Catching Up - Greenstone Track
March 13, 2009 · Print This Article
We are now in Melbourne, Australia (Monday April 7th) after a sad departure from New Zealand, a country that we all loved. Our stay here will be just short of a week before we leave for Istanbul, Turkey on the 13th. Postings have been sparse during our time in New Zealand and now that we have good access to wifi in Melbourne, we’ll catch up a bit. Rather than putting all into one big mess of a post we’ll do a number of smaller ones in chronological order and corresponding dates.
First, some foreshadowing of future events from the topic and backdating of this post.
The end of March brought two special birthdays for our family and marked the first time that Ainsley and Jack celebrated in the fall. We were at the Bark Bay hut along the Abel Tasman Track on the South Island for Ainsley’s 13th birthday, complete with two kinds of freeze dried deserts (yum?). Hard to believe that Ainsley is a teenager! She is growing up so fast on the one hand yet still retains so many great attributes from her younger years.
After a special stop at the Hanmer Springs Thermal Pools, we returned one last time to Nicky and Graeme’s in Christchurch where we celebrated Jack’s birthday. Eleven!! His choice for desert was Hokey Pokey ice cream, a New Zealand specialty and his new favorite. Think of hardened caramel or toffee. Add to that Jack’s love of dulce de leche from Argentina and you may detect a pattern.
From Christchurch we left for a short stay on the North Island. Everyone was really quite sad to leave. We loved the South Island a lot and no one in the family wanted to go. It was such a peaceful and beautiful place; no highways to speak of, few shopping malls, no crowds of people, mostly unspoiled vistas of beautiful mountains, valleys and coastlines. Too bad we didn’t figure out a way to stay for good!
Now, back in time to our hike on the Greenstone Track that we started on March 13th. Because the Routeburn Track is not circular and the road distance from one end to the other is more than 350km, our original plan was to hike the Routeburn, see Milford Sound, then hike back to Kinloch Lodge via the Greenstone. However, the weather took a turn for the worse, with rain, hail and even snow at fairly low altitudes, so we changed our plans a bit and played it safe. After two nights in Milford Sound, a long journey via bus to Kinloch, and better weather in the forecast, we decided to hike the Greenstone.
The Greenstone has a reputation as much less dramatic and not quite as beautiful track as the Routeburn. It lies mostly in a river valley with no sub alpine sections so no amazing views of the mountain ranges like the Routeburn. Even so, as you’ll see in the pictures, the valley was incredibly beautiful, the weather was perfect, the huts were lovely and the Greenstone was much less crowded than the Routeburn. We spent four gorgeous days walking together, eating lunches with fantastic views, crossing streams, and truly enjoying one another’s company. It was a magic time for us and became one of our favorite hikes. I guess having had perfect weather helped.
Robyn and i were at Kinloch Lodge when we first met this intrepid group.
We hiked the routebun and on our way out via the greenstone we met them agai at the Greenstone hut. What a family; their Mums and Dads can be very proud of them all. I will never forgat the arrival of Kelli and Eliot at the hut; Kelli, under about a thirty five pounds pack and looking as though she had just finished an incredible game of International netball or similar. Hair all over the place and soaking wet from more than just a little bit of perspiration. The elegance that we had seen in the comfort of at Kinloch Lodge was well and truly hidden. The Greenstone Hut has only 20 bunks. Kelli had noted that there seemed to be a lot of people on the track and she was worried that her brood might be left bunklrss and have to sleep on the hard floor or outside on the porch or goodness knows where so she decided that she and Eliot would race ahead and try to catch-up and beat a party of five men in front of her up to the hut to claim bunk space for the family. As they went past the group Kelli muttered a “Gotta get Eliot to a toilet’ and kept going. She and Eliot raced the last two or three kilometres with Eliot coming in first and Kelli a very creditable few seconds behind. I will never forget the lookof total satisfaction on Kelli’s face. She later came up and wanted to apologise to Robyn for this “Untramper-like behaviour” which had us laughing as any one else in the hut would certainly have done the same. She deserved to be applauded, and was. Wish I had taken a photo.
Wonderful to meet these Ambassadors in our country; The Ugly Americans they are not.