The Routeburn Track – Part One

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!

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?):

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:

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:

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.

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