Fiordland

On the 9th, after waking up early in the campervan, viewing Porpoise Bay and the fossilized forest, and eating muesli, we headed for the Fiordland. As a side note, the campervan smells a bit like cow's milk and a bit like wet socks, which makes sleeping in it a challenge, especially if you have to sleep in the same van with me, because I snore--and moan.

(Yeah, it's embarrassing.)

Just so you can imagine it spatially, imagine me traveling in the shape of a "J," but with a curvier hook. We start on the east coast in the upper middle of the south island, at Christchurch, head south to the Otago Peninsula and farther south to the Catlins, come up the west side to Te Anau and then, near Milford Sound, to the Hollyford Track, and finally Queenstown. My bus trip from Queenstown back to Christchurch makes it sort of a lowercase cursive "J," actually, but without the dot.

Our initial plan was to do the Milford Track, but the folks at the DOC (pronounced "dock" and standing for Department of Conservation) said that the track was only open to people with avalanche experience. I might like to someday take some type of class to learn how to handle avalanches. A Canuck we met on our hike said that it involves something like checking the cleavage of the ice, using a probe to search for buried avalanche victims (i.e., poking down into the ice with a retractable stick until you hit the buried person), and generally surveying a scene so as to understand your safety there. Anyone want to expand on this?

The DOC workers suggested the Hollyford Track instead, so we filled out a form stating our intentions and bought a hut pass. That's the other thing: many of the tracks here also have shelters along the way. These aren't thatch-roofed huts or anything; they're wooden buildings with bunk beds, mattresses, sink water, cast iron stoves, and outdoor toilets. The huts and the level of maintenance on these tracks make my alpine wilderness experience with Kimmy in August seem like an eXtreme sport or death-defying activity. I would kind of have liked to have done the Milford Track, avalanche potential included, just to be challenged, because one could really have done the Hollyford Track with one's grandmother and her walker and she's dragging an IV and she's wearing inappropriate shoes and dragging a handbag the size of Bharain.

That evening I took a ferry to the glowworm caves. I really would've loved to have shown you pictures of these caves and the glowworms, but no cameras were allowed in the caves, as that causes the worms to switch off their lights. The ferry takes you through the fiords to where rivers and waterfalls go underground. The glowworms, much like spiders, catch insects in sticky material. They spit sticky strands which hang from their bodies. They then produce a glowing light at their tail-end, which is somewhat a mystery to scientists, but which is made by some combination of ATP, oxygen, and some other ingredient. The lights look like stars at the roof of the cave, and they look nice to insects and to gawkers like me on slow underground boat rides.

Here is what the mountains looked like on the ferry ride home.


The mountains, some of them snowy, some of them containing waterfalls, generally looked like this. When I was a child, I'd draw triangular mountains with snowy caps and was both exhilerated to see mountains for the first time and saddened when, in North Carolina and Tennessee, I saw rolling mountains with green peaks. In the Antipodes, however, the mountains are jagged and snow-capped, just like in childhood artwork. It really is life imitating art, you know?


Along the Hollyford Track were a few swinging one-person capacity bridges.


At sundown these were the views just outside Alabaster Hut.