Southern Adventure - Part two - Rakiura / Stewart Island

Mon 22 Nov - Ulva island, Akers Point (Day 0)

We were up and about early-ish to make the most of our 'free day' in Oban. We'd all read about Ulva Island as the place to go, so off we headed, a short walk over a hill to Golden Bay where the ferry left from.

The ferry was a cute little boat, the boarding passes were mutton scrub leaf with nice writing on the back. Soon enough we were at the Ulva Island jetty, milling about and figuring out what to do. There are a series of walking tracks through the island in a rough loop, that took us through wonderful untouched forest with so many birds flying about. Angela sighted an incredibly rare Tīeke (South Island Saddleback) flitting about. 

The tracks took us from beach to beach as well, to see weka running about fossicking for bugs and suchlike. There were weka chicks that were so cute! No seals to be seen but plenty of mussels on the rocks. 

After a couple of hours we'd sucked the marrow of all the tracks and our return ferry appointment was looming. So back to the jetty we wandered. It started to drizzle at this point but we were warm enough under our jackets. 

Back at Golden Bay we had lunch in the little shelter by the jetty. Then it was time for our second destination of the day. A local pointed us off in the direction of Akers Point with something about cutting through the golf course. It all made sense when we got to the end of the road we were following to find the shoreside track washed away and an impassable cliff face in its place.  But a fairway followed around the erosion and we were able to rejoin the track after the no 5 green. The course was... rustic, with lots of grass mulch on the fairway and a green that was pretty well like the fairway but with slightly shorter grass. It'd still be quite something to say you'd played that course though. 

Soon we were approaching Harrold House, when Stacey let us know that her great great ... grandparents were the original occupiers! The Pākeha side of her family got a lot more mention on the signs than the Māori side which miffed her a bit. Still, the old stone cottage, where her ancestors had raised 9 or so children, was delightful. 

We followed the track on and on to Aker's point, via some houses and interesting old machinery out front. We had all the seasons - sun! Cloud! Showers! More sun! At last the now automated and modern lighthouse loomed into view and there we were.

By the time we got back to Oban, we'd walked significantly further than any of our actual hiking days. Off to the pub for dinner, then an early night in anticipation of our upcoming travels.

Tue 23 Nov - Oban to Port William Hut (Day 1)

Trail map (DOC)

9:30am saw us up, packed, a bag left with the backpackers to look after, eating scrambled eggs at the pub, and off.

Our tramp started with a slightly interminable walk along sealed road to Lees Bay. It must have been a couple of hours but it seemed to last forever. At last we reached Lees Bay and edged around the Mamaku Point conservation reserve - a little known pest-proofed peninsula that is thriving.

Off we set

On we go

Lee's Bay

The track is nice

Today's walk was fairly straightforward, mostly following the coastline and dropping us onto the beach from time to time.  We stopped at Māori Beach for lunch and to look at the old sawmill that had been left behind over a century ago. It's fascinating what was done to try to make a living in the most inhospitable places.

It was a short distance to Port William Hut, and in spite of our relatively late start we were there before 2pm. What a great hut! Reasonably full with people hanging about on the grass outside and at the beach just in front. 

Rakiura huts have a bed bug problem, that they seem to have got on top of but they weren't taking any chances. Most of our stuff stayed outside, on the porch, wrapped in plastic (I'd bought pack liners just for this). 

I discovered a part completed wasgij puzzle in the hut, and spent quite a bit of time on it. A good way to decompress. (Angela noticed, and guess what I got for christmas?)

Our husband-and-wife hut wardens were lovely and somewhat eccentric. We first got a long lecture on how to use a camping stove without burning down the hut or setting ourselves on fire. Then we got a really good set of hints for the evening about how to spot kiwi.  We tucked into our Backcountry Meals having cooked them very carefully and in compliance with the safety instructions. Angela had boil-in-the-bag MTR Indian meals with rice on this trip as an experiment - and absolutely loved it. The slight increase in weight was more than made up for by the massive uplift in taste and flavour. I think that's her go-to easy vegetarian tramping food now.

After dinner we wandered down to the campsite, 200m or so from the hut, to get away from the crowds and hopefully see some kiwi. We celebrated Stacey's birthday with some little bottles of liquor that Callan had brought in. Were there kiwi to be seen? No, there were not. It was a beautiful evening though so a wonderful excuse to sit in the dusk and quietly chat.

Wed 24 Nov - Port William Hut to North Arm Hut (Day 2)

Today got off to a cracking start as Angela sighted a white-tailed deer on the way to the toilet. It was pretty tame and just hung around the hut. Cool. 

Over breakfast we witnessed a stove disaster, as someone using a borrowed stove managed to snap the spork they were stirring with, which catapulted their dinner onto the bench. Luckily they've followed instructions from last night and were cooking well away from the edge of the bench and standing back. Risk mitigations right there. 

We somewhat chaotically packed up along with everybody else on the porch. (More on that later). Today we were ascending to a mighty high plateau, towering ... 180m above sea level. Just an 11km day again, but it did take us all day because of the mud we found. The track was well built and maintained, but you can only do so much when you go through swamp. I discovered the trick of following the line of the track through the mud, and hoping to find the fabric and plastic netting that was used to give the track some resilience. If you stayed on that you were okay. If you fell off it, or it just wasn't there, then the mud was deep.

Packing up

Lush!

Mud

Splosh

Yes, mud

Andrew and I were very happy to have leather boots and gaiters. We kept our socks clean and dry for the whole trip and could just splash through the deep puddles that everyone else had to pick through. My irrational distaste for gaiters is well known but I may just have had my prejudices broken down by this trip. Can I change? 

Near the midway point we found a couple of temporary huts used for track maintenance. Interesting how they do this. They build a foundation and platform for the huts, then simply helicopter in the hut itself and tie it down. Much less work and easy to then move huts about as they're needed.

Temp hut for lunch

The midway buoy. With the boys. Har har.

There was also lots of old cast iron milling equipment in evidence, including boilers for two huge log haulers. The old wire rope followed our track for quite some distance.

It was quite a relief when North Arm Hut appeared. We made use of their boot washing station and again, wrapped our gear in plastic and left it outside. This hut had had a major infestation and they had gone hard to eradicate it - stripping the bunkroom back to framing and rebuilding it after a thorough fumigation. Every nook and cranny had been sealed with silicone. Bed bug monitoring traps were everywhere. I felt pretty safe.

The last descent to the hut

Then, as we were wandering about before dinner, we sighted a pair of white tail deer. They were incredibly tame. Callan got within 3 metres of them and they just couldn't care less. They wandered around the campsite near the hut, then down to the hut itself, to the delight of all the occupants.

This was the point where I realised that in the chaos this morning, I'd managed to not put my puffer jacket into my backpack. It must have been still sitting on the porch, mixed up with other people's repacking, when we left. Gah! There had been quite a bit of water taxi traffic to and from the hut the morning we left, so I hoped against hope that I could be reunited with it in Oban.

Thu 25 Nov - North Arm Hut to Oban (Day 3)

Another shortish day today, with a little bit of mud but not nearly as much as the day before. We were out by 11:30am! There was still a reasonable few km of road walking to get us to the pub and lunch though. Andrew and I found long grass and a stream to mostly wash our boots off and arrived in Oban with relatively clean gear.

I called in at the DOC centre in Oban and was delighted to find that they had my "sleeping bag" (puffer jacket) neatly tagged in their lost property bin. Wonderful!

Another delight awaited when we collected our bag from the backpackers. I tentatively enquired about how much a shower would cost us - after our Punakaiki experience of $12 shower fees (as a nice bait-and-switch after paying them hundreds of dollars for car relocation) I assumed the news would be bad. "Oh, you were staying with us before you did the track, weren't you? Just go have a shower, no problem." Another tick for the amazing Stewart Island Backpackers. 

Our Rakiura adventure was nearing its end. After a well earned lunch and drinks at the pub, we wandered across to the ferry terminal. The freight boat was in so that gave us a bit of entertainment, watching an eclectic collection of stuff from cars to windows to beds to ride-on mowers come off the smallish boat with a built in crane. It seemed like chaos at first glance but the crew were well experienced and knew just how to unload each item the most efficiently and could drop things straight onto waiting trailers when need be.

After another fast but gentle crossing we were back in Bluff, reunited with our cars and blissfully unaware of the local knowledge about regular break-ins and vehicle thefts there. We parted ways for now with Callan and Stacey and were back on the road again.

Rakiura is such a special place. Angela in particular is super keen to go back and spend more time exploring the longer routes on the island. I regret not exploring Southland more in my teens when I lived in Invercargill and had so much opportunity to. It's so much harder/more expensive/more time consuming to get down that way from the North Island. But, I think we'll be back again soon. 

Southern Adventure - Part One - the getting there

What an adventure we've just had! It's hard to knock off 'firsts' nowadays but this was our first time to Stewart Island, our first time seeing certain birdlife in the wild, our first time in Tuatapere and our first time tramping together in Fiordland. Amazing. I can't wait to write about it all.

Fri 19 Nov - Wellington to Christchurch

It all started, as it often seems to, with the blaring of an alarm far too early. Our uber was coming early, to take us to an early flight. We were off tramping in the far south - but there were things to do first. So our first stop was Christchurch.

It was still early when we blearily got off the plane, and another Uber took us to Steph and Sam's house. We were welcomed by Tessa, Toby and Sam - but no Steph. Her father David had fallen off his mountain bike so she had high-tailed it to Wellington to tend to him and to work from there. Oh no!

First stop was Little Poms for brunch of course. But alas we weren't staying at the Pomeroy B&B as it is no longer, the Pomeroy family have exciting new plans for it which is great - except our Christchurch bolthole is no longer available. We were staying at our second-favourite place and with many special memories - the Ashford Motor Lodge on Papanui St.

The rest of the day seemed to consist of driving. A lot of driving. From Huntsbury to Pomeroys to Riccarton to Ilam to Papanui St to Huntsbury to Riccarton to... we bought some last minute supplies from Macpac Riccarton, perused the Riccarton Mall, dropped Tessa home, moved the first boxes of stuff from Toby's hall, dropped his stuff at Tessa's, collected Tessa again, and excitingly, got to see Toby and Tessa's 2022 flat. It's nice and close to Uni and it'll suit them nicely.

After all this it was coming up to dinner time. Of course, dinner was at the Pomeroy Inn. Delicious as always.

Sat 20 Nov - Christchurch to Queenstown

After an earlyish breakfast at (where else but) Little Poms cafe, we bid farewells to Toby, Tessa and Sam and hit the road for Queenstown. Maybe not the most direct route to Stewart Island, but close enough and set up this way to collect the van we now have staged in Christchurch, get Mike to his Queenstown Half Marathon and then collect Andrew who was flying in to meet up with us. Well - Covid had put paid to the Half Marathon but leaving all the bookings as-is anyway made sense.

The drive down was largely uneventful, and spectacular. I don't think we'd gone this way since the 1990s when we'd do southern lakes ski trips out of Christchurch because it was cheaper. We called in at Kimbell and the old crib is in fine heart. The high country past Tekapo is incredible. The Lindis is rugged, tussocky, brown and rocky. (Angela is helping me with adjectives now). We made really good time and pulled in to Queenstown in the drizzly mist.

Big Country

Kimbell house looking well tended

We found a pay-per-day Wilsons car park, because Queenstown, and sought out Andrew and our backpackers.  The backpackers - Absoloot - was really well set up and right in the middle of town. I'd definitely stay there again. Our room was set up to be a dorm if it needed to be, with curtains across the bunks. Angela decided it was like being in a submarine. Maybe I need to build curtains and a low ceiling on our bed at home...?

Neat and functional? Absolootely!

Even though it was dinner time, none of us were particularly hungry, so we wandered and foraged. Icecream and craft beer and poutine at various places did the job. We explored the waterfront and watched the mother duck teaching her cute ducklings how to manage the waves lapping along the lakefront... until cuteness was replaced by harsh Darwinism when a seagull swooped in and took away a duckling that had drifted too far from the group. Some children watching were fascinated rather than horrified. Good on them, an early lesson in how nature works.

Album cover for our difficult second album 

Wakatipu foreshore. Count the ducklings...

Sun 21 Nov - Queenstown to Oban

Was it noisy, right in the middle of Queenstown? If it was, none of us heard it. We all slept really well. 

On our way out of the backpackers we bumped into Jeanette, who we'd been to Nepal with back in the Before Times. Was great to see her! We swapped stories.

Quick breakfast at the Boatshed Cafe on the way out of town, and then the three of us pointed the van south. What a nostalgic drive - when I was a wee'un, me and my Dad did this drive many weekends to hit the slopes at Remarkables and Coronet. I knew it well but it had been a very, very long time ago. Certain parts of the road brought back sharp memories of specific events, other times just the general feel of remembering driving at night tired and happy after a weekend on the slopes.

We made good time until Winton, a few km out of Invercargill, when we met the Groundswell protest. It wasn't very big and it wasn't too slow. It seemed to have a bit of support, but it was pretty unclear to me what it was protesting. "Don't do this, don't do that". No actual alternatives. It's easy to say "don't", harder to say, "this is my alternative plan you could do instead". 

OK politics over. We jogged along til we hit the 4-lanes of Dee St and were able to get past. Tried to avoid the protest entirely but were fooled by a glitch in the Invercargill grid system. Eventually we emerged onto Tay St. Google's recommendations directed us to Meccaspresso cafe and we ate well. Yum. 

We had a quick wander through Invercargill's CBD. It was sad and dreary through the rain and cloud. The shops are all run down with peeling paint.  There is a massive hole in one block where they are building a new shopping mall.  Esk Street is a maze of construction fences and negotiating the footpaths to any of the shops that were still open was hard.  I guess the construction industry is busy.  But there is an impact on the local shops, that is for sure.  

We couldn't get on the road soon enough, and so off to Bluff we went, through the rain. After a bit of navigation around closed roads we found the ferry terminal - and Callan and Stacey! A great sign that our plans were actually coming together and we'd actually managed to book onto the same ferry on the same day.

The ferry was a fast cat, passengers only, a bit bigger than Devonport or Eastbourne ferries but the same idea basically. It was fast, and not too rough at all. We were pulling into Halfmoon Bay after just an hour, all feeling surprisingly chipper and not sick.

Oban is a much more developed and 'normal' town than I expected. It's basically the same as any rural village you might find,  There's a 4 square, a pub, a cafe, a DOC centre, a 'kai cart' and, of course, a backpackers. And plenty of roads and plenty of cars. 

First sight of Oban

Our first stop was the Stewart Island Backpackers. After minimal fuss checking in we three were ensconced in our little 3 room dorm, fairly identical to Callan and Stacey's 2 room bedroom, but with one more bed and 2 less towels. You don't get complimentary towels if you are in a dorm.

I'd heard a lot about the pub's Sunday quiz night - alas we were 15 min late, the pub was packed, and the quiz was kicking off into full steam ahead. So to the Kai Cart for fish and chips we went. Our two vegetarians decided that the fish was clearly sustainably caught and prepared so that's what we all had. It was yummy and good.

Waiting for kai

It was still a bit drizzly and cold, so it was relatively early to bed. We were all looking forward to a day of exploring tomorrow. With no real knowledge of what we'd find, I was buzzing with anticipation.