Kiwis Don't Make Straight Roads

Well, Mack and I are pretty exhausted -- we just finished up a 16 mile hike with 3000 ft elevation gain in the last seven hours or so. This turned out to be our version of the Kepler Track, a Great Walk in the Fiordlands of Southland near Te Anau. Sadly, the hike has an alpine section that requires previous experience in relatively extreme snow situations, so we both bailed pretty quickly on that one. However, we are heading north into the Milford Track early tomorrow morning, in which case doing a long hike today was probably not the best idea ...

In other news, we left Mount Bruce a little over one week ago and have been busy travelling and hiking since. After boarding the ferry at Wellington, we cruised over to the South Island and immediately drove to Abel Tasman National Park where we prepped to leave the next morning for a four day hike in the park labelled as one of NZ's other Great Walks. It was truly spectacular -- you hike along some of the most crystal-clear beaches I've ever seen in my life. Definitely a destination for a summer vacation, though it gets pretty busy; in fact, it's New Zealand's most popular national park (~300,000 visitors per year), and we managed to see about 40 people or so while we were there, very cool. I wish I could post pictures, but I just haven't had many free minutes to even load them onto Mack's computer.

After Abel, we travelled down the west coast of the South Island, hitting up Westport, Greymouth, and all the way down to Haast. On the way, we stopped for one day in Barrytown to make our own knives which was perhaps one of the coolest things we've done on this trip, plus I now have my very own ridiculously sharp handmade (by yours truly) kitchen knife. We also saw two different glaciers, the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, though they weren't terribly interesting and we weren't willing to shell out a lot of money to go walk on them. Other than that, we've just done a ton of driving and we've seen a lot of really cool little stuff along the way. We also have a lot of really good pictures, which I'm excited to edit and hopefully turn into a book once home.

So yeah, that's pretty much it -- we leave early tomorrow morning from Te Anau to the beginning of the Milford Track, and return in three days! Pray for good weather ...