Tales of New Zealand II: Kicked in the Butts by Trek
November 28th, 2008
Fiordland National Park
South Island, New Zealand
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"It's been raining for six hours. How much longer can it last?"
Elaine, trekker from Wales
Apparently quite a bit longer.
Trekking in the rain sucks. It's not being dirty that I dislike, it's the smell...that unique fermentation that occurs when one sweats for days beneath polypro long underwear and layers of oh-so-nonbreathable fleece and gortex, then crawls into a sleeping bag with another synthetic liner sweating throughout the night, and then gets pelted throughout the day by rainfall, dirt, and bugspray. It's an overpowering and disturbing smell...a mixture of sweat, citronella, and musk, with notes of something strangely sour.
Why Mum and I choose to shoulder 40 lb plus backpacks up over mountains in bad weather, lather ourselves in bug spray, subsist on dehydrated pasta, and then sleep in bunkhouses with snoring, equally smelly strangers baffles me. We continue to suffer from what I refer to as "Trekking Amnesia," in which several months pass by after said memories of torture dissolve away and are replaced with nostalgia and fond recollections of bonding.
Our second trek, The Routebourn, is famed for receiving over 200 inches of rain a year. I believe that we were there around 30 of them. One hut ranger we met says that there's a sure-fire way of predicting the day's weather in this part of New Zealand. "If you can see the mountains in the morning...then it's going to rain. And if you can't see the mountains in the morning...then it IS raining."
The landscape here, despite the rain and sheer physical torture, is stunning....shimmering in thousands of shades of green...and even more vibrant after a heavy rainfall. We hiked through beech forests filled with the calls of the Tui and Korimako, beneath waterfalls cascading down Yosemite-like mountain faces of granite, past wide open river beds that meandered past magnificent fields of grass and up above the treeline to alpine lakes and wind-swept mountain passes. The fog creeped along the mountain faces like slow-moving smoke as Keas flew overhead and chattered away. We even passed through a forest painted in moss...every rock, stick, and tree trunk dead or alive was covered in an emerald carpet of green...the dominion of witches, warlocks, and faeries.
Mom and I, though avid hikers, have been once again humbled (some might dare say "defeated") by trekking. Although we weren't walking many kilometers per day, the strenuous ups and downs of mountains trekking with heavy gear in bad weather took its toll on our legs, backs, and even more precious egos. It doesn't seem to matter what type of training you do for trekking (biking, hiking, or dance)...the only way to build up muscles or stamina for backpacking is to do it. Carrying 40 pounds of sleeping bag, pans, toiletries, camera, pasta, butter, cheese, crackers, and a first aid kit kicks my ass every time (and yet I continue to do it). We stumbled into camp on the third day looking like landmine victims and Mom swore on several occasions that she would NEVER AGAIN go backpacking without a llama, sherpa, or heavy meds.
On our last night as I was cooking our final pot of ramen noodles, I noticed a trim, good-looking, stylish German girl I hadn't seen before on the circuit.
I asked her where she'd hiked in from.
"We came from the other side of the pass. We're doing the whole trek in two days," she answered, a bit too cheerily.
"You must be tired!" I exclaimed, trying to hide my own personal devastation.
"No, not really," she shrugged. "It only took us 7 hours today."
I calculated that it had taken my mother and I ten hours between two days to cover the same terrain--not including our breaks. I couldn't imagine having done it all on the same day, arriving before dark, and feeling strong enough to cook pasta or look as good as this German girl really did. Was she human?
She looked at me through her stylish eyewear, "Excuse me but how long did it take you to come from the last hut?"
I thought of our slow start earlier in the morning, of getting drenched in the flooded waterfall, of our multiple bathroom stops along the trail and of our lunch on the lookout where I cried about my stepmom. All in all, it had taken us 5 hours since we had left.
"Four hours," I answered, rounding a little bit down.
"Four hours?" She raised her eyebrows with a mixture of dismay, surprise, and the kind of sad compassion one would give to a lesser, more disadvantaged being.
I thought later (as I always do after the fact) of telling her that trekking is not a race. That we take a lot of photos as we go. That I hadn't felt energetic that day and that neither Mom nor myself liked rushing our walks.
But all I said was "Yup. Four hours."
She shood her head with pity and turned her attention back to her pasta. We clearly belonged to two different camps of trekkers: The winners and the losers.
I sank down in my seat beside Mom...shocked that a human being near my age could so casually make that death march seem like a walk in the park. Maybe her pack had been ultralight. Or maybe she had loaded all of her heavy stuff in her boyfriend's pack (not that I would ever consider doing such a thing). Maybe they had had better weather for the crossing than we had while we had suffered through 12 hours of rain.
I hated this girl.
Mom and I talked about how tired we had been through the trek. We sat huddled in our corner, feeling reassured that we could share in each other's suffering. I looked through all the photos I had taken over the past few days. I thought of the mammoth-sized waterfall that we had survived crossing beneath and that had nearly blown us over...I remembered sharing tea with the hilariously funny English trekkers, of eating apples and cheese in the hut with a bunch of soggy strangers on a miserably wet day, and hearing the story about the Czech couple whose horse and baggage fell into the Amazon on a trip to South America. We'd even hung out with one of the hut rangers who'd proudly showed us his home brew stash (what else are you going to do out in the middle of the rainforest during a long winter?) that he could have made serious money on selling to parched trekkers.
That Couple over in the corner han't had any of those experiences. They definitely didn't have any of the cool pictures we had cause I doubt they stopped long enough to check out the scenery or talk to anyone. They did look damn cheery though over in their corner of the hut as they ate their pasta and giggled together.
The next day as Mom and I finished the last few kilometers of the trek the same couple passed us. Instead of throwing toilet paper at them and cursing their names I instead chose to remember all of the moments that Mom and I had shared over the past four days. I realized that it didn't matter how far ahead of us the couple was, Mom and I had our own journey to make. A bit slower of a journey but valid nonetheless.
When Mom and I victoriously finished the trek an hour later, a Kea parrot landed beside our packs and hung out with us for a while as if to congratulate us on a trek well done.
When the German girl and her boyfriend caught up with us again--they had added on a side hike for extra exercise cause the trek wasn't enough for them--she was bummed to have missed the parrot.
I was sad for her, too. ;)
May you all be enjoying your own paths...no matter the speed.
much love,
Rachel and Karen
P.S. Turns out we weren't total wimps after all. Just a day behind us, a young woman from Sydney stumbled off the main trail, blacked out, and woke up facedown on a ledge that fortunately, had broken her fall down the mountain face. Miraculously, she didn't have any major injuries...she was just a bit shaken up.
P.S.S. The day after we began our trek, the beginning part of the route was closed off when a storm we blew a tree over and damaged one of the bridge crossings. The date after we ended our trek, the high mountain pass we hiked over received snowfall.
Friday, November 28, 2008
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