I'M AT: Te Anau YHA, replete with a real stroke of luck, as the room is just amazing, part of a shared house with its own garden, modern, beautiful and peaceful - AND the guy undercharged me, so I'm not paying any more than I would have done for a dusty dorm.
The Kepler Track is one of New Zealand's nine Great Walks.
The Great Walks pass spectacular scenery, but can get full up with trampers, meaning overnight accommodation is tricky to come by. This fact, combined with my unwillingness to drag a sleeping bag and stove up a thousand metres of mud and bracken, lead me to attempt just a one-day walk, via water taxi, up to Mount Luxmore.
The Kiwis here organise a couple of races each year - the Kepler Challenge, during which entrants race round the whole track in less than four hours (bear in mind that the DOC recommend taking several DAYS to do this hike); and the Luxmore Grunt, where competitors just race up to Mount Luxmore and back. It takes them under two hours. I've got pretty fit doing all this hiking, but it still took about six hours there and back, and we didn't quite get all the way up to the summit, as we ran out of time.
The only thing I can offer in defence of my pride is that the racers probably don't stop to take quite as many photos as me.
Anyway. A description. The first couple of hours is a steady, steep climb from Brod Bay beach, menaced by sandflies, up into a beech forest. From the branches hang delicate strands of Old Man's Beard, a lime-green moss that dangles in sharp contrast to the deeper green of the beech leaves. This kind of forest is typical of Southland, which is a Very Wet Place, covered in lush green from the pines and podocarps. The keas enjoy themselves, dancing amongst the trailmix that hikers leave behind. The Dept of Conservation (DOC) ensures that the track is uniformly excellent, scattering grey gravel over mud puddles, and building small bridges over torrential channels. I've developed a massive respect for the work of the DOC here. Fair play gentlemen!
So, after you emerge from the treeline, at a thousand metres or so, wiping sweat from the eyes, you're hit with previously-conceealed views of lakes Te Anau and Manapouri, deep pools of blue. Boats touring the lakes look absolutely tiny, rippling the reflections of the massive Kepler Mountain Range with their shimmering wakes. And you cross the alpine landscape, mercifully level, to reach Luxmore Hut, where sweet water drips from chrome taps.
A side trip - and the hardest bit of the Grunt, I should imagine - takes you to the summit of the Mount, about four hundred metres higher than the hut. And whilst this isn't high enough for the altitude to affect you, your ears pop, and your eyes pop, and your legs snap, and your lens crackles. And you thank God that you bought the same wide-angled camera to replace the one you lost in Nelson, as it eats views of the blue-black mountains.
From there, it's down, down, down, back to the flying devils of the beach, back through the forest which, strangely, seems to take longer on the way back, even though you're coasting by now, and bounding down, tops of the thighs burning.
On the way back, the proud and friendly guy driving the water taxi told us in friendly detail all about the races, and it was easy to ignore the moss-like hairs tumbling out of his friendly snout. And then he offered to ferry us back for free the next day, at the same time, if we wanted to go to the beach for the afternoon, as I guess we seemed friendly to him, too.
But today, the thought of walking on tired legs drove me instead to sit down in here and limit the punishment only to the tips of my typing fingers.
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