Hanmer Springs

Our two zero days were utter bliss. Two days off + the half day on the day we arrived was, admittedly, a little overboard. We weren’t that tired. But we had hiked faster than we’d anticipated, and our future bookings at resupply locations would all have to be changed if we kept up the speed. Also, New Year’s Eve should be spent in town if possible, some bubbles and civilisation are required! Hanmer Springs was bustling with tourists, our accomodation was really pricey due to the influx of people gathering in town for NY celebrations. We raided the Four Square supermarket on arrival, I cannot possibly describe the bliss of eating vanilla yoghurt topped with blackberries and fresh peaches after three weeks of stale energy bars.

So what did we do in Hanmer? We ate. And ate more. Of course hikers will eat a lot during their town stays - finally you have access to everything you crave without having to carry and ration it for a week. However, the amounts we ate we just… preposterous. We’d snack all day, then have lunch and dinner out too. I felt 5 kgs heavier each day, after having gotten pretty skinny in the Richmonds. I just couldn’t stop. The compulsion to binge until my stomach lining screamed was like an irrepressible instinct, regardless of the fact that we’d had plenty of food in Nelson Lakes. I like to think of Hanmer as the end of my toned hiking self and the start of my chunky hiking self.

We spent hours chilling in the hot springs for which Hanmer is famous. Clear water filled the not-so-great-smelling stone pools, green vegetation made it feel like we were in an expensive resort. I didn’t have any swimwear and had to purchase a bathing suit… that was so expensive I felt like I couldn’t get rid of it - and ended up carrying it all the way to Bluff! Still have it.

I wrote out the missing pieces of my journal inbetween fixing our resupply for the next stretch and mending my torn-up boots with dental floss. The Let’s Trek It blogs couldn’t possibly have been written in such detail as they are without me keeping a daily journal. The highlights are easy to remember, but it is the moods I want to capture. Thoughts, feelings, intentions - not just the landscape. These flashes of meaning would inevitably get lost over time, but writing a journal entry every day preserves them and allows me to share my journeys in vivid detail. All the daily blogs you read here stand almost in their entirety as they were written during my days on the trail, titles included. Coming up with the daily titles is one of the most fun parts of writing, the cultured of you will recognise many from songs, poems, books and art.

The reason why this entry is titled “The End of an Era” is because our group as it had been since day 1 on the Queen Charlotte Track would end here. Etienne was leaving. The Te Araroa was Patrick’s dream and project, he would go all the way to the sea. But Etienne had to go home to begin his military service before he went off to medical school. He planned on enjoying New Zealand from the comfort of a bus with KiwiTours for a couple of weeks, ticking off boxes like Lake Tekapo and Queenstown - still hundereds of kilometres away for us on foot. We would miss him a lot. I felt sorry for Patrick who was now essentially on his own. Even though the four of us always spent the nights together in camp, Toby and I would usually hike out together because our speeds matched more, while Patrick and Etienne would form the second pair. Hiking alone can feel liberating and has much greater potential for introspection, but the team feeling we had cultivated was so jolly, we were united in mission and spirit. Saying goodbye to Etienne was hard, and put a real dampener on the festive spirits going into 2018. Not much fireworks going on in a mountain town either. We gave one another one last hug before crawling into bed, ready for our next regional section: Canterbury.