Kiwi Tracks (2 page)

When I return cautiously to the hut, everyone is in bed. I undress and change into a relatively clean and dry set of polypropylene underwear before climbing blindly into my upper bunk. The first snorer begins. An irritated male voice with a heavy Irish accent yells from somewhere: ‘By Jesus, will someone not stuff a finger down his throat?’ Instead, heavy rain begins to thump loudly against the corrugated tin roof, effectively drowning out the snoring.

During the night, I wake up. There is not a sliver, pinprick or muted shade of light to give any point of reference. It’s like being at the bottom of an inkwell in a dark room in the middle of the night. I place my hand in front of my face and touch my flickering eyelashes with my fingertips to make sure my eyes really are open.

I have had too many Sleepytime teas before going to bed and my bladder is bursting. I remain in the cosiness of my sleeping-bag trying to ignore my pressing dilemma. Eventually realising that I had better go out and pee, I sit up – and smack my head hard against the crossbeam supporting the roof. I fall back on the mattress and raise myself again with more caution. I search vainly for my flashlight, which I had tucked under the mattress. It is impossible to see anything without it but I cannot waste more time looking: I’m desperate. I blindly swing my body over the edge of the upper bunk and lower myself slowly overboard, reluctant as a sailor abandoning ship. Feeling with wiggling toes for the wooden frame of the lower bunk, I dangle precariously over the side. The foam mattress, on which I have a firm grip, slowly lifts off the bunk. I fall backwards, crashing into an assortment of packs, the mattress landing on top of me.

The backpacks cushion my fall, but their shoulder straps and waist belts are like a spider’s web, and disentangling from them makes me feel like an ungainly insect. I extricate myself, replace the mattress and sleeping-bag and head for the kitchen/eating
area, hobbled by tightly crossed legs. Fumbling for the exit, I knock aluminium pots and pans off the kitchen counter. Eventually locating the door, I stumble outside into pouring rain. Not daring to go too far in case I fall over the riverbank undercutting the hut, I uncross my legs and relieve myself into the void beyond the hut steps. It feels a bit like peeing under a cold shower with the lights off.

Thoroughly soaked and cold, I dodder blindly back through the obstacle course of packs, pots and pans. I grope tentatively into what I think is my sleeping-bag and provoke an irate bellow. Dropping back onto the floor, I manoeuvre my way around to another bunk. A probe with my fingertips ascertains that this sleeping-bag, if it is not my own, is at least empty. Scrambling up, I step on the elbow belonging to the occupant of the lower bunk. He curses unintelligibly, staccato Oriental-sounding words flung out at me in the dark.

Amidst the sleeping trampers is a trumpeter doing a solo act. The mother-of-all-snorers is on our trip, although no one except myself seems to have noticed. If the hut were about to fall into the river, Yoda the hut warden would have one hell of a time waking anyone up to warn us.

All our backpacks are lined with heavy, waterproof plastic bags, to keep out the moisture. They have been designed by malicious plastics engineers so that the more surreptitiously one tries to get at the innards of one’s pack, the more noise the plastic makes. If Yoda did want to alert everyone of an emergency, the most effective method would be to sneak into the hut and crinkle a backpack’s inner lining very carefully and very slowly.

Before dawn my bunkmate takes to sorting through all his belongings, diligently rearranging them in his pack. Not only does he have a big plastic liner bag, but every single item also seems to be individually wrapped in smaller plastic bags. It is impossible to sleep with my lower bunk partner doing the plastic
bag shuffle. Frustrated, I sit up and smack my head on the crossbeam again. When I recover, I see, in the first dim light of dawn, that during the night I have turned my sleeping-bag inside out.

It has been snowing in the mountains all night and it is cold. Before we set out in the morning, Yoda tells us: ‘The weather forecast is for thunder and hail. With all the snow, you’ll have to watch out for avalanches. If you hear a loud crack, something like thunder, it’s probably an avalanche; drop your packs and run and hide behind the nearest large tree.’ With the weather forecast for thunder, we will be forever dropping our packs and diving for the trees.

With a headache and a noticeably bruised forehead, I’m happy to be out of the noise and confusion of the hut and back into the tranquillity of the rainforest. I hang back at the tail end of the group again. It could not possibly get wetter: I am surprised there is enough air left in the opaque curtain of falling water for us to breathe. Water courses down the muddy path in rivulets, although the track is well maintained, with drainage ditches on either side. My feet slip and slide, my boots and trousers getting caked in mud. If it keeps bucketing down like this, I would prefer tramping with a pair of angler’s waders up to the chest. There is more rain here than in Norway, which I have just fled because of its interminable rain and darkness. It rains or snows two hundred days a year in Fiordland. Milford Sound has an annual rainfall of between seven and eight metres, and most of the precipitation is during peak tramping season. The rest of the year it’s too frozen to tramp.

A mass of heavy cloud, drizzle and layers of gossamer mist hug the lower slopes of the Clinton River valley. The air is absolutely still, not even the mist stirs. Long lines of waterfall pour magically out of vertical cliff faces. Welts and weeping sores scar the mountainsides, dramatic evidence of past avalanches and waterlogged earthslips. We do not stand a chance. After thunderous false alarms all day, we are sure to be caught out by the real thing.

I pass a boat beside the track, which despite being at least a
couple of hundred metres from the river is tied securely to a tree, like Noah’s Ark waiting for the flood. Does someone know something we don’t? If it carries on raining like this it just might be prudent to hang around the boat for a while and then row downstream.

At midday snowflakes centimetres in diameter invade like miniature parachutes falling to the ground. In the supreme silence of the forest, the Gore-Tex hood pressed against my ears becomes a sound chamber. It amplifies the fall of the heavy snow into dull thumps, which change to sharp rat-a-tat-tats as an artillery barrage of hail pelts my head. If it were remotely possible to raise the white flag and surrender to the elements, I would. Most of the day is spent focusing on my feet, the view visible from under my hood a tunnel-vision of soaked ground. The misty vapour exhaled from my lungs further reduces visibility.

Covered in wet clinging snow, I stagger towards Mintaro Hut. On the way I meet terrorists: half a dozen keas, owl-sized parrots with dark brown–green plumage and bronze-coloured underwings. Imitating me, they stumble along the snowy path, but with the swagger and confidence of professional pirates. They steal anything they can and rip it apart with their lethal, razor-sharp beaks. I leave my baseball cap unattended and within minutes it is shredded and dropped atop a boulder, as if as a kea warning. Another kea attacks my backpack and boots in the short time I enter the hut to find a bunk. Someone else’s leather boot, torn apart and unusable, lies abandoned. The tramper must have hopped one-legged over the pass without it. I retrieve my pack and boots before too much damage has been done.

In our group of trampers there are thirty-seven foreigners and three New Zealanders. I approach two of the Kiwis, middle-aged women from Invercargill, and join them in their conversation. They talk about what kind of cars their husbands drive, until I redirect the subject to the Maori legends regarding the origin of rain and mist.

‘What Maorri legend might that be?’ one asks, rolling her r’s like a Scot.

‘You know, the one about the creation of the earth and the sky.’ They look at me blankly. Having just read about it in my guidebook, the names are still clear in my mind. I explain, paraphrasing the text I have read: ‘According to Maori legend, there was nothing, not even light, in the beginning. The sky-father, Rangi, lived with the earth-mother, Papa, in total darkness. Their many children – god-of-the-sea, god-of-the-forest, god-of-cultivated food, god-of-wild-plants – didn’t want to live in the darkness. They decided to separate their parents, who were preventing light from coming into their world.’ The two Kiwi women regard me with the vacant looks of the slightly bewildered. I feel like an authority on the matter compared to my audience. ‘All the god-children tried unsuccessfully until the god-of-the-forest succeeded in forcing the parents apart, and light entered their world. The two parents were very sad they had become separated. Rangi cried so much that much of the land became the sea. Even now, every morning, dew can be seen on the back of Papa, evidence of Rangi’s grief. The mist that forms in the mornings in the valleys and rises towards the heavens is Papa’s sigh of longing for her husband.’

I like the story, find it touching. Walking in the steep-sided valley of the Clinton River, it is an entirely plausible rationalisation, certainly as coherent as a Christian God creating the world in seven days.

‘Ah, don’t believe all that Maorri stuff. Load of rrubbish. That’s just made up for the tourrists.’

The other Kiwi woman looks sideways at me and says quickly to her friend: ‘Ah, I don’t know about that.’ She changes the topic of conversation to the tourist features of Invercargill.

I vaguely see what looks like a parrotfish staring through the steamed-up window as if it were an aquarium. It’s a kea hanging upside down, peering into the room, trying no doubt to get out of the cold and into the mass of belongings inside. Behind the kea the snow falls, flakes so large I can see each one distinctly as it descends through the branches of the trees. The kea gives up trying to break in through the window and takes to rolling a stone on the roof, repeatedly fetching it from the gutter and carrying it in
its beak to the top to let it tumble noisily down the corrugated tin roof. Since the kea cannot get in, it is vengefully determined to drive us all mad.

The hut is abuzz with excited conversation as trampers talk about the next day and whether we will make it over the pass. Ralph, the third Kiwi in our group, is a mechanic from Kerikeri. He is tall, well-built and good-looking, and has carried several beers up here. He generously offers to share them with me.

‘Where’re you from?’ he asks.

‘Canada,’ I reply, not telling the entire truth to keep it simple.

‘Cool.’ He says cool with a hard ‘kuh’ so it sounds more like ‘kuh-ool’. He must be in his early forties; Mandy, his English girlfriend, is half his age. He finds it easier to bond with me than she does, alternately telling lewd jokes or describing his work as a mechanic at an organic orchard. That was where he met Mandy, a nurse, when she was working there as a fruit picker. ‘Told my wife I was going to leave her as soon as the kids were old enough to leave home. She never believed me.’ He nudges me conspiratorially with his elbow and indicates a group of Aussies sitting huddled together. ‘Know why Aussie women wear makeup and perfume?’

‘No,’ I answer innocently. Mandy grimaces, apparently having heard this one before.

‘Because they’re ugly and smell bad,’ he laughs, as if getting even with the Aussies for their comments about Kiwi chicks. Not sure I get the joke, Ralph adds, ‘Know why Aussie blokes don’t wear makeup or perfume?’ I shake my head. ‘Because they’re ugly and smell bad but don’t know it.’

He has the habit of telling a joke and then laughing at it himself, wagging his chin up and down as if he were trying to rub the chalk marks off a blackboard with his jaw. Over the next hours he imparts his detailed knowledge about what is the best ‘new-in-New Zealand’ used Japanese car to bring into the country and sell. He has imported one hundred used cars from Japan, purchasing them through a friend who works for Air New Zealand. Why am I so vulnerable to long drawn-out monologues on subjects I’d rather not know about?

When I go outside alone that evening to get some personal space, I try saying ‘cool’ with a hard ‘kuh’. There’s a different way of pronouncing ‘cool’ nowadays: it’s definitely more like kuh-ool than cool. When I say ‘cool’, I sound like an ageing hippie in a drug-induced haze, rather than someone who is really cool, hip and young. I practise and the insulating blanket of snow, which smothers everything with its pale softness, absorbs the sound of my repeated ‘cools’.