Fiordland

14 March - 20 March

This week I went to a potluck dinner/meeting with the Students for Environmental Action group. I made baked kumara (the local version of sweet potatoes) stuffed with crushed pineapples, orange juice, and some sunflower seeds. Thanks to my mom for this recipe, the one nice thing I know how to make that will always turn out. We talked about a bunch of local environmental issues, including a hearing on whether to allow coal mining in Happy Valley, which is a breeding ground for an endangered version of kiwi. I ended up helping out a bit with making some "Save Happy Valley" campaign banners. Pretty convincing title if you ask me.

Anyway, the "tramp" for the week was out to Fiordland, which is a beautiful area and also the only one in New Zealand to measure their rainfall in meters. Yes.

So we drove up Friday, arriving after dark and setting up tent flies. Overnight it promptly began to rain. It did let up a bit in the morning, but the mountain ridges were covered in clouds so my group had to rethink our plans because our original route had zero visibility. We ended up just hiking along a popular "Great Walk" trail - the Routeburn Track - with old Japanese ladies led by bored-looking tour guides, etc. It was a pretty nice hike though, and we took some side-trips to see McKellar falls and twice up to Key Summit. The first time up Key Summit we had amazing views of the backs of our hands and pretty much nothing else, but the next day it cleared up a bit and there were nicer views of the surrounding mountains. We had lunch up there with our cameras out, and each time the clouds blew away from a peak we all jumped up and shot as many pictures as possible before they came back. Basically it was: eat, eat, eat, eat, picture! eat, eat, pic-false alarm, eat, eat, picture! eat eat, go back down. Good trip though.