Hungover in Dunedin

First things first: Happy Birthday to my bro Ceej (aka C*Bob), sister Paps, mum and granddad, on the 22nd, 29th, 25th and 28th April respectively - have a great day, I love you all and presents will be forthcoming once I get back to Blighty.

Right then. Click here and have a look at the picture. See the position she's holding? Replace the slinky, leather-clad kung-fu babe with a porky Englishman with a large backpack, a woolly hat and a manic expression and you've got a pretty fair idea of what I was doing every ten minutes on Wednesday.

Allow me to explain. I started the Kepler Track on Tuesday, for once lacking such distractions as crippling hangovers, busty Swedish sexbombs, spectacularly mangled feet or a gnawing sense of guilt. Unaccompanied even by my Official Great Walks co-hiker Danny - who'd moved on to Dunedin with Jane and Jill - I was looking forward to an uneventful walk, and so it proved. For the first day, anyway.

Day two was a touch more eventful. I'm not sure exactly when one of the Chuckle Brothers became a weather forecaster, but believe me, the words on the board in Luxmore Hut the next morning - "moderate winds, rain in the evening, otherwise fine" - could only have been part of Barry's latest crazy scheme. The second I left the hut I was being buffeted by gusts strong enough to knock me off the track a couple of times. Within fifteen minutes the mist closed in, and then it started to rain. Ahead of me lay 10km of exposed alpine trail. Bugger.

After a pretty miserable hour - including one memorable moment when a particularly strong gust combined with a turn in the track to give me a splendid if not entirely welcome view of the valley beyond the ridge - I arrived at the first emergency shelter and stumbled in gratefully. After a while I was joined by another couple, and ten minutes after that pretty much everyone that had left the hut that morning was crammed in there. Happily, that included two experienced hikers who said that they'd never walked in winds like that before, which went some way to allaying my fear that I was being a complete buttercup about the whole situation and there were more rugged types out there laughing manfully at the light breeze and feeble tourists. (To be fair, I was being a buttercup - this was the Kepler Track, not Mt. Cook - but humour me, ok?)

When we finally peered out of the shelter the sun was out, but the wind, if anything, had strengthened. The next section of the track ran along the top of a ridge with sharp drops either side, and it was here that often saw me adopting the Trinity pose. It was mind-buggeringly windy up there, and a backpack catches those gusts a treat, so every time a particularly strong one threatened to tip me over the side I had to drop to the ground, one foot planted against the wind, until it passed. Strangely enough I enjoyed myself immensely, and I had a big grin on my face along the entire ridge which only vanished when the descent to Iris Burn hut began and it started to absolutely chuck it down.

The next morning I sneered at Barry Chuckle's dire warning of heavy rain - and rightly so, it was glorious sunshine all day - and stuck to my really rather stupid plan to walk all the way back to Te Anau, about 37km away, and so it was that my last multi-day tramp in New Zealand ended once again with - you guessed it - blisters.

The next night in Queenstown a bunch of us went out for a couple of quiet drinks, which somehow stretched out to six hours and included a near-fight with two Irish guys over whose turn it was on the pool table (as I argued with one of them I was sidling over to the nearest cue, figuring that I probably wouldn't have time to take off a sock and pop the white ball in it), a load more drinks with the same guys after a fiercely contested game of doubles, and a pleasant incident for the lead singer of Busted (he introduced himself as Frederick from Switzerland but I wasn't fooled, the enormous eyebrows gave him away) when a Kiwi girl walked over, sat on his lap and started kissing him. After about five minutes they strolled off to the toilets - no doubt to discuss the pros and cons of the first-past-the-post electoral system - and I, not envying the young, handsome bastard in the slightest, had his drink away, chucked his passport in the fire and sat in the corner muttering darkly to myself. I arrived in Dunedin the next day with no new friends whatsoever, having spent the entire journey at the back of the bus reeking of ale, with my earphones in and my hood pulled over my eyes.

Right - we're up to date, time for some pictures.


Mounts Cook and Tasman reflected in Lake Matheson. Big version.


Somewhere along the Routeburn. Big version.


Lake Harris from the top of Conical Hill (worth mentioning cos it was a bugger of a climb). Big version.


Cruising on Milford Sound. Big version.


Mitre Peak at Milford Sound. Big version.


A purty rainbow on the Kepler track. Big version.


More of the Kepler, with the path not looking nearly as narrow as it did when I was on the fucker. Big version.


And yet more Kepler goodness. Big version.