Waiau Hut - Anne Hut

Woke up to an emotional hangover, and spent the soft grey morning adjusting my creaking joints back into hiking mode. I set out alone and picked my way across dewy meadows, along the soft banks of shallow rivers interwoven with patches of trees. The clouds teased around, but I knew they would lift – they always do here.

Out of the last grouping of trees I came upon a 4WD track that shot straight ahead for as far as the eye could see. Ever since Ship Cove, I’d never been able to actually see the trail in a straight line, there was always an inlet or a mountain to navigate around. The valley spread out before me in a thousand shades of ochre and green. Ada Homestead, a small farm with grazing horses lay off to the right in a secluded pocked beneath snowy mountains. Far ahead I could see Toby as a tiny dot in the high grass. I raced along towards the grand vista, plugging in the best tunes I know from Into the Wild. Green mountains rose up into the blue sky, the only sound apart from my footsteps was a soft wind that tossed my hair around playfully.

Blankets of flowers coated the ground, caressing my ankles as I swept by them. I could have been the only person in the world. The songs in my ears carried me faster than I knew it was possible to hike until I was almost running. I flung out my arms and tilted my head back to shout indistinguishable happy sounds into the sky. I spun and laughed and danced and could only gasp in awe and gratitude of living in this day.

As I felt my pulse beat in tune to the humming of every blade of grass in the golden mountain valley, I knew that I was experiencing one of the happiest moments of my life. This kind of overwhelming joy that penetrates each cell in your body doesn’t come along many times over the course of the years. The feeling of absolute harmony with nature, rushing adrenaline and dancing to my favourite songs carried such a weight of extraordinariness that I felt the purpose of embarking on this trail become realised in that very moment. This is it. This is what I have been looking for, for what feels like all my life. This is freedom, happiness, love. This is everything.

I felt light as a feather, pack and all. This was simply effortless. Everything that had held me down or hurt me was being washed away with every step I took toward the magnetic pull of Bluff. It wasn’t so much gravity that tied me to the world, but this trail. How had I known back then that this would save me? I could never tell you. But carrying myself and my pack and my heart and my head over now 400-something km was the most purposeful thing I had ever done in my life.

Toby had his own music plugged in and almost had a heart attack when I jumped on him from behind. He was astounded I’d caught up to him, we laughed and fell down into the yellow grass to have lunch in the sun. The trail turned up to the right where prickly bushes dotted its flanks. Sticky honey on sticky peanut butter on flaky tortillas. Half-melted Snickers for dessert. I was beginning to feel the stingy stomach cramps that inevitably come after almost three weeks of being powered by 100% carbs and sugar. Whereas before I’d dreamed of burgers and pizza, my number one priority in Hanmer Springs would be probiotic yogurt and vegetables.

Anne Hut was absurdly large and lay plopped randomly down in a side valley where the meadows began rolling into forests again. Etienne and Patrick burst in over three hours behind us, by then Toby and I were on the brink of walking back to look for them. We enjoyed the company of two middle aged Kiwi women and bunkered up in our own room, a rat’s nest of stinky sleeping bags and cosiness. To think that tomorrow would be our last day on this stretch – the last of Nelson Marlborough! It would be a long chunk, over 30 km. But the terrain ahead was easy, no more mountains, so we would smack two day stretches into one. Today’s 26 km had gone by in a breeze. We set our alarms for 05 and prepared for race day. Tomorrow was our home stretch, and we were ready to smash all our previous speed records. After all, we’d earned our cockiness through and through.