Zero day in Wanaka

Blissful rest day! It always feels odd writing out a zero day blog, they feel a bit like fillers since you’re not actually hiking. But Wanaka had plenty of sights to see. Specifically, the borderline emotional view of an extra-large burrito, the queues at New World food store, the sight of my TWO resupply boxes including the one which hadn’t been delivered to St Arnaud. I was now overloaded with food I had long tired of. One Square Meal bars, little chocolates I’d eaten a thousand times, honeycomb-flavoured coffee. All I craved was hot food and vegetables.

We walked from place to place, eating until we could barely move. Wellness bowls, ice cream, ingested on the glittering white beach sands among the willows. I joined the boys in their hostel and said goodbye to my backpacker crowd. A map of New Zealand hung across the dark wood panels in our 1960s room. I walked my index and middle fingers down all the way from Ship Cove to where we currently were in Wanaka. Dang. It was so far. On the map, the distance was unimaginable. In my head, it was coded into a hundred thousand separate memories from the past 46 days. A month and a half. Somehow containing 100x more life than the everyday. We are hardwired to store experiences of novelty and awe in different ways than the potato-peeling activities that fill our regular days. It’s life in HD, brighter and shaper and shimmering with specialness.

The evening brought a moderate panic. I’d treated myself to a sports massage, during which a kind older woman shoved her elbow into my butt muscles until Breast Hill, Mount Rintoul, Travers Saddle, and Waiau Pass fell out. I thought I’d feel all loosey goosey, but instead the massage unleashed a flood wave of lymph that had been contained in my muscles for 900 km. My legs swelled up until I thought the skin would burst. Not the dream start to a stretch that would challenge us in ways we couldn’t yet imagine.