Day 93 - backtrack

Upper Travers hut —-> St Arnaud 21km walk + watertaxi

My eye was affecting my sinus, so I had all the outward symptoms of a cold. The other hut-goers were doing their best to avoid me and I wasn’t surprised, I looked pretty gross.

I was in agony, I couldn’t focus on anything and trying to look at anything specific caused shooting pains through my head. I knew I’d scratched my eyeball, I’d done it once before and had exactly the same reaction. I’d also done that scratch with a plant and it had got infected so I was worried the same thing might happen again.

After much deliberation and a whole lot of tears, Josh and I decided the best thing to do would be to leave the trail and get my eye looked at before continuing any further. The nearest hospital was in Nelson - a 90 minute drive from St Arnaud. But first, we had to get to St Arnaud. The fastest way was to walk back the way we’d come the previous day, past John Tait hut and continue on down the TA trail to Lakehead hut, the way we would have come had we not made the side trip to Angelus. From Lakehead hut we could get a water taxi to St Arnaud, and from St Arnaud organise a shuttle to Nelson. The only trouble was, the walk to Lakehead hut was 8 hours.

I wasn’t sure I could walk for 8 minutes let alone 8 hours. But I didn’t have a choice, it was either hang out in the hut and risk my eye getting worse / infected - or drug up as best as I could and get back to civilisation.

So we walked back the five hours we’d spent on the trail yesterday. We’d spoke to some other hikers in John Tait hut and they let us know that there was a regular water taxi scheduled to leave Lakehead hut at 3pm. Had we known this this morning we would have packed up a lot quicker, but now at 11am, we were going to need to move very swiftly indeed in order to make it.

We tracked our distance every half hour, checking to see if our pace was quick enough. The familiarity of the trail allowing us to move quicker when my eye would let me.

We sat down for a 12 and a half minute lunch at the base of a swingbridge and with military fashion sped over and raced the final few km to Lakehead hut.

We arrived with 15 minutes to spare. Waiting for the boat, my eye was starting to feel better and I flitted back and forth whether we made the right decision about leaving. It was only when Josh showed me what my eye actually looked like that I realised we 100% did.

This friendly South Island robin hung out with us for a while.

The water taxi over Lake Rotoiti was beautiful and stopped at various points across the lake dropping and picking people up.

We arrived in St Arnaud around 4pm and got a last minute room back at The Alpine Lodge where we organised a shuttle to Nelson for the following morning.

I consoled myself in bed for the rest of the evening with a takeaway pizza and my weight’s worth of chocolate, still trying to convince myself we’d done the right thing.