New Zealand 2024: December 27th - Iris Burn Hut to Manapouri Hut

We woke up late enough that several other parties had already left the hut and gotten going. One exception was a party that had an injured hiker from the day before. We would learn later that they had to leave him at the hut for a helicopter evacuation. We ate our breakfast, packed, and started walking on the forest path. While not completely flat, day 3 was supposed to be much easier, and we got going at a good clip.

We met up again with Udi, and had a nice chat with him. He told us about the injured hiker from the day before, and told us he was on a 6 week trip in New Zealand with a rented RV. He’d not managed to get the Milford Track or the Routeburn track, but told us about another Great Walk which allowed mountain bikes, enabling him to do the track in 2 days. Given how easy today’s walk was, he’d decided to hike all the way to his RV today and skip the last hut.

While walking with Udi, we saw an injured goose. It had an injured wing. We wondered if it would survive through the next winter, but it was clearly ground bound and quite distressed that we were apparently chasing it down the trail. It eventually got off the trail, and we walked past it after taking a few photos.

A runner came past us, and as he passed us, he looked like he wanted to talk to me, and then said: “Are you Piaw?” “Yes, but I don’t remember you!” “It’s Nick Su, from Aurora! I’m on my honeymoon!” It turned out that he had planned to do the Kepler Track with his wife, but she got pregnant, and so he had to scrap the 4 day hike and run the entire track in a single day (he did it in less than 8 hours!) instead. If we’d had any pretensions at being strong tough hikers, Nick definitely put an end to that!

We eventually made it to Lake Manapouri, after which it was only a short walk to the hut. In fact, we arrived at the hut at 3:00pm, which was plenty of time to keep going to Rainbow Reach, but the hut looked gorgeous and there was a breeze which would keep away sandflies. The water looked inviting, and Xiaoqin declared that she had had enough hiking for the day, and so we stopped. Udi wrote his name down on the huts list of people who’d had a reservation but elected to walk on.

We once again ended up upper bunks, parked our gear, got changed, and went for a swim. While at first the water felt cold, once you got immersed in the water it was quite peasant and I swam for a good 10 minutes, much more than I’m capable of staying in the water in any Sierra lake. The views were beautiful. The boys were willing to play in the water, but we could not persuade them to swim.

Once we were done swimming, we hung up our laundry, and made dinner. People were arriving in earnest, and we finished dinner just in time to hear the hut warden talk. The hut’s tap water had a strange brownish orange color, and the ranger explained that it was caused by leaves dropping into the water source. As with the other huts on the Kepler, she said she drank the water from the tap without any treatment and had no adverse consequences, but also said: “If I get a bit sick, it’s no big deal. But if you’ve only got another week in New Zealand being sick would kinda ruin it.” Using the water filter got rid of the strange color in the water so we just did it anyway.

After the talk, the colors around the lake looked gorgeous, so we went down to the water for photos, but the wind had died down and the sandflies were out in earnest. We snapped a couple of selfies and retreated back to the hut for some quiet time before bed. I noticed that my CPAP battery was down to one light, and was unlikely to last the night. Fortunately, everyone else in the bunk room were either confident of their ability to sleep through it or already had their own ear plugs, so my efforts to give everyone ear plugs were rebuffed. I used up the rest of my small powerbank charging my phone up, and went to sleep. I’d awake at 1:00am with the dead CPAP, but all in all decided that it was a reasonable trade-off to avoid carrying another pound of weight.