We chartered a small eight-seater to fly us into oban, a task mos hilariously completed. For less than the cost of the ferry from Bluff to Oban, and one-third the time, we flew straighaway from Invercargill into the lovely patch of road that is Oban.
Seriously, this entire island has, perhaps thirteen kilometres of road. People here own more cars per capita than on the mainland! If that isn't ridiculous enough, there are two car rental companies in this town of four-hundred! We saw literally three tourists driving two little peugot cars around for half a day. The other guy who rented a car was a contractor who was installing some surveillance equipment at the far end of the road. I kid you not, only our-hundred people live on the entire island, in one tiny little corner of it, and they live like this. It's great! We had many jokes at the locals' expense.
As we flew in, I thought of the joke about the Ukranian pilot who had to land on a short runway. We practically aimed for the side of the cliff coming in, and touched down a few feet after the start of this patchy, rough excuse for a runway. It was rougher looking than many of the neglected backroads of country between my hometown of Forestburg and that of the neighboring town, Strome. We had just enough runway to make a very short stop with full brakepower.
Now, try to get some petrol in this town on a friday? Good luck. We asked our pilot if he knew when and where to get some gas for our camping stove, and he rubbed his neck, saying (at two in the afternoon), "gee, the servo just closed up for the day". He turned around as a lady walked past and said "oh, hey, Jane, what are the chances you could let these fellas buy some petrol for their stoves?" With that, she, in her rubber boots (everyone here wears rubber boots), whisked us away to her gas bar, and let us fill up the entire one-litre of my stove tank. I thanked her, and gave her a dollar. I love small towns. Anyhow, we 'hitchiked' to the trailhead after filling our intention forms, which really meant that a local fisherman let us hop in the back of his ute (utility-truck/truck for us Canadians), and drove us the entire two minutes to horseshoe bay. With our nalgenes clutched hopefully in our hands, we set off on our soon-to-be-masochistic journey.
I will spare you the gory details, but the Rakiura track was misleading. The great walk section was pretty well-defined and reasonably muddy (more so than most other tracks in NZ), but nothing could prepare us for going past the Port William hut onto the north-circuit section. This is craziness for anyone who thinks they can hike fast even in poor conditions. It was much muddier than my experience on the Hollyford, and the time we spent hopping side to side made the first day fairly slow. Not to complain, but this track actually lived up to it's reputation as being a 'slog'. We met the Irish couple from Te Anau that night at Bungaree, and many stories were shared. The Bungaree hut seemed to have been taken over by a penguin researcher, and so we had milk and cereal for breakfast - a luxury I have not had much on this trip. Again, on day two, we slogged it to Christmas Village, meeting our Kiwi friend, Big Kev Wells. This bloke was keen to do the whole north circuit, and had about eighty pounds of baggage to do it with. Well prepared.
If day one was bit tough, and day two was a bit of a beat-down, the horribly defined trail of Mount Anglem on day three was the shites. Having been beaten a bit by the Fiordland hikes, and feeling weary from Jardine's "white-flour energy blues" I felt like giving up at points. Those points would include when I nearly broke my leg by lodging it in a slippery granite crevice and trying to move forward with regular stride, and when I came across a thicket of dead bush which looked like the path of least resistance, where on any other hike, would be a clear no-go indication. After overcoming the fact that I would be wading uphill through a stream the rest of the way, I got my second third fourth wind, and continued with apathy to the peak. At this point, we dressed in our warmest gear as it was snowing, howling, and cold. I was actually reminded of Christmas and winter, and what I was missing in Alberta at that point. I even stumbled across a beautiful moss-ish kind of tundra vegetation with red and green foliage. The peak was fairly spectacular, and it was quite funny to look down from the snow, wind, and biting cold at our little beach, where it was above thirty and sunny.
After a slow, hasty retreat where I gave into the mud, and simply waded knee-deep the rest of the way, we met with Big Kev, only to find him bashing some poor marine life into food for the evening. He called it paua, and showed us how to harvest a few each for dinner. The paua is much like the limpet in that it sucks down hard onto it's rock when one tries to move it. The size we were eating were about six inches wide, and the meat was like a tough scallop. He showed us how to clean the meat, and bash it with rock to tenderize the muscle. We sliced 'em thin like mushrooms, fried them in butter, and ate like kings. (Apparently these beauties sell for around eighty bucks apeice, and we ate perhaps three each - quite the meal for being in the middle of nowhere!) I tell you, I have not had better seafood in my life!
We made our regress on day four, hiking leisurely back to bungaree, feeling like we were veterans after the Anglem hike. Without imposed times or expectations, the mucky trail became our friend, and we were much more wary and able to read it's mud-style. We even invented names for the mud like the inuit name different types of snow.
More thumbnails ...
2 votes 
