of the people to see what had been previously hidden from them. Hopefully it should be a really great crossing over to the Routeburn Falls Hut. It was so cold in the bunkroom last night that I wore two pairs of socks, thermal underwear and long sleeved shirt on in my sleeping bag with the hood drawn tightly closed. Fortunately I was really warm. The only disappointing thing was that “Gods chosen ones” made a very noisy late entrance and talked loudly for some time. What’s wrong with these people, it seems to be so common. Without giving a clue about who I was talking about I asked a guy named Steve, who had worked at a Queenstown backpacker hostel for a year, who the worst behaved backpacker nation was. He confirmed my own experiences as have others since. God really screwed up on that one.
Going back in time a bit it was on the 2nd December that I started the Kepler Track and as previously noted I reached the Luxmore Hut “running on empty”. In fact just above the treeline both legs seized up so that I walked like the tin man in Somewhere over the Rainbow, or whatever that Judy Garland film was called. The muscles at the back of my thighs just knotted up. I guessed it was just some kind of cramp but thrombosis did cross my mind. After all I had not done any preparation for the walk apart from wearing my boots rather a lot.
On the morning of the 3rd December we awaited the hut warden’s decision on the Kepler alpine section. It had been closed by snow the day before and it would have been very disappointing to have had to walk back down again after expending so much effort. My objective of researching the walk for my book would have been over before it had barely begun. The warden simply announced that a storm was due in the afternoon with rain, sleet, snow and winds gusting to 120 km per hour on the tops. If we wanted to go across we had to go now. And so there was a general stampede out of the door. It is a long hard climb up from the hut to the turn off for the Mount Luxmore summit itself and for me it was a real struggle. It was already blowing hard and sleeting. At least I had had the experience of doing the track with T some years before but that was in bright sunshine with clear blue skies, and very little wind. The first target was the first emergency shelter. From below you could see the track winding its way inexorably up until it disappeared from view around a corner. I guessed that that point was the top of the first climb. Wrong! At least when I looked back I could see a number of other trampers way down below and that made me feel much better, but them no doubt worse. Conditions were now getting very unpleasant. On the way up I had been passed by a young Irish couple who seemed to be going very well. However, when I finally arrived at the first emergency shelter they were both very cold, wet and shivering. They were just totally ill-equipped for the track in those conditions. They wisely decided to turn around and they said that their aim was to carry on straight back to Te Anau. That would have been a dreadfully long walk and they certainly will not forget their Kepler Track experience for a very long time.
There were also four girls in the shelter, three from Singapore and one from Malaysia. I had briefly made their aquaintance since we had travelled to the start of the track together the previous day. Two were particularly poorly equipped for the alpine conditions and were shivering. I said they should change into warmer clothes and offered one girl a pair of thick woolly socks for her hands. One of them was giggling and shivering and I was concerned about hypothermia since it brings on rather strange behaviour. The party had a definite leader who seemed to be in charge but she seemed to think that everything was fine. She was being quite stupid. I therefore politely insisted that I would walk behind them until the second emergency shelter which was located some two hours distance. When we started again the conditions deteriorated quickly and they were moving so slowly. A young Austrian, Martin, who I had briefly spoken to the night before, caught us up. He was obviously very experienced and well equipped and so I told him about my concerns. He said that he would wait at the next shelter and he could provide them with some spare clothing if necessary. The lead girl kept taking photographs of the group oblivious to the potential danger. The weather continued to deteriorate with howling wind and snow along the ridgeline. The group made the next shelter but if the weather had deteriorated further into thick snow then they would certainly have been in trouble. As they waited at the shelter it became noticeably colder and the snowfall more prevalent. This was all marvellous material for the book.
Another idea for the story is that Alexander receives his walking stick Te Puke from Rita the Maori. She tells him it is a very special item, perhaps owned by male ancestors, but she wants to give it to him. Alexander is afraid to take such a special object and says that he is afraid that he might lose it. Rita says not to worry because Te Puke will find his way home. He is also worried that he might break it but Rita assures him that he can never break Te Puke. All the time Alexander has Te Puke it tries to get away or causes him problems. If Alexander leans him against a rock he will slip down onto the path so that Alexander has to bend down with a heavy pack on his back to pick Te Puke up. Also Alexander is careful not to put him down close to a stream in case Te Puke falls in and escapes that way down the stream into a river and into a lake or the sea. At the same time Te Puke saves Alexander a number of times on the path when he would otherwise have fallen. These ideas have come from direct experience of my own when Te Puke (the actual name of my own walikng stick) kept slipping down from where I put him. I should also try to develop the Rita and Maori aspects of the book more fully with the Storm God fighting Te Puke.
The walk from Lake McKenzie Hut to the Routeburn Falls Hut was as good as ever, if not better. The climb up from the McKenzie Hut was beautiful with the mountains in clear view and with snow down to the treeline. The view down to the hut was impressive but the hut looked so vulnerable under the steep mountainside. Beautiful grotto like walk through the trees on the lower slopes with moss all over their twisted shapes. Along the main traverse I was able to see right down to the sea and the peaks of the mountains on the other side of the Hollyford river were visible through the cloud. Below me huge clouds drifted down the valley like great ocean liners. It was very strange to be above them. The ‘rock’ of my book still looks as impressive as ever and I was pleased to confirm that there was no track down to it. In addition it did not look as if the shelter had been used for a very long time since the overhang floor was covered in grass. Hopefully it had not been visited since I climbed down to it a number of years ago. It was also good to be able to confirm that the Deadmans Track is located between the rock and the Harris Saddle since this fits in perfectly with the storyline. Also the emergency shelter at the Harris Saddle clearly has two padlocked cupboards which may contain some emergency equipment. I hope that it is more than on the Kepler shelters which only contained a single shovel! The snow was falling quite steadily at the top which certainly added to the atmosphere.
The walk down from the Harris Saddle to the Routeburn Falls Hut was very dramatic and entailed walking along quite narrow ledges. Lake Harris was larger and more impressive than I remembered it. The track also crossed an area of very deep snow which would have been up to my chest if a path had not been cut. At the beginning of this section an overturned notice read Safe but it was only after I reached the other side that the notice for walkers in the other direction stated that there was a danger of avalanches! Overall I held up very well and yesterday and todays walk were well within my capacity. The Meindl boots have been fantastic and I have no blisters to talk of, a major change from my previous tramping experiences. My kit has been good and I have certainly needed all of it, leggings, waterproof jacket, wooley hat, gloves. The gloves only just made the journey from the UK since I thought that I would be walking in sunshine. Strangely various muscles ached at different times rather than the problem concentrating on one area. There is no doubt in my mind that repeating both the Kepler and Routeburn Tracks has firmed up a lot of ideas and has been really worthwhile research time. For example, seeing the rucksacks of the Singapore girls caked in snow as they climbed in a small group above me was very visual and so many other observations have made an impact on my thoughts. I am now planning two nights in a single room in Queenstown which will hopefully be bliss. I then have to decide whether or not to return to Wanaka since the library and lake/mountain scenery provide me with a great environment to continue writing the book. I’m not yet clear how long I will stay in New Zealand but I know that I must try to finish the story once and for all before I leave.
The idea of having back to back books appeals to me with “Pelorus” starting at the opposite end from “Where to Now”, the diary of my writing efforts. I think a great deal will depend on how interesting “Where to Now” will be for readers, but only time will tell. Perhaps having a record of how and when ideas arose will be quite interesting since they can be directly related to the book. I have no doubt that my decision to travel to New Zealand was the right one even if it still seems quite irresponsible. He who dares Rodney.
