New Zealand
By Rachel S. Thurston
Lest we forget we’re in this together.
Why my 62-year old mum and I choose to shoulder 40-pound backpacks across mountains in bad weather, slather ourselves with bug spray, subsist for days on dehydrated pasta, and sleep in bunkhouses with snoring, equally smelly strangers baffles me. It’s rare in our many years of travel to come across other mother/daughter duos, let alone women my mother’s age attempting to trek where we do. There’s probably a good reason for this. We suffer from what I refer to as “trekking amnesia,” in which a year passes by and memories of our agony are replaced with blissful nostalgia.
We’ve crossed the world’s highest pass in midwinter only to have our lunch frozen solid in our chest pockets by noon, battled hypoxia and acute mountain sickness with copious loads of garlic and Diamox, and we’ve trekked the rice fields of Vietnam during the beginning of monsoon season, yet it’s these equally miserable and memorable experiences that keep us booking tickets again and again.
Last year we set out to do the Routeburn Track, one of the Great Walks of New Zealand in an area that we learned receives more than 200 inches of rain a year. We stop in for our permits, a park ranger informs us that a late-spring storm is coming through for the length of our trek. I look over at my mother, hoping that she’ll be the one to say, “Let’s just scrap this whole trekking thing and stay in town and eat chocolate.” But she doesn’t, and my competitive spirit maintains its silence.
The landscape is jaw-dropping and gorgeous. We hike along wide river valleys and magnificent fields of grass, beneath waterfalls spilling off Yosemite-like granite faces, and through forests dripping with emerald moss. We cross our fingers that the weather holds, but luck is not with us. I wake on the first night to a screaming wind rattling our hut’s roof and sheets of rain pelting our windows.
Trekking in the rain, by the way, sucks. And that’s mostly what we do from day 2 onward. Dressed in thick layers of long underwear, Gore-Tex, under giant black trash bags that make us look like fat, wet beetles, we scramble up steep paths that have been transformed into small creeks, and we frequently catch ourselves to prevent twisting an ankle or stumbling off sheer drop-offs. When we’re too exhausted to keep marching, we pretend to be characters from Lord of the Rings and duel each other with our walking-stick “swords.”
We both have our own low points during those four wet days. Hers is when we encounter a group of sprightly octogenarians, 20 years her senior, moving across the slippery rocks with ease, grace, and humor. My own personal low point is discovering that every other trekker my age has made it into camp before us and appears to be cheery, well rested, and looking fashionable. And I hate them for it.
We hobble into our final night’s camp like landmine victims, once again humbled (some might say defeated) by the wear and tear of our four day trek through pouring rain with heavy packs. Our bodies and our egos diminished, my mother officially swears to me that she’ll never do a trek again without heavy meds, a lobotomy, or several pack-mules.
A week later when our sandfly bites have healed and the novelties of hot showers and clean clothes have worn off, we begin to feel restless. When we’ve had our fill of meat pies and markets, Mom buys a book regaling Hannibal’s treacherous journey across the Alps, leading the Carthaginian army and 40 elephants against the Romans. She reads a passage to me about the sheer misery of it all.
We look at each other with devilish grins, thinking that same familiar thought: How bad could it be?
Five Signs “You’re Not in Kansas Anymore” In New Zealand:
1. Bitumen (pronounced “bitch-a-men”) means a sealed road, pasties are something you eat not wear, chips are fries, crisps are chips, and kiwi is either a fruit, a bird, a person, or a combination of the above.
2. You don’t have to tip anyone, and you still get great service.
3. You can drink the tap water without regretting it later.
4. More than six cars in a roundabout is considered a traffic jam.
5. A 3,000-foot mountain pass is called a “hill.”
Rachel S. Thurston is a writer, photographer, and outdoor guide who seeks out travel to countries with a good exchange rate and which tend to have awful weather for most of the year. Her website is www.rsthurston.com.
