Our tramping adventure

Since my last post we've done some tramping. We headed up to remote Kinloch, just across Lake Wakatipu from Glenorchy and a great place to do some serious relaxing. We had just a day before our trek over the mountains on the quite famous Caples Track. This was a nice track; not ultra-scenic but fun, what with us meeting some drunk and incompetent deer hunters along the way. (That's taking it a bit far, but I'll call it poetic licence).

We then hitched down to Milford Sound, through Homer Tunnel, which is a great big tunnel going through an even greater bigger mountain.



Emma and Matt took a boat tour of the sound (I've already done one), and then we relaxed in the pub for the night. Matt and I got a beer tower, much to the envy of everyone else in the pub. The next day we hitched back to the tramping track, and took the Routeburn track back to Kinloch. The Routeburn is a very famous NZ walk, rightly so because it contains gorgeous scenery.









Once back in Kinloch we had a rest day and prepared ourselves mentally for our next prepared tramp: the Rees-Dart. This was quite hard to do, being as it was raining incessantly outside, and when the weather does that it feels quite hard to get motivated to go on a long walk, with the prospect of deep river crossings and snow covered passes upon us. In the end, we decided against doing this tramp on the advice of the owner at Kinloch, who said the rivers would probably have become impassable having had the huge influx of rain over the previous two days.



Instead of tramping, we hitched a lift back to Queenstown where we are now. We're planning to do the Kepler Track out of Te Anau, starting tomorrow. In other news, I've got someone to look at buying my bike in about an hour so wish me luck with getting rid of it!