Day 130 - kidnapped in kindness
Mavora Lakes wild camp —-> Te Anau
23km walk + 45km hitch
As beautiful as our campsite was, we woke up beyond excited that we had (if all went to plan) only have nine days until Bluff. Single figures!
Of course nine days was a long way away and we had no idea of the weather forecast for the next few days, but hey, we could start a countdown…
We were headed to Te Anau today. It wasn’t officially on the trail but both John and I needed to resupply so we planned to walk to the main road and hitch a ride into town from there. We’d hitch back to trail the following day.
Back into the forest we went, hopping over the normal forest sludge and following the Mararoa river on our left hand side.
We decided to leave the official trail at the Kiwi burn turnoff - the notes said we’d need to cross the river later on if we took the normal route - by crossing early we could hopefully save our feet from the icy water and cross over on a bridge. The downside of that however was that instead of a formed path we’d be bashing through the tussock on an old stock trail. 15 minutes in and we had already regretted our decision.
Clearly no stock had come through here in decades, it was incredibly slow going trying to work out where to put your foot without falling into a tussock hole. We ended up having to wade through the water anyway - heaps of tributaries that weren’t on our map. Both John and I were over it - so we sneakily hopped over the fence into the field next to the “trail” and climbed up the hill and across another couple of farmers fields to the road.
We followed the road for a couple of hours, fighting the howling wind that tried everything in it’s might to push us backwards, and just after 12.30pm perched down outside a field full of cows for some lunch.
A car approached just as I’d pulled my chair out - it was the first car we’d seen for hours so we ran over to see if they were headed to Te Anau. They were and were happy to give us a lift - hooray! Matt lived in Te Anau with his two kids who were in the back, they’d been staying at Kiwi Burn hut last night with Matt’s friend Kelly. With only room for one in the back, John hopped into the trunk of the ute and we sped off, very happy we were on our way a bit earlier than planned.
Turns out Matt and Kelly were headed home via a quick stop at Lower Princester hut, the first stop on our trail tomorrow - so we drove up there to check out what we had ahead of us. Back in the car, Matt called his wife and let her know that they would have two extra people for lunch (wonderful, but I hadn’t actually been invited for lunch?!) and we drove towards their home in Te Anau. I sat in the back of the car chatting to the kids and hoped his wife didn’t think it was weird her husband was bringing two strangers home without even the strangers knowing about it…
After a lovely lunch spread and some verrrryyy interesting conversation about NZ politics, Matt’s wife dropped John and I off at the hostel we’d booked for the night. The usual admin of shower laundry shopping followed and as the rain came down, I was very grateful for a little haven indoors.
