Wednesday 20 February 2013

Nelson Lakes

I'm not too sure why but since abandoning the tablet and putting pen to paper all of a sudden my blog posts have become more thought out, descriptive and enjoyable to write. I'm currently sat on a grassy mound at the shore of Blue Lake in Nelson Lakes National Park and the scenery around me is nothing short of truly magnificent.

Since arriving into the South Island the hiking has just got better and better. The 4 day Queen Charlotte Track scored a 6/10. After tasting the rigours and adventurous side of hiking it was a little tame to be honest but great warm up after completing the North Island and taking 3 days off in Wellington. Next we moved onto the Richmond Range, an 8 day epic that was rugged, tough and hard work but the alpine views and surprisingly consistent weather made it a 9/10 but since entering the Nelson Lakes it's been demoted to a 8/10 making Nelson Lakes 9.5/10! It would only be better if there was a skimpily clad bar women in each hut at the end of the day serving ice cold beer.

Yesterday, when climbing up the Travers river the sentence that came out of my mouth when approaching Upper Travers hut for a lunch stop was "...wow, I think that this is the closest place to paradise I've ever seen..." Insanely beautiful and picturesque. The hut lay on a plateau at the foot of a steep mountain ridge that seemed to cocoon and dwarf the hut. Snaking its way along the flat plateau was a crystal clear river with slight and occasional rapids and all around us was knee high grass and tussock, green, brown and yellow in colour with wild flowers in abundance. With the cloudless blue sky and the full strength of the midday sun the colours intensified.

Today we have decided on a short day as we have enough food until or next resupply and Blue Lake is outstanding - what's the rush! It has been crowned the purest water in the world with visibility up to 80m and is sacred to the Maori. Sitting here, drinking from the lake, washing adjacent to it and being drawn to sit at the source for a few hours I can appreciate why.

After Blue Lake we pushed on to Boyle Village then hitched to Hanmer Springs to resupply before embarking on the next 5-7 day mission up and over Harper Pass to Arthurs Pass. The Nelson Lakes was a complete Te Araroa highlight for me and the South Island is just amazing! We are now over 2000km into the journey and have less than 1000km to go so are two-thirds of the way through already! Happy days!

Bye for now....

Phil and Em x

1 comment:

  1. Sounds amazing!! Keep walking you guys!!

    Dezzie

    ReplyDelete