raffael

This posting is dedicated to the Queen (aka Sunny-Bunny) who motivated me to write about my experience in New Zealand.

Last Thursday a group of four started a tramping trip. It was planned to do the Routeburn Track. But there were avalanche warnings, so we didn’t exactly know if we could do the Routeburn. Our backup plan was either the Kepler Track or the Greenstone and Caples Track. So the four of us got up really early and drove the six hours to Queenstown. At the DOC office they told us that the Routeburn and Kepler were closed. Oh well, this meant that we had to hurry: Grab some lunch and find a way to the start of the track. Our choice was fast food and a transportation from Glenorchy. After some invasion of private driveways we found the transportation guy. After repacking our stuff, the first surprise: Instead of taking a car around lake Wakatipu for 40-60min, we had the pleasure of a 10min jet boat ride. This was handy, because we made up some time and started tramping around 3pm. On our first day we had a relatively easy hike and good weather. After 2-3h we had a break at Mid Caples Hut. There we met the first people on the track. One guy resting in his tent (sand fly protection) and the hut warden. He collected our hut tickets (we carried a tent, in case the huts were full or didn’t make it to a hut at night). Then we carried on to Upper Caples Hut, which took us another 1,5-2,5h. We had to cross some small streams, but wet feet are normal people say^^

Day 2: Friday
Upper Caples Hut -> McKellar Hut (5-8h)

Day 3: Saturday
McKellar Hut -> Greenstone Hut (4,5-6,5h)

Day 4: Sunday
Greenstone Hut -> Carpark (3-5h)
This day was special. Well, the night was short — that was not special! But we had a tint little bit of rain — That’s supposed to be normal, well normal is one day of rain — we didn’t need our jackets once… But once we were done with tramping, the real fun began:
First we had to wait two hours for our pick up and then we could _not_ take the jet boat back to our car!! Things could only go wrong from this point…
Well, we were happy to be back at our car and the plan was to eat a burger in Queenstown, but first we had to get gas… somewhere in Queenstown was a gas station, somewhere. We made it to Queenstown and after a while we found the gas station — on the other end of the town. We also checked the tires, we checked the oil already on the start of our tour… so back to the town center… 500m and steam started to come through the heating system, the engine was over heated, there was hardly any coolant left — cool! Since I had a similar problem on my way to the west coast earlier this year, I had no problems refilling the engine coolant with all water we had left… but it wasn’t enough. So two of us walked back to the gas station to get more water (I stayed with M. at the car). Done that, we kept going to the town center to get our Burgers! We didn’t care too much about the water dripping from the glove compartment into the passenger section… — The Burgers were great! — Now back to Christchurch.
There was not no more water dripping into the passenger section, at least not as much… all good? No way! Half way out of town the engine over heated again! F*CK! So we had to stay in QTown over night?! We managed to pull over in front of a Hotel. We wondered if they could help us… The lounge was packed with Asian tourists… I steped to the counter and the women on the counter called a mechanic for us. Too bad that he was in Christchurch at the moment. No luck on a Sunday… we could leave the car at his garage and his mechanics could take a look at it tomorrow. He told us that we probably blew something. When L. was about to call another mechanic, I received a call on my cellphone… it was MR.~X! No kidding, it was the nice guy I was in touch with through couchsurfing.com (if we’d done the Routeburn track, we would have needed accommodation for one night). Well he asked where we are and that we would have a pleasant surprise in 5min… Now I also read his txt-reply (I wrote him a message earlier, when we were stuck the first time): He was a AA-Mechanic/Tow-er! WOW. So we had a free towing service, accommodation and meditation the next morning! It was unbelievable!

I can just ask everyone to sign up with hospitality-exchange networks: bewelcome.org, couchsurfing.com, hospitalityclub.org

We had a great evening, including German Sauerkraut cooked by three German Girls!

Day X: Monday

I think we all had a pleasant night, no snoring grandfathers getting up at 5am! We got up at 7am for meditation — not kidding. It was an interesting and good experience. We picked up the car(s) and had breakfast. One of our fellows missed out on that and left early by bus. We had a nice 6h drive back to Christchurch — flat Christchurch.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 05:48 and is filed under en route. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.