Free Pants

February 8, 2009

Today was going to be my longest segment of the Routeburn Track. I started at Routeburn Flats hut and walked up and up, higher and higher. I passed an area where I huge landslide knocked down hundreds of trees. I continued to cross several small mountain streams across swing bridges. The trail was built to a very high standard. After about two hours, I reached Routeburn Falls hut, right at the edge of the tree line. As I marched steadily into the mountains, I was able to see more and more of the valley open up below me.

Routeburn Falls hut would have been my desired location to spend the night before, but it was booked solid. That’s okay. I still helped myself to use the toilet and refill my water bottle (not from the same source of water as the toilet, of course) before continuing up into the mountains.

The higher I got, the cooler the weather got. I was happy for my awesome merino wool sweater. It was lightweight and kept me sooo warm. I wish I had it that day I was stuck on the Abel Tasman Track waiting for my clothes to get delivered. Of course, if I did have it at that time, it probably would have just been in that pack I was waiting for. Doh.

For a short time, I walked to one of the hut wardens who was walking along the trail. He moved FAST. He wasn’t carrying a big pack, of course. He wore shorts, but didn’t look cold. I guess it takes a special breed of person to do his job. I was quite happy with all my layers, thank you very much.

Once I was past Routeburn Falls hut (and the nearby Routeburn Falls themselves), I was past the tree line and the character of the landscape completely changed. Now I was surrounded by alpine meadows, and big tussocks of spiky grass. The Route Burn was still here, too, but it was reduced to a narrow stream, tumbling over rocks before spilling over the falls and into the gorge below. Maybe some panoramic photography will help illustrate the scene (click to enlarge image)?

Harris Saddle Panorama

The trail continued into a mountain pass called Harris Saddle. The scenery was stunning. The sky kept filling with gray clouds, however. I feared that I would soon be rained upon.

Much of the upper parts saddle was filled with a large lake called Lake Harris — the source of the Route Burn. The trail kept going higher, though. I walked part way up a cliff overlooking the frigid waters below. Amazing.

Lake Harris

As I approached the top of the saddle, it started to drizzle on me and I wasn’t able to see nearly so far. I put the waterproof cover on my pack and took far fewer pictures. At the top of the saddle there were a few tarns and an emergency shelter which I ducked into to eat my lunch. The altitude here was 1220 meters above sea level. Yesterday morning I started at the Routeburn Shelter at an altitude of about 450 meters. That’s an 800 meter climb! The slope of the track wasn’t very steep, though. The walk was actually very easy.

After lunch, the trail crossed over from the lands of Mount Aspiring National Park to the famous Fiordland National Park. This trek would be the first of my three sojourns into this massive and spectacular national park. The trail flirted along the top of the Hollyford Valley for a long way. Across the valley there should have been a glorious panorama of mountains (see this image from Wikipedia). I didn’t see any of it though. All of the mountains were obscured by fog and clouds.

I don’t exaggerate when I say this track was both popular and very easy to follow. Once I got over the Harris Saddle, the number of people I encountered was astonishing. I encountered two or three tour groups being lead over the mountain. One tour group seemed to consist entirely of slow-moving, white-haired, Japanese grandmothers who barely made space for me as I tried to get past them. Some of these tour groups had their own private huts on the track. Tramping in New Zealand was certainly an industry.

Not all my encounters were so frustrating, however. At one point, I found some cute Japanese girls labouring to get up a hill. I told them “ganbatte!!” (“good luck!”).

Although it was still foggy, it wasn’t raining anymore and I started taking pictures again. Something weird was happening, though. All of my photos were turning out yellow.

Above the Hollyford Valley

It’s like the white-balance setting on my camera was way out of whack. I’m quite sure I set it to “cloudy”, but it didn’t seem to work. I think the sky really was yellow, though. At first I didn’t understand, but later I learned what was really going on. Someone in the hut told me about the horrible fires in the state of Victoria in Australia. Even though they were worldwide news, it was the first I had heard of them (news travels slowly when you’re backpacking). The smoke from these fires had been blown by air currents all the way across the Tasman Sea and was messing with my camera here in New Zealand… 2000 kilometers away! That’s just scary.

Eventually, I reach a viewpoint above the emerald waters of Lake Mackenzie. From here, the trail zig-zagged down the mountainside and I shed 300 meters of altitude in short time. As trail plunged back below the tree line, I found myself in an absolute treasure of a forest. Every surface, except for the trail itself, was covered with a verdant and thick carpet of moss. Simple photographs can’t capture the beauty of that place.

Moss-filled forest near Lake Mackenzie

Moss-filled forest near Lake Mackenzie

Finally, after about six hours and thirteen kilometers of walking I reached my destination, Mackenzie Hut, tucked in alongside Lake Mackenzie. Here is where I took one of my favourite photos in New Zealand, with rugged peaks and brown clouds full of smoke from Australia. It looks like somewhere out of this world.

The Shores of Lake Mackenzie

The hut was crowded that night. Lake Mackenzie Hut was apparently the largest hut in Fiordland National Park with fifty bunks. I played more cards with Syd, Astrid, and some guy from British Columbia that night. More euchre was played, of course. In addition, we played some more of the Backpacker card game and some Wizard, which I’m absolutely terrible at.

I had a can of Thai Green Curry for dinner that night. Some people thought it was silly that I would bring a CAN of food on a trek. It was so heavy! But, I thought it was a great idea. The trek was only two nights, so I only needed two dinners. As always, you always have to pack away and carry all your rubbish with you. You’re not allowed to leave your garbage at the huts since they don’t have any road access — if you left your rubbish there, it would have to get flown out on helicopter! With a simple stomp under my boot, I was able to flatten the can and make it easy to carry out.

–
Rob Szumlakowski
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

February 7, 2009

Even though I was beginning another epic tramp today, I was able to get up at 7:30 AM since my bus to the trailhead didn’t leave until a leisurely 10 AM. After some final packing, I left my extra stuff in the storage room at my hostel and walked down a super steep hill into town. I wanted to go to a certain café for breakfast, but it was full so I went back to the amazing Fergburger for a Morning Glory burger instead: fried egg, bacon, hash browns, sweet chili sauce and other goodies all in a bum. DAMN GOOD. Fergburger totally owns!

The perfect meal before a three-day walk in the mountains

After stuffing my face I killed a bit of time with a walk in the market near the waterfront before heading over to the Department of Conservation (DOC) to look at the weather forecast for the next three days. It didn’t look good. Although the skies in Queenstown were clear and blue, the forecast called for three days of rain. Uh oh.

Anyways, I boarded my bus that took my to the start of the famous Routeburn Track at the corner of Mount Aspiring National Park. The bus dropped us off at 11:30 AM. As I was departing the bus I observed that two of the other backpackers had MEC backpacks adorned with Canada flags. I introduced myself to them. They were Syd (from Dunnville, Ontario) and Astrid (from Hamilton, Ontario). Hello fellow Southern Ontarians!

We started walking together for a while but decided to separate after I realized I left my sunhat somewhere back on the trail. Doh. I preferred walking at my own pace anyways. The walk was absolutely beautiful: lush green beech forest, swing bridges, lofty mountains in the distance, and a wild gorge carved by the tumbling Route Burn.

“Burn” is a Scottish word for any stream of water that you can jump over. The Scottish settlers of this area must have been really good jumpers. I wouldn’t even want to attempt to jump over this thing (maybe they counted the rocks?):

The Route Burn

On later treks, I found “burns” even wider than this one. Silly settlers.

The path crossed the river, or some of its tributaries, several times. There was always a bridge at these crossings. At one of these places, I observed something very interesting happening below me:

Canyoning under the Routeburn Track

This group of people were “canyoning“. They were descending down the river canyon by a combination of jumping, sliding, swimming, wading, and abseiling. It looked very VERY fun. A few days later I’d attempt the same activity in Wanaka, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

My destination that day was the Routeburn Flats Hut, a mere 6.5 km from the trailhead. It took me only 2.5 hours to get there (including the backtracking to find my sunhat). Was this track so poorly designed that my first day’s walk was so short? Not quite. Check out this map:

Map of Routeburn Track

The full length of the track is 32 km. I started at “Routeburn Shelter” on the east side of the map. The tramp is the red dotted line. There are four huts, but the track is short enough that you can easily do it in only three days and use only two of them. Why so many huts? VOLUME. The track is so popular that it needs that many huts to handle all of the trampers. The second hut, the Routeburn Falls Hut, is a more sensible goal for the first day since it’s 9 km from the start, but that hut was fully booked so I had to settle for the Flats.

That’s okay. I’ve never had the luxury to sleep in a more beautiful place. Here’s the view from the front porch of the hut. The only sign of human habitation in the whole scene is a single picnic table. It’s one of the greatest front lawns ever. Nothing like tall mountains jutting out of the flats with myriads of waterfalls spilling down their slopes.

The Routeburn Flats

Since the walk was so short today, I had an abundance of time to kill at the hut. I wrote in my journal for a while. I read more of “The Life of Pi”. After some of that, I played a card game called Backpacker with Syd and Astrid. The game was a about traveling around the world, going to as many countries as possible to take photographs. IT WAS A GAME ABOUT MY LIFE. Astrid won, but I gave ‘em hell!

We played some Euchre, too. Our fourth was Adam from Michigan. We all agreed that it was excellent to finally be able to play this game without having to explain the rules and strategies to newbies (like I did one night on the Abel Tasman Coastal Track). After much research while traveling, I’ve decided that Euchre is only known to Canadians and Americans from the Midwest. It was rare to get four such people in the same place while traveling.

My dinner that night was some instant kimchi soup that Kerstin Meinecke had given me when I was in Palmerston North, but it wasn’t that great. I also had some cous cous mixed with honey, muesli, tuna, and coriander (which tasted much better than it sounds).

This hut was much swankier than the ones on the Abel Tasman Coastal Track. It was bigger. It had gas cookers, though you still had to supply your own pans. All of the bunks were individualized, so you didn’t have sleep asscheek-to-asscheek with a stranger. There were even electric lights in the middle of the night. You had to press a button to turn them on, though. They were on timers and automatically shut off after a few minutes. I think they were charged with solar panels during the day.

–
Rob Szumlakowski
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

February 6, 2009

One advantage of planning your trip in little pieces and delaying the booking of bus transportation as long as possible is that sometimes someone will offer you a ride somewhere. Getting a ride and going on a road trip is almost always more fun than a tedious bus trip. Today I was fortunate to get a ride all the way to my next intended destination: Queenstown. Our route would take us 330 km over the Southern Alps of New Zealand. This was going to be great!

My companions for my road trip today were Kevin (age 30 from West Virginia, USA), Kristin and Jen (ages 20 from NYC and San Francisco, USA). We squished all of our stuff into the trunk of Kevin’s rented Mazda Familia Sedan and roared off down New Zealand State Highway 6 south. I’ve been on this particular highway a lot in the past few days. It doesn’t carry a lot of traffic. In fact, most of the highway bridges along the West Coast were one-lane wide. There wasn’t enough traffic to justify bridges a full two lanes wide! There was one place that the one-lane highway bridge also carried a railroad across the river! If there was a train coming then cars had to way at either end of the bridge. Some of the longer bridges had tiny sections partway across. So silly.

As an added inspiration to silliness, I decided to celebrate Waitangi Day along our road trip. Waitangi Day is the anniversary of the day in 1840 when the British signed a treaty with the native Māori people. This document is considered the founding document of the state of New Zealand. I wished many people that day a “Happy Waitangi Day”, but many of them didn’t know what I was talking about. Maybe they didn’t understand me with my crazy Canadian accent.

The scenery was stunning. As we turned away from the coast and ascended into the mountains at the gates of Haast, the mountains got more rugged and the road got more twisty. We briefly stopped here to take some pictures and admire the scenery. I assembled this lovely panoramic photo here (click to enlarge):

Here’s a question I pose to my photographic buddies: this photo probably spans about 200º of view and has these crazy curved distortions (check out the highway bridge). Does that look good or bad?

Anyways, once we were over the mountains, we stopped for a wee picnic lunch in a very windy picnic area. I noshed on an improvised Marmite and cheese sandwich and polished off the last of my Monteith’s Celtic beer. Here’s a photo of my road trip buddies during our picnic that day:

Road trip lunch buddies!

We continued down past beautiful Lakes Wanaka and Hawea before pulling into the town of Wanaka for a break. The town is located at the far southern end of Lake Wanaka. The weather was still windy and chilly and I was astonished to see people attempting to swim in the choppy lake waters. Crazy. Meanwhile, I thought it would be more fun to climb a tree.

Me in a Tree

As we departed Wanaka I rolled down the car window and continued to shout “HAPPY WAITANGI DAY!” to random people. Most continued to look confused, but one lady actually shouted greetings back. The girls in the back seat of our car said that my random drive-by-shoutings and the perpetually confused locals were probably the highlight of their day. Excellent.

From here the highway ascended high up in the desolate Crown Range of mountains along the highest sealed road in the whole country. After cresting the range it was all downhill to Queenstown, which was, as far as I was concerned, the center of tourism on the South Island of New Zealand. Set along gorgeous Lake Wakatipu with The Remarkables forming a heavenly backdrop, this was a party city and mecca for adventure tourism. The types of crazy bungy jumping you could attempt here were just insane. I wasn’t here for bungy jumping, though!

After agreeing to meet up again later, Kevin dropped us off at our respective backpackers hostels. Mine was at The Hippo, perched on a hill looking out over the town. I quickly sorted through my stuff and repacked it. I was starting another tramp tomorrow morning!

I climbed back down the hill and to the legendary FERGBURGER (the web site is actually rather funny). This is the burger joint that everyone who goes to New Zealand talks about. I had to see what it was all about. I met up with my crew and ordered a fantastic meal. After living off of cheese, bread, Marmite, apples, bananas, cans of soup, and really weak sausage for days, I needed a meal fit for a king. I went a bit crazy and got a “Little Lamby” lamb burger with mint jelly, thick cut fries, wasabi mayo, and a luscious ginger beer. The spread was a bit pricey at NZ$19.50 (CA$13), but SO EXTREMELY GOOD. You have no idea. Even now, I drool when I think of this meal.

After a walk along the waterfront and we stopped for some hokey pokey flavoured ice cream. This crazy flavour is just vanilla ice cream embedded with little frozen bits of honey. I saw a newspaper article describing this flavour as the national ice cream flavour of New Zealand and the most appropriate flavour to choose on the country’s national day. Yummy!

Queenstown was definitely a party city and was filled with bars and night clubs. We headed over to the Buffalo Bar for drinks, shots, and pool. Kevin, Jen, and Kristin decided to go on a crazy pub crawl called “Big Night Out”. I stayed with them until they left the Buffalo Bar, but, sadly, I could not continue with them. It would have been EXTREMELY FUN to continue to drink with them, but there’s no way I could justify it. Tramping was my primary activity in New Zealand. I could go drinking and partying anywhere, but going on these tramps was something I could only do here. Alas, I had to say goodbye to my road trip buddies so I could return to my hostel and sleep.

As you will read next time, this tramp was absolutely amazing. I feel I made the right decision here. Wait until you see the pictures!!

–
Rob Szumlakowski
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

This weekend, I went skiing at Adatara, Fukushima with a whole bunch of teachers from Hokota 2nd High School (and some affiliated with it). I spent the entire weekend skiing, skiing and more skiing. Oh and there was a little onsen action too.

As always, let me give everyone a few tidbits on Fukushima and Adatara. Fukushima is the prefecture directly north of Ibaraki. The prefecture is full of mountains so the area is quite famous for skiing. Adatara has a huge active volcano and it previously blew up in 1996. Active volcanoes = minerals= onsen!

First, I just want to say I don’t really consider myself a good skier. I’ve skied before (obviously) but never done it seriously. So, being Canadian, it was assumed by all the Japanese teachers that I’m a skiing expert! HA! Little did they know…Anyway…

Suzuki and Miya sensei, relative newlyweds.

Saturday morning, I got up at a ridiculous 3:30 am in the morning. I dragged my sleepy ass out of bed and caught my ride. Waking up at 3:30 in the morning sucks. Good thing I slept on the way up to Adatara. When the car got close to Adatara I saw a spectacular Mt. Adatara and the surrounding mountain range. It was pretty glorious but I was too sleepy to remember about my camera. Sorry…

Manabu sensei all decked out and ready to carve.

Arrived at the ski resort at around 9am. Got unpacked and equipped and was out on the slopes by 10am. The place was packed. There were so many kids there. I guess the place is pretty famous. There were tours running and school kids all over the place.

So, the first hill we went on was a easy slope. It was pretty simple but I managed to fall once. I hadn’t skied in a while so I was rusty. After going on that slope twice, they immediately started on the intermediate slope. All I can say is Wow… intermediate was steep… Steeper than Tremblant if I recall correctly. And the snow was icy and bumpy from all the usage. Anyway, I think I got a lot worse at skiing. I fell so many times Saturday and I really hurt myself. I have battles scars especially my toe. I stubbed it really badly and the nail is all black from blood. I have to walk with a limp now.

The Hoko 2nd (and affliated) ski crew 2010.

The onsen after skiing was amazing. The water was milky white from the minerals in the mountains and it made my skin super smooth. The best part about the onsen was SO totally out of an anime. 50 year old men screwing around and splashing water and throw snow at me in the outdoor bath. I would have never imagined it happening but it did. I guess this is part of Japanese male bonding… haha

Suzuki sensei, one of the many culprits in the onsen incident.

Dinner was delicious… and interesting! One of the teachers got drunk and decided to take me “girl hunting”. I didn’t know what was happening. He just told me to come with him and all of a sudden, he brought me to a table with 3 cute girls. I was like “WTF?!?!”. He introduced me to the girls and said I was from Canada and asked if we could sit down with them. He took a chair from another table and sat me down and started talking to the girls. The only thing I could do at that point was apologize profusely. This went on for a few minutes before the other teachers noticed and came to my rescue. I was ushered off back to one of the rented rooms (without the rest of my dinner). So sad… I had to eat cup ramen and it just made me more sick in the stomach…

Sunday (today) morning, had a Japanese breakfast and made eye contact with one of the “girls” from the night before while eating. I completely remembered all the embarrassing bowing and apologizing from that split second look. Sigh… I still need to master the powers of NO SHAME.

Skiing was crazy after breakfast. The “leaders” decided to take the gondola up to the top of the mountain and do the hard course down. I slid down the mountain on my ass for the most part of it and lost my cell phone to boot. Good thing the ski patrol found my phone. After the a rest break, the “leaders” decided to do another hard course. Again, I was on my ass for most of that course. The one time I fell, I was on my back and couldn’t stop rolling down the mountain. Somehow, I got turned around (probably because I lost a ski) and started going down head first. I only stopped because someone was there to stop me. If it wasn’t for him, I would have slid all the way down the mountain. Yikes… At that point, people finally realized that hard courses were too much for me. We did intermediate courses from then on.

Top of the Orange Line, one of the intermediate courses.

Anyway, it’s probably going to take me a good week to recover from all the bodily damage I sustained over the weekend. Damn being old an all…

-will

Yesterday, I went the Ushiku Daibutsu in Ushiku, about 1.5 hours away from Hokota. What is it? According to the Guiness Book of World Records (you know where this is going now right?), it’s “the tallest statue of a bronze statue of Buddah” in the world!

A scale model of the Buddah head.

This f-ing thing is huge, standing at 120m tall! It’s 3 times the height of the Statue of Liberty and about 9 times the height of the Daibutsu in Kamakura.

It's HUGE!

Did I mention it’s huge? Yeah… you get the idea. Well, here are more fantabulous facts about the Daibutsu for you:

• 4000 tonnes of bronze
• the right hand is 18m long
• the head is 20m tall
• each eye is 2.5m wide
• the mouth is 4m wide
• the nose is 1.2m long
• and the ear is 10m long

Praise the Lord! I mean, Buddah!

All hail Buddah!

You can also go inside! There’s an elevator that takes you up the insides of the Buddah. It’s like going up its rectum! Sorta… lol (I’m totally going to get smited for this)

Anyway, the initial elevator ride is creepy as hell. It’s completely dark with weak green LED lights on the ceilings and floors. There’s Japanese commentary during the ride. It felt like an elevator ride to hell as opposed to an elevator ride of enlightenment.

When you get off, it remains kinda creepy (and trippy). It’s still very dark and in the middle of the main room, there’s a golden Buddah on a pedestal with a strong spot light shining on it. The walls lined with LED waves and LED Buddahs that change colours. Very psychedelic…

The shining light of Buddah.

Once past that room, the route leads to a room with the history and making of the statue. It’s all in Japanese but there are a lot of pictures so you can make out what the stories are. Once past the history portion of the route, there’s another elevator ride, one that takes you to the chest (observation deck). The view isn’t all that great as you can only see through small slits. Bleh. There are some treasures donated (?) from Thailand such as this golden Buddah statue…

Worth more than my left nut? Possibly...

… and two other golden things that I couldn’t take good pictures of. On the way down, there’s a circular hall that houses 3300 small Buddah statues, similar to the one that had the spotlight on it. Like this guy…

Bodacious Buddha Bokeh!

It was cool and creepy at the same time. So many statues of Buddah staring at you… Here, you can feel it too!

Only 6600 eyes piercing through your soul...

Ok, it’s not quite the same… When I walked through that room, it felt like my soul was being put in the rinse cycle of a washing machine. I guess I didn’t feel very comfortable. Maybe I have something to hide, or I’ve sinned or something. lol

Enough of Buddah, on to the good stuff!

As ridiculous as this may sound, behind the Buddah is a petting zoo! Yeah! They had wild bunnies and squirrels to pet and this guy!

Porky's mini cousin.

It’s a Japanese mini-buta (buta=pig). I went to take a close-up and it thought my camera was food. What a pig! Literally! Seriously though, it almost became a disaster when it got too close to my camera. That brown stuff on the snout isn’t exactly chocolate if you know what I mean.

The squirrels were super-cute too. They just run up to you thinking you have food to feed them (in most cases is true). Japanese folk, especially the kids, love feeding the squirrels.

A sunbathing squirrel.

Unfortunately for them, I’m cheap and not Japanese and don’t have children so I didn’t buy any “squirrel food” for 100 yen to feed them. They still nibbled at my hand thinking it’s food though.

A leap of faith.

Silly pea brained squirrels…

After the petting zoo, there was a monkey act. The trainer had the monkeys do some interesting things like catch rings, ride a tricycle and this…

When I get off this ball, I'm going to eat your brains!

Pretty impressive. I certainly can’t balance on a ball let alone roll around on one. But then again, I’m not a trained monkey… Don’t even go there! Don’t even go there…

-will