We woke up to dry weather and clear skies, and to my relief most of the laundry we’d hung up to dry had dried overnight. Leaving Twizel, we started on a long drive towards Queenstown, passing through landscape that was beautiful and new but familiar at the same time since we’d seen snippets of it from various Peter Jackson movies. I realized that this was the first time I’d seen most of this as my 2000 trip on the Flying Kiwi bus went a different route.
In Queenstown, we stopped at the supermarket to buy a picnic lunch and headed on the Glenorchy road to Bob’s Cove for a picnic. We were running out of time so I made the call to just park at a playground for lunch. The playground had a parallel zipline so the two kids could have a zipline race after lunch.
From Queenstown to Te Anau was another 2 hour drive, the first of which was along the twisty road that fronted Lake Wakatipu. We stopped at Athos for a bathroom break and then drove all the way to the DOC office in Te Anau where we parked and got a ranger briefing. I’d read that you had to get tickets for the various DOC huts from a ranger, but that turned out to be false for the great walks. On those, your names were already provided to the hut rangers, and all you needed was your control/reservation number. The check-in system was there to ensure that you got a briefing from the ranger before departure. The ranger answered questions about the weather, the hut system, as well as giving us a weather forecast and the water taxi that would have about 4 miles of flat hiking along the lake from the control gates. We were also told that we could park anywhere in town as long as there wasn’t a sign indicating limited parking.
We drove to our motel and checked in. I booked the water taxi for 9:00am tomorrow based on the weather forecast stating that it would rain at 1:00pm. We then walked to Miles’ Better Pies for a lunch and bought lunches for 3 days at the supermarket for the backpacking trip.
Back at the motel, we repacked everything we needed for the Kepler track’s 3 nights into the backpacks we had in the big luggage. We had a sleeping bag each, freeze dried dinners, oatmeal for breakfast for the kids and granola for the adults, and then various deli meats for lunch as well as a loaf of bread. Of course, Boen’s precious freeze-dried ice-cream sandwiches were not forgotten. I debated whether to bring one or two CPAP batteries, and decided to just bring one, with a smaller battery to recharge the phone. We had 2 headlamps and 1 flashlight for the cave exploration on the first day, a partial roll of toilet paper (which it turned out we didn’t need), a water filter, a pot, and water bottles. We had 2 hiking sticks. Everyone commented that their backpack felt light, which made me feel relief. That’s why we spent money on the lightest possible equipment I could find. My Crown X60 backpack was 2 pounds empty, my wife’s Salomon 28+5 was even lighter, and Bowen would use my Deuter Speedlite came in at 1.5 pounds. Boen would use the Osprey Daylite backpack. We also had clothing and rain gear, as well as insect repellent. We packed sunscreen as well as toothbrushes, toothpaste and floss. Since the Kepler was pack-in/pack-out with no garbage service we also packed extra garbage bags, both to serve as rain covers if needed and to carry our garbage out. I made sure that we didn’t buy canned food or anything packaging which would have been onerous to carry. I had my portable CPAP machine as well, of course. We would fully charge all our phones and hope the charge would last the 4 days we would take to do the trip.
I decided at the last minute that we should bring a pack of cards so we’d have something to do indoors if it rained a lot. I walked over to the supermarket and bought a pack for $5. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t bother as the huts were well equipped with board games and cards.
No comments:
Post a Comment