It was time to check out of hell.

None of the other campers were headed back to Warkworth, so I asked the female owner once again about the taxi. It came to 40 euros, she guessed. She still recommended hitching.

There was now a tremendous hill involved this situation, one we hadn’t had to deal with on the way in. We’d have to get over it before even raising a thumb.

As I walked back to Antje, I thought, “If she agrees to hitch-hike, then she can use the saved taxi-money on clothes.”

Before I could suggest that, though, Antje agreed to hitch-hike, with one contingency. “Only if I can spend the money on clothes.”

That was a win-win.

What was a lose-lose was huffing up a very big hill with all our stuff, walking alongside to a road for another mile (1.6k), and getting sunburned – with nothing to cool us down but whooshing cars. It was our last full day in New Zealand.

Leigh came into view, and we agreed to call a taxi there. It was the worst of all possible outcomes. Just before Leigh, though, a Toyota 4Runner pulled over. A woman swung the door open, smiled, and said, “Sorry if I don’t talk much. I’m hungover.”

It turned out she’d been one of the revelers at our campground’s campfire the night before. She felt like crap, but she had to get out early, since she and her (French) husband had to cater a friend’s wedding that evening.

About halfway through we went around a roundabout that, one day a week, serves as the focal point for a farmer’s market. The entire roundabout was swarming with bees, so thick they darkened the air. Parents were shielding their children, and all in all, it looked like a scary movie. Distracted by the bees, Marie almost hit someone.

She’d done her share of hitch-hiking, Marie, and was happy to see us doing it. “It’s too bad, it was kind of a tradition, you know? Kiwis like it when they see tourists getting in on it.”

Still, we were happy for our bus seats on a scheduled bus. As we headed into Auckland, I checked the map. More bad news. Our hostel was a mile away from the bus stop, and that was no longer tenable.

We buckled (in) and took a cab.

The hostel, called “Verandahs,” was the most beautiful we stayed in. Continually running through my mind was a variation on, “We don’t deserve this for this price.” It was white and victorian, with all sorts of carved wood furnishings and trims, new carpet, fresh paint, stained glass windows, everything perfect. Behind it was a park and the cityscape, and, looking out on it all, a large verandah.

Dinner was at “The Brewery”, where we ate on our first, horribly jetlagged night in New Zealand. The funny thing was, they were now brewing their own beer (they’d been too new when we first visited) and the beer wasn’t as good. Or maybe we’d changed: “You cannot drink the same beer twice.” Either way, oh well.

The next morning we ate breakfast at a hundred-year-old brick fire department converted to a café. The food was delicious, the servers young and caffeinated, the owner Vietnamese and very friendly, and we enjoyed, for now, the last of our beloved Flat Whites.

The bus picked us up near the top of a hill, drove thirty more feet (10m), and stopped at a light on the corner.

Walking toward the bus, or rather strutting, was… I don’t know. He/she was Maori, possibly drunk, and was either a transvestite or transgender or a very masculine women in a pink top. As he/she got closer to the bus, the strut became a full-blown comic exaggeration of a runway walk; showgirl knew how to work a crowd.

The entire left side of the bus was now watching, partly out of boredom, and as the bus rolled back and went into gear, showgirl stopped, yanked out a breast, aimed it at the bus, and started shaking it like a squirt gun, grinning at our faces with both sets of teeth.

And you know what? That’s the kind of farewell I’ve always wanted.

So goodbye, New Zealand! We’ll miss you. You were just voted “Friendliest Country on Earth”, and we agree.

Back when some plans were in the process of bursting (thanks again Airjet!), I called a campground in Leigh. This was the day after the Milford Track, and we’d spent most of that day – up ’til 4PM – getting to a point, plan-wise, where I could even make this call. And… success! The two-night reservation was arranged, all pertinent questions about the facilities were answered, and only at the end did I enquire about local buses from our stop in nearby Warkworth.

“There aren’t any,” the woman sighed. “So you can either take a taxi, or hitch-hike. A taxi’s pretty expensive, so most people hitch-hike. It’s really easy, you won’t have any problems.”

Hitching a ride is far more common in New Zealand than it is in the US or Germany, and among those hitch-hikers there were a few couples like us, smiling hopefully from the road’s shoulder. Kiwis themselves encouraged the behavior far more than they discouraged it, just like this woman in Leigh.

I’d been standing at an intersection with a sign that read “Leigh?” for ten minutes when an elderly woman walked over.

“You’ll have a much better chance if you go up the road a bit,” she pointed. She had a very specific location in mind, one that virtually guaranteed success, she was sure of it, one where everyone HAD to be going to Leigh. But when it came time to tell us how to get there, the directions included a lot of ‘stay to the lefts’ and ‘stay to the rights’, a few hand gestures, some squinting of the eyes, and a particular tree we “couldn’t miss.” Well, we never found that tree, but we did squint a lot, and, with the help of a map, find the spot!

Five minutes later a beat-up hatchback pulled over, two guys in the front seat. “Just need a second,” the passenger said, cleaning up for us. “Got some eggs back here.”

The driver had pink hair and asked our names.

“I’m Antje.”

“Conor.”

The guys nodded.

“Jessie.”

“Jackson.”

I’ll never forget those names, but it also wasn’t the right time to explain what they meant in combination to an American.

Jessie, the pink-haired guy, laughed when he found out Antje was German. “My daughter’s German.” The mother was from Münster, and he was visiting them that day at a camp-site close to Leigh. Jackson told us stories about the recent oil clean up, and how he’d hitch-hiked all through Europe with a Chicagoan. Both had hitch-hiked in the past, and were happy to return the favor. We got along well, and could’ve spent more than 20 minutes together, but at that point we’d reached our campgrounds.

It was a dump.

Not only was it a dump, but the price of our “cabin” was a touch too high for the plywood it contained.

Well, that’s OK. Two chairs were on the porch, and the view of the ocean was pretty nice, even though the wind made things… cold. Hm. Hopefully the roof didn’t rip off. Bathroom break – but the door to the bathroom was broken, the soap dispenser was broken, the hot water tap was broken, the men’s urinal was broken. Later I’d find that the shower was sort of broken. In the kitchen, the wall-mounted boiler was broken, one of the toasters was broken. On the plus side, there were heaps and heaps of dishware and silverware for general use, save for those unnecessary items called “spoons”, “knives”, and “bowls”. (To be fair, the second kitchen did have a functional water boiler, which I used to sterilize our encrusted silverware.) And where were the trashcans if they weren’t inside the kitchen or outside the kitchen?

We’d come to this campground because it was THE access point for the Goat Island Marine Reserve, a snorkeler’s paradise. With the wind blowing that seemed unlikely, and a talk with the owner, who rented out the snorkel gear, confirmed it. “I wouldn’t even rent it to you. It’s too murky. You’d just come back in ten minutes and ask for your money back.”

Well that was honest and disappointing, let’s get some food!

Technically we weren’t in Leigh, but just outside of it, and we had to get to town to buy our groceries. Funnily enough, that turned out to be almost 2 miles (2.9k) on a roadside shoulder that didn’t exist. Also funny were the General Store’s monopoly prices and lack of, er, foodstuffs.

So this is what we’d hitch-hiked for.

This place wasn’t in need of renovation, it was was just plain rotten, rotten to all hell, and it depressed us. The kitchen felt like college, and the children, having made so many new friends and come up with so many new games in such an awesome place in such a short time, were, for all intents and purposes, on natural methamphetamines, which was fine until they found the piano.

It was time to hunker down.

In Queenstown we drank too much coffee, ate too much food, had one beer too many. It was perfect.

Our flight took off at 2PM, heading north to Auckland. Down below, a lake drifted by with an island in the middle. Lake Wanaka!

“Lake Wana-naka,
we hold you in our heart!
And when we think about you,
It makes us wanna ________!”*

That’s where we’d kayaked and spent New Year’s with Robbie and Rebecca, and watched a catamaraner lose his money; next the captain announced that Mt. Cook was on the right-hand side, and sure enough, there was the mountain we’d watched turn orange with a bottle of wine in Twizel; behind Mt. Cook was Lake Tekapo, with the Mt. John Observatory somewhere on top. Maybe we could see Christchurch…?

The reminiscing was interrupted by the worst turbulence I can remember, and the kind Antje, who hates flying, will hopefully soon forget. The airplane was small, much too small – the dreaded Boeing 666!? – and the wings kept flapping with each and every elevator drop. No one was injured, but it was bad enough that I remember thinking, “I should’ve emailed my parents that we were on this flight.” Then we broke through the clouds, and all the shaking was over in an instant. To calm Antje, I ordered her a 4-euro airplane Heineken, and my 9-year-old seat neighbor found this entire transaction very fascinating, start-to-finish.

This flight, with New Zealand’s low-cost “Jetstar”, was the only flight that day, and had originally been scheduled for 10AM. They’d sent an email a while back explaining that it’d been changed to 2PM, and that it was totally, totally OK if we wanted to cancel our flight, no questions asked, everything refunded IN FULL, seriously no problem.

Um, that doesn’t help.

People usually book a flight first. After that they lock in accommodation and transportation, and after that, excursions. The delayed flight meant a missed bus, the last of the day, and the first domino in a series that resulted in a missed dive-trip.

Everything was refundable, but the dive was one of the world’s ten best, and Jacques Cousteau’s personal favorite.

So with regard this “We changed your flight time” phenomenon that seems to be happening more, rather than less, here’s two votes for seeing that go away, immediately, through legislation, in the next congressional session. Otherwise, where are we headed?

“Dear Passenger,

Your flight has been moved to yesterday.

Where were you?

Best,
Low-cost carrier”

So, instead of diving, we got an extra night in Auckland. And, for the first time on this trip – and almost ever, for us – we stayed in a real HOTEL.

We’d almost forgotten about this world, with its piles of white towels and little refrigerators with cold candy bars and room service and a pool with an exercise room and a sauna and a cocktail bar and a helpful concierge next to the business center.

Checkout time was 11AM, an hour later than the hostels.

And 11AM is when we checked out.

* Modified Nickelodeon theme song. The missing word begins with ‘f’

His side-sleeping helped, leaving the room quiet and pleasant, save for some lingering smelliness. We’d been warned about stinky boots and sweaty clothes, as well, but given the proximity of the rivers on the trip, it really wasn’t a problem.

Just about everyone (save for the Israelis) was awake for breakfast, a breakfast which saw Antje andI more or less run out of food. We had an apple left, two fingers’ worth of peanut butter, and a couple mini Snickers for the next 12 miles (20km).

Regarding those 12 miles, the reason we’d been encouraged to “take our time” and “take it slow” was, counterintuitively, because of a time constraint. Most of the group had to catch a 2PM ferry, the rest a ferry at 3. Doing 12 miles before 2 (or even 3) is pretty tight, and most trekkers, according to the ranger, put their heads down and stomp their way through, seeing nothing. A shame, really, but that certainly wouldn’t be our problem.

With the combination of another weird night’s sleep and the tape job of a helpful trekker, Antje’s left leg had gone from marginally flexible to something like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. [note: the tape was intended to make things less flexible, so really, it helped.] Still, going down anything resembling stairs took three times as long as normal, and 800mg of ibuprofen did nothing.

So, having loaded Antje’s pack into mine, we indeed took it slowly. Before the first mile marker, the Germans overtook us. Between the first and the second, the Koreans overtook us, followed by Biologist and friends. I asked Antje when we’d left that morning. “6:45,” she said. Green Day overtook us, the Bushwalkers overtook us, and when mile-marker two came up, we checked the time. 9:00. I did a quick round of calculations, and it had us arriving at the dock… at… oh… about 8PM. “Um, Antje?”

I really meant it when I said I didn’t care if we didn’t make it. The rangers had made it pretty clear that, no matter the circumstances, no one was going to get left behind on the Milford Track. This wasn’t a “42 go in and 38 come out” sort of scenario. That’d be bad PR. So everyone comes out of the Milford Track, and that was final. If we were late, I argued, we’d figure the rest out when we got there, and if it came down to it, we’d call in a helicopter.

Antje was having none of it. To miss the 2:00 boat meant missing a bus that we’d paid for, and a room in Queenstow, also paid for. I tried to explain the irrelevance of all that, but she wouldn’t have that, either.

Instead she leaned on her stick like a pole vault and narrowed her eyes. The next mile went by in 35 minutes, and the next in 40. Antje was dripping sweat, and luckily we’d reached an obligatory stopping point, Mackay Falls.

An aside: As the story goes, two men, whose surnames were Mackay and Sutherland, had taken this same route from the other direction. Coming upon this waterfall, the most beautiful waterfall either had seen, they, being males, naturally wanted their surname attached to it. A coin was flipped. Mackay won. A short while later they reached the 5th-highest waterfall in the world – the one we’d seen the day before – now called “Sutherland Falls.”

While I climbed inside a feature called “Bell Rock,” Antje stayed outside and took 600mg of ibuprofen. When I came out, the Biologist and friends asked how she was doing. We said “Alright,” which wasn’t true.

It was 2 more miles to Poseidon creek, and it took an hour fifteen. The trail had gone from flat to moguls, and wasn’t as well maintained. Anything resembling a stair was either torturously slow or painful for Antje, and her knee, if it was possible, was locking up even more.

At some point the only other family in the group overtook us. They were a focused family, one who often sent their teenaged son ahead in the last section of each stage to secure good bunks. They’d been quiet the whole trip, so we’d never spoken, but now they stopped to ask about Antje.

“It’s my knee,” Antje explained. The father nodded, knowing the injury. He offered one of their hiking poles, and his daughter immediately offered up a second.

It was incredibly nice of them, and the poles were a HUUUUUUGE help. Antje had a much easier time with bigger rocks, and, on the flat stretches, we made better time.

Still, we were annoyed how long it was taking to get from Poseidon Creek to an area called “Rock Cutting.” It was supposed to take an hour, and we’d been going an hour twenty when we finally saw it. It’s at an area where the lake bottlenecks, and the trail, by default, has to go through granite. With dynamite and chisels, a few guys hacked a path out and tagged it with their names in 1899.

Just before that point we’d caught up with a middle-aged guy who called our attention to the water. “Right there,” he whispered, “see it?” We saw nothing. “Just went behind the bushes there. Trout. Let’s see if he comes out again.”

We stood there, waiting for the trout to come out again, and this was a complicated situation. Because there was almost nothing on earth at that moment as irrelevant as a trout beneath a bush. Whether it came out of the bush or stayed in the bush for the rest of its life was of no concern to us at that moment, and yet somehow I could not find the words which would exempt us from watching trout. And so we waited, and waited, and waited – for a trout that never came.

Halfway up the “Rock Cutting,” I looked down, saw another trout, and before I could think, said, “Look, there’s another one.” Why did I do that? I have no idea why I did that. It was like the burp that came out at Mt. Cook, and the result was of course that we all had to stand there, looking at the trout. “Where is it?” Antje asked. Why did she ask that? The guy pointed one of his fingers at it. “There, by the shore. See it? Over by the log, almost at the log.” She saw it, and we stood there, just standing and looking at another trout. I willed the trout under the log, but defiantly he stayed in the sunlight, flapping about without a care, laziness incarnate. Stupid bastard. Enough was enough, and we said goodbye to troutman. When he overtook us just after the top, I asked if he’d seen the engravings on the wall. He hadn’t, and went back to find them, guaranteeing us at least fifteen minutes with no trouts.

I speed-walked ahead, dropped the pack, sliced up our final apple, scooped our the last of our peanut butter, and readied myself to pass them to Antje, relay-style. Instead she stopped to eat, in accordance with German tradition.

15 minutes later came Giant’s Gate, the last waterfall of the trek. The hole beneath the falls is so sparkling blue and deep that it really is a compulsory swim. Having cleaned up lunch, I’d just caught Antje, and asked if she wanted to swim. She shook her head, eyes forward. “You can catch up to me,” she said. We had three miles left (5km), which, if we kept the same pace, would take an hour fourty-five. The ferry left in two. I dove in as fast as possible, and, as we’d run out of water by that point, filled our bottles with waterfall.

When I caught her, she was miserable. 9 miles isn’t too terribly much, but when you do it without stopping, without really drinking, without really eating, and with a stiffened leg, it’s very, very hard.

With 2 1/2 miles left, we caught, to our amazement, the Bushwalkers. But then again, they were observers, and Stone Cold had also had problems with his knee. He had his own advice. “If it hurts, just bloody walk through it.” Antje was doing just that. I said I was happy we hadn’t had a drop of rain the whole time [the region gets 7m (22 feet) per year], even though ranger Katie had said we’d be missing some beautiful waterfalls without it. He agreed with me. “Last time we did it, it rained one day and you just put your head down and go. Don’t see a bloody thing.”

The Koreans caught up, having stopped somewhere for lunch, and asked if we were OK. “Yeah, we’re almost there,” Antje tried. The family that’d lent the walking sticks walked by, and asked how she was doing. “Good, thank you so much for the walking sticks. I wouldn’t have made it without them!”

By that point something of a 500m-long “group” had formed, with about a dozen people between us. For the first time that day, it looked like we’d make the 2:00 boat. That said, we had two miles left, and, with no waterfalls or rivers or anything else to distract us, they went on and on and on and on and on.

A portable day-hut passed by, and suddenly we were worried. Our notes read “1 hr” from that point, which would have put us there at 2:05, or even 2:10.

But something was wrong with those notes, and way before we expected, Sandlfly Point came into view. “Is that it?” Antje asked. I thought it was. “Is that it?” People were milling about. “Yes, that’s it.” “But is that really the end? I don’t want to think that’s it, and then…”

It was the end.

Antje broke down, then, having kicked a week’s worth of ass in half a day. We shuffled our way into the day-hut and got congratulations from Green Day and his girlfriend. Antje took her boots off, having taken her final steps in them. She had five new blisters (on top of all the others), one of which was gigantic and pus-filled and looked like the picture you might see next to the definition of “blister”. Her 16-year-old boots were officially retired.

“For sale: Hiking boots, never worn (without blisters)”

The families were there, the Koreans were there, the Germans were there, too. The Swedes showed up at the very last second, and the Israelis never made it.

Before going to bed the night before, a woman asked them when they’d be getting up. Generally they woke up waaaaaay later than everyone else, and the whittling Israeli looked back at her, genuinely confused. “How will I know this now?” Well, hopefully they caught the 3 o’clock.

The 2 o’clock had pulled in, and I loaded our bags onto it.

Antje hobbled toward the Milford Sound, and, with all of her clothes on, went in.

The End

It was the kind of speech that keeps coming back to you after the fact, returning in little loops. It was from Katie, our Mintaro Hut ranger, and it had a ring to it that we couldn’t quite get a hold on. It was like hearing a politician who once believed in his message, and maybe still believes in his message, but has had to repeat it so many times that it becomes too practiced, too polished, to be believed in entirely. Anyone forced to speak in front of other people has this problem, teachers included, but hers had an air of NEED to it, like it was something SHE needed to hear for herself every evening, as justification of her life choice. Being a ranger implies solitude, meaning no significant others, not much extended family, and certainly no children, unless they’re let loose in the wild and allowed to go feral. But society doesn’t accept feral children very well, and society still expects babies from women. And Katie is a woman. So it’s not easy being a female ranger, and Katie’s in a weird position. The hut she’s responsible for is in one of the most astounding places on planet earth – she couldn’t possibly do better than Mintaro – and yet people ask her why she’s there. When she’s alone and has some free time, she writes.

After the speech, Stone Cold Bushwalker raised his hand. “We found some Old Man’s Beard yesterday. I was wondering if any of the rangers had–”

Katie laughed. “You know, I wanted to talk to you about that afterwards, in private, but since you asked…” she smiled at the others in the room, “… it wasn’t Old Man’s Beard you ripped out.”

A big long “OOOOOOOOOHHHHH!” filled up the kitchen, with whoops of laughter piled atop it. The Bushwalker’s face didn’t turn red, it turned pale. He was shellshocked and devastated. It was like watching a priest find out he’d urinated on a cross.

“How much do I owe you,” he flatlined.

The crowd laughed, and Katie said. “It looks a lot like Old Man’s Beard, it really does. It was [whatever] plant, and when it’s juvenile it reeeeeeally looks like Old Man’s Beard.” Bushwalker nodded, looking horrible.

She shifted gears to the next day’s climb. We were to cross Mackinnon Pass. Up top there was a day-hut and a bathroom that was promised to have “The World’s Best View From a Bathroom.”

“And it’s clean,” she promised. “You can just sit on down and… plop!” The crowd laughed – but Katie was serious. “The reason I know it’s clean is ‘cuz I helped clean it out. And you know how we do that?” The crowd didn’t know. “With shovels,” she grinned. “500 lbs.’”

“OOOOOOHHHHH….”

She shifted to Kiwis, meaning the birds, and mentioned that two were in the area. “They’re nocturnal,” she reminded. “And this is proooobably one of your best chances to see them in the wild, just doing what they’re doing. It’s very rare to actually see one, but if you don’t try….”

A woman across from us tried – at 2AM. She hadn’t packed the night before, so she packed at 2AM, why not? As a result we were awake off and on between 2AM and 5AM, when our own alarm went off, and we, too, tried.

It was cold. We had goosebumps, and sometimes shivered. For the first half hour we needed a headlamp, and thereafter we used the cool blue light of the behind-the-mountain sunrise.

Save for a few Paradise Ducks, though, Lake Mintaro was deserted. And at that we headed for Mackinnon pass.

Katie had warned us about the switchbacks, all 11 of them, and from a psychological perspective, I’m not sure if that helped. It’s kind of like a dentist telling you beforehand, “The first part’s gonna hurt, and then the next part’s reeeeeally gonna hurt… but then you’ll be just fine.”

It took two hours, and with the help of the single boiled egg inside our stomachs, suddenly we were at the grassy saddle of the pass, with the sun coming up. We stopped to take pictures of the clouds being sucked over the pass (yesterday’s photo), feeling warm and sweaty and satisfied. 10 minutes later we ascended the pass, and icy hell broke loose.

My layman’s guess is sustained 40MPH (70km) winds, with gusts of 60MPH (100km). The clouds became our fog, and as our sweat cooled, we tried to put pants on over our shorts, our fingers already numbing. (It really is amazing how quickly all this stuff happens.) A few steps later, we dropped our packs again and removed our ponchos. When those were on, we turned into highly flappy, very inefficient sails. But sails we were, nonetheless. “Let’s just get to the goddamn hut,” Antje shivered, and we found the sign on the pass. “Mackinnon Hut – 20 minutes.” WTF? 20 minutes? We were ON the goddamn pass!

Heads down, hoods up, we burrowed into the wind and up the saddle. On the way we passed three Kia birds, who’d also hunkered down atop the pass, watching us with commiseration and occasional attempts to fly. By the time we’d made it, and this will really sound like exaggeration, but it’s not – Antje’s lips were blue, and my fingers were almost useless. In 25 minutes!

“MOTHER NATURE, SHE’S A GOOD OL’ MOTHER, BUT LIKE ALL GOOD MOTHERS, SHE LIKES TO SPANK HER KIDS ONCE IN A WHILE.”

In the hut we made “breakfast”: granola with extra nuts and sliced apples, and powdered molk. Another boiled egg was slurped down, and, when Antje wasn’t looking, some Snickers with chunky peanut butter. Miserably, a perfectly operational gas range sat before us, begging to be used for hot tea. We could not do it. We had no pot. So instead of tea, I sat on Antje’s lap, and felt her shiver.

Five minutes after the hut, and the wind died down. The sun still hadn’t reached the backside of the pass, but the wind had died, and the ponchos made us warm. We slalomed down the mountain, into a bowl with a half-dozen waterfalls, and fresh, drinkable water. A helicopter swooped by, doing all sorts of aerial tricks for the paying passengers, and down, down, down, we continued.

“My knee’s really hurting,” Antje said. It sounded like my old knee injury, and I recommended a few stretches, one of which worked. We stopped when we reached a series of cascading, sandstone waterfalls that, once again, looked like a child’s dream. On the boardwalk above them we took off our packs, raised our feet to the rail, and dreamed senseless thoughts for five minutes in the sunlight.

A ranger walked by with a wink and a faithful Münsterlander, checking tbe traps for stoats.

“Man.” Antje stood up. “My stupid knee.” I looked for a good walking stick, but, also stupidly, they were all rotten. Down, down, down, it continued, and halfway down, we finally had to stop. Antje’s knee was locking up, and the ibuprofen wasn’t doing much.

For those who haven’t had an IT band inflammation, it starts off as a pang and ends up feeling like an exposed nerve. As for the effect it has on the knee, you could say it’s like a motor running out of oil.

The Japanese couple walked up, and the woman asked if she could help in any way. We said no thanks, and they went on. The 2AM kiwi-hunter came up, and, as we exchanged kiwi-hunt stories, it turned out no one had seen a kiwi. Off she went.

The trail finally leveled off to some extent, but Antje was still hobbling. “We don’t have to go to the waterfall,” I said, but she shook her head. “We’re going to the damn waterfall.”

Sutherland Falls is a 1 1/2 hour round-trip extension to the day’s already-very-long trek. Kaite had said we “couldn’t miss it.”

It’s almost 600m (2,000 feet), and we’d never seen a fall like that up close. Though it was “light” due to the recent drought, its power was impressive, like aiming a thumbed-over hose into a bucket. We both swam out in the fall’s general direction, but the blowback kept us away. The Japanese couple were there, and we took turns taking pictures of each other.

Antje’s knee warmed up on the way back, and halfway through we saw the Israelis. “You were swimming?” they asked. We were. “You were with the Koreans?” they asked. Wait, what? Koreans? Why had we thought Japanese? Why had we ASSUMED Japanese? Oh westerners. Good luck to us.

Antje’s knee had stiffened by the time we reached the original trail. Things really weren’t good. She seriously dependent on the stick, a stick that was far too flexible, and was wincing at every tenth step or so. She’d never had the injury before, and was finding out how it injured. From the trail juncture it said “1 hour”, and it took us closer to 2.

Next to Dumpling Hut was another perfect swimming hole, though and Antje used its waters to cool her knee. Insjide our bunkroom was Green Day and his girlfriend, and two things came to light: Green Day needed better deodorant, and they weren’t from Germany after all, but Vienna, Austria. Oops.

During dinner, German girl was cooking for German guy. He walked up from behind, looked over her shoulder, and snarled, “ISN’T IT READY YET?!” She ignored him, and at that point I completely gave up on the redeemability of German guy. I proposed to Antje that we pass around a flyer signed by all that said, “You should break up with him. Sincerely,…”

After dinner, which was instant for us, but included an avocado that was now fermenting, we listened to Amanada, our final Ranger, who implored us to take the next 12 miles, our last, as slowly as we could.

Antje and I would take it slowly.

We’d just had the season’s hottest day, Amanda informed us: 33 degrees, which was 91 degrees Fahrenheit.

Her speech ended, and NEC boy, with a fair share of nervousness, approached our table and sat down. “Hi,” he said. We said hi back. The whittling, harmonica-playing Israeli engaged him head on in conversation, one man to another, adult-to-adult, all while drawing with a pencil. He had been impressed by Antje’s drawings throughout the trip – even requesting her to draw on his newly whittled backscratcher – and, inspired, he’d been spending the evening drawing… Antje. He laughed at himself for doing it, for such an obvious sign of affection for her, and continued to do so while talking to NEC boy.

“So,” he asked the boy. “Do you ever fight with your brother?”

NEC boy, it turned out, had perfect manners. He never said “Yeah,” or “Yup” – always “yes.” He listened with the type of attentiveness that all human beings wish they could listen with. He’d even stopped slamming doors, thanks to his (attractive) dad’s request to stop doing so. This whole situation was probably a big deal to him – he was talking to so many older people – people who could do whatever they wanted – people who weren’t his parents – and he drank in every word, every movement, every social cue from the “cool kids”.

During a pause we talked about something alcohol related, and NEC boy chimed in, “Since my grandpa paid for this trip, we took him out to a restaurant, and the waiter said, ‘it’s OK for kids to drink alcohol in New Zealand, if their parents are there.’ So my mom let me have a sip of her wine, and I took a big gulp, and it was sooooo disgusting!”

(The grandpa, who was to complete the 33.5-mile journey the next day, was 73.)

In the meantime, the other Israeli had pulled out his Ukelele. I knew he’d brought it on the trek, but had only heard it the evening before, just slightly, as he was playing it on the helicopter pad. While strumming it he explained the difference between a Ukelele and a guitar, and even let me play it for a few minutes. The Swedes sat down, and one asked the same guitar-vs.-ukelele question I’d just asked. Instead of answering, the Israeli completely ignored him and just kept playing. It was rude, but also lovely, and his strumming became more confident.

“You’re really good,” NEC boy said. “My guitar teacher teaches me to play classical stuff. But you’re REALLY good.”

The compliment was so heartfelt, so childishly genuine, that even though it had come from a child, it charmed the Israeli down to his socks. He smiled for five minutes, then hummed along, and then, in the thinnest of voices, began to sing in Hebrew. The other Israeli joined in.

We didn’t take a picture then, but if any single “mental picture” stays stays in my head from that trip, I hope it’s that one, with NEC boy watching the whittling, harmonica-playing, Antje-drawing, and currently-singing Israeli, whose Puerto-Rican-model-looking friend was also singing to the Ukelele, with Biologist girl next to him reading a book about the history of the Milford Track, and Japanese couple, who were now Korean, making another, perfect meal. At just that moment, the Bushwalker group burst in.

“Are you just NOW getting here?” someone asked.

“Of course we are,” he growled, surveying everyone in the entire kitchen. “Don’t see what the bloody rush is all about!”

Still, we were awoken the first morning by a man speaking in full volume to his boys, wife, and father-in-law. It was 6:00AM, and silently we loathed every one of them.

We’d seen the dad the day before. He and his family were Australian, and at one point Antje said, “He is very good-looking for his age.” It was true. He hadn’t picked up an ounce of fatherly flab; his hair was receding in all the right places; when he wasn’t laughing, he was smiling; he also had a trekking beard.

As for the two sons, the oldest looked like a blonde, pubescent version of Carrot Top; the youngest was a cherubim, but sort of ruined the effect by slamming doors and covering his shaggy head in a baseball cap that read:

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As for the mother, she wasn’t my best friend, either. I’d been trying to read myself into sleepiness the evening before when she called out to her husband:

“Now here’s an idea. Why don’t we put the molk [milk] in the river, so it’s nice and cool tomorrow morning?”

That was a very good idea indeed, he agreed – so much so that when grandpa walked in, he encouraged her to tell him about it, too. “So I was just thinking,” she told her father, “why don’t we put the molk in a bag, and kind of put a rock on it or something, and put in the river. That way we’ll have cold molk in the morning.” Grandpa thought it was a great idea. Nothing worse than warm molk!

The oldest son moseyed on over, having only caught the end of it. “What’s the plan?” His mom explained. “We’re gonna put some molk in the river. That way it’ll get nice and cold for tomorrow morning.”

The door slammed so hard that the bunk-room shuddered; NEC boy was in the building. The older brother walked past him and said, “Ask mum about her stupid idea.”

NEC boy turned innocently to mum, full of curiosity. “What idea?”

“Well, I think we’re gonna put the molk cartons in a plastic bag and put it in the river, so it’s cold for tomorrow morning.”

He pondered this for a moment, and said, “I know what we should do! We should put the water from the river in a plastic bin, and then put the molk inside, to cool it. Then we could put the purifying tablets in the water, so we could drink it!”

It was ingenious, he was just sure of it!

The thing was, we did have tap water. Plus, water from a bin with a milk carton is probably not delicious.

But no one wanted to hurt the boy’s feelings, especially mum. “You know what? That’s a really good idea, and that’s exactly what we’ll do when we go camping sometime. But we can save the purifiers for now, I’m pretty sure.”

Whether their molk was cold the next morning, only God and that family know. What we knew, though, was that they were incapable of sleep empathy. How could you talk in full voices at 6:00? Unbelievable. Regardless, it was time for everyone to go ahead and get up and eat some goddamn breakfast.

Around us there were instant porridges and instant oatmeals and many many other instant things that required only hot water. There was a lot of watching and learning going on, and one idea that took hold was to drop tea bags into a boiling pot of water, rather than making tea cup-by-cup. The Japanese couple spent over an hour preparing their breakfast, which included a delicately carved red and green apple with very sharp cutlery. Green Day and girlfriend ate silently in a corner. As for the other German couple, she was busy cooking, while he was busy leaning over her and being a hungry, grumpy male. At one point his girlfriend shouted, “YEAH I’M DOING THAT!”, momentarily hushing the room. It was an important moment for some. A cliché had been confirmed.

Not long after setting off, we caught up with bushwalkers next to the river.

“Trout in there,” the guy pointed. There was some discussion as to whether the trout, which was lazing about in the sunlight, was brown or rainbow. Brown, the group decided. Stone Cold Bushwalker shook his head. “Rather look at the bloody thing than eat it. I don’t get these people coming out here, pulling ‘em out and eating ‘em.”

It was the last thing you’d expect from a guy who looked like a Hell’s Angel, and we all walked together after that, exchanging almost zero personal information. Instead we stopped to examine different tree varieties; to check out animal tracks; to look inside a stoat trap (no stoat, but the egg-bait stank); to look for birds; to explore the overgrown hut. The bushwalkers were seriously good at bushwalking, all five senses were completely in tune, always on the hunt for tiny details. Not really sure if we were intruding into that experience, Antje and I moved on.

The Israelis marched past, followed by the Swedes. For the next few miles we did the tortoise and the hare thing with the latter, as they stopped constantly to take pictures. Our own camera was Antje’s iPhone, and we’d only charged it halfway before the trip. That was very stupid. The trail went past dozens of skinny waterfalls threading their way down the mountains and into the valley. The Swedes found a perfect little spot right next to the Clinton river for their lunch, or maybe breakfast, and we moved on.

A half hour later, an unexpected sound came drifting through leaves. Someone was playing a harmonica. A day-hut came into view, and I half-expected a ranger to be sitting there, just being a ranger and playing his old harmonica. Instead it was the whittling Israeli. His eyes flicked up to me, but really he just wanted to finish his song, something from the Beatles. His friend had his back to him and was quietly singing along, his audience being the forest. The song finished, and the Israeli smiled. “I like it, the harmonica.” His friend turned on a battery-powered radio. The music that came out sounded like the Israeli answer to Frank Sinatra. “It is a treat for us. We listen to one disc today, now that we are halfway.” They stuffed it into a pack, and off they went, both singing along, fading into the forest. On their heels came the quarreling Germans.

She sat down with a huff, intentionally not looking at him.

He walked up to her, stopping directly in front of her, hands on hips… but ABSOLUTELY NOT sitting down, hell no.

“SO ARE WE STOPPING HERE OR NOT?” he demanded.

“NO,” she said, and stood up. They stormed off. We allowed some distance before we followed.

Lunch was a boiled egg, mixed nuts, apple slices with chunky peanut butter, and, at least for me, Snickers bars… with scoops of chunky peanut butter on them! Antje was revolted, but man, that’s life in the bush!

It was hot by then, and after more than a mile of open plain, even hotter. A side-trip took us to a hidden lake that was neither hidden nor very swimmable, and away from it we trudged. For the next two miles we sweated it out over a dozen dried out riverbeds, until finally there came one filled with water. I immediately dropped my pack, scrambled up the boulders, dunked my head in, and had my first drink of river water. Delicious. A minute later Grandpa walked up, saw what I was doing, and followed suit. The Swedes walked up, saw what grandpa was doing, and scrambled up. One corner later, a much, much easier access point appeared, with deeper water to boot. Ah well. “It seemed like a good idea.”

The last two miles were the day’s Heartbreak Hill. At every turn you expected the hut, and at every turn it just got steeper. “Are your knees OK?” Antje asked. Surprisingly, my old running injuries were nowhere in sight. “My knee hurts a little bit,” she said. She also had six blisters.

When Mintaro hut came into view, we ditched it at once for Mintaro Lake. And Jesus H.W. Bush.

Mintaro Lake is the type of scene you’d expect a 2nd grader to draw when they very naively imagine the perfect mountain setting. “So there’s these really steep mountains, and then here’s the lake, and here’s some grass I made all around it, and here’s some sand in the middle of the lake so you can lay on it, and here’s some ducks that you can play with.” The ducks in question weren’t Ranger Ross’s beloved blue ducks, but Paradise Ducks, which were hilariously territorial, mostly out of boredom. They stood together in clusters for minutes on end, placid in the sunlight, only for one to decide, “ENOUGH BULLCRAP!” and run the others OUT.

The Biologist and her friends were brave enough to try the lake – and flailed right back out, shrieking. I went next, and yes, swimming was out of the question. Antje was the last, and afterwards we warmed ourselves on the sand. The Biologist and friends had left, and suddenly we were alone, and in the middle of something that couldn’t even really be talked about.

Instead, and having had a few minutes to find the best words I could, I said, “You know I don’t believe in heaven and all that, but if you ever want to imagine me in one, it can be like right now, rubbing each other’s feet.”

The German couple walked up.

They were both in bathing suits, and the guy put his feet in first. “Bwaaaaaahhh,” he groaned, then splashed the glacial water on his head, “Bwaaaaaahhh.” It trickled down his back, “bwaaaaaahhh, bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh.” His girlfriend went into giggle fits, then repeated the act.

They deserved some alone time, too, and as we left them there, they were curled up together on the sand, all made good by the mountains.

Having walked three-miles, we arrived at Clinton hut, the first on the Milford Track.

Across from our bunks were two Swedes, brothers Hakan and Bengt. I asked Bengt, who’d been living in Sydney for seven years, if he missed home. “No, not really,” he said. His brother was visiting for three weeks, and that was enough of ‘home’.

At dinner, we and the Swedes had our first surprise: there were gas ranges aplenty, and plenty of running water, but no pots. Pots, apparently, were one of those things we should’ve packed in on the trek with us. Everyone else seemed to have read that somewhere. Only we, and the Swedes, hadn’t. “Well, at least we’re in this together,” I said to Bengt. He looked around hopefully and said, “Maybe we can borrow one.”

Luckily, a single, beat-up, communal-looking pot sat under one the ranges. Antje and I used it for a dinner of ramen and baked beans, complimented by a a half-bottle of pinot noir and half-pack of oreos. As the Swedes used the precious pot, two early-twenties Israelis scooted into our table. One was whittling wood with a knife. The other was busy looking like a Puerto Rican model.

But when I said I was from Seattle and lived in Germany, both looked alarmed. “GERMANY? Why do you live in GERMANY?” “Because my wife’s from Germany,” I explained. “So we live there.” Their eyes went from me to Antje, the infernal GERMAN, who smiled and said, “I’m from Germany.”

Silence.

We all kind of looked at each other and tried to smile, but it was as if the table had cracked in two. The situation was gigantic and stupid and totally unnecessary, and I aimed for common ground. “I visited a friend in Israel. He was in the army. We went to a Taglit.” At the mention of the Hebrew word (a Taglit is the the culminating party of a week-long, sponsored trip that any teenaged Jew worldwide can take part in) their eyes lit up. “You are Jewish!” “No, no. We snuck in. Through a side door.” “So you were not invited?” “No, we snuck in.” “Ahhhh. So you had a very good time!” “Of course. There were 4,000 people!” Hakan the Swede asked if they had been in the army, if being in the army was optional. “They do not ask you. They tell you,” the whittling Israeli said.

We were friends, then. Or sort of friends. Or something. The Israelis got up to make tea, using the same beat-up pot that we had. The next day, I realized it wasn’t a communal pot at all. It had been theirs all along. They just watched patiently while everyone else used it.

As they made tea, we talked to the Swedes. Next to the Swedes sat another couple, whose male counterpart I referred to in my head as “Green Day.” The guy had dyed his hair green, bright, bright green, and he had tattoos all over his arms. He even looked like a thicker version of Green Day’s lead singer. He and his girlfriend didn’t introduce themselves at all, and spoke only to each other quietly, in German. Another couple slipped in beside us, also German, and at that point the Ranger strode in.

He was 6’6” tall (2m), 60 years old, and wore hiked up shorts that accentuated the stork-like quality of his thin, white legs. “One look at these,” he joked, “will let you know I’m a darn good ranger.” The whiteboard had mentioned an 8:00 “Ranger Talk,” and after explaining some basic safety concerns, namely fire, he proceeded to explain the next day’s trek, milepost-by-milepost, including the lakes that we were to pass, the orchids we should look for, swimming holes and fishing holes we should watch out for, including the best for trout, a place where the Clinton river branched in two, an old hut that had been overgrown, and was now hard to see, but COULD be seen, if one looked hard enough.

The Israelis were bored. Quietly, but loud enough for our table to hear, the whittling Israeli said sarcastically, “This is a very in-ter-es-ting lecture we are experiencing!” The others smiled or laughed outright, and at this, their opinions on the Ranger, Ross, began to sour.

Ross moved on to a particular flower we were to watch out for, the Mt. Cook Lilly. “Now, the Mt. Cook Lilly is white,” he said. “Does anyone know why it’s white?”

No one knew.

“Does anyone know how they’re pollinated?” he asked.

A late-20s Australian girl raised her hand. “Well, if it’s yellow it’s pollinated by insects, if it’s red it’s pollinated by birds. so white… I guess… is… bats?”

Ross couldn’t hear her.

“By bats?” she said. “Or moths?”

“Moths!” he said. “That’s exactly right!” The girl smiled politely and looked down. Later it came to light that was working on a Ph.D. in Biology.

Ross moved on to the topic that mattered most to him: birds.

He mimicked the different bird calls, bird-by-bird, to a whole lot of laughter; explained which birds might be easily approached and which to wait for; suggested that we stop moving for five minutes and see what happens; talked at length about which birds were now endangered due to non-endemic animals; talked about the way the birds were banded for identification–left leg for female, right for male (“since men are always ‘right’”); lamented their failed attempts at attaching transmitters; told the names of particular birds. “Some of our ducks are named after Aussie cricket players,” he said “since you always have to ‘duck’ when playing against the Aussies.”

Our table, which was back in a corner, had completely given up on Ross. The German guy next to me exhaled loudly, twice, like a spoiled child. The Israelis, too, were no longer listening, and the Swedes were stifling yawns. The whittling Israeli turned to me, “You are paying very good attention,” he said, poking fun. I was. The lecture could’ve used some visuals, but as Antje later said, Ross was deeply, deeply passionate about his work, and passion tends to spread. Ross’s personal mission, the last of his life’s work, you could say, was to save the blue duck.

Blue ducks, he explained have been absolutely ravaged by stoats. A stuffed stoat was passed around, terrifying a Japanese woman, and for good reason: a stoat looks like a squirrel who’s gone so rabid that he chewed his own tale off and ate it for breakfast. Ross explained how the stoat traps worked, and the way he and his colleagues chase ducks into a river net to band them. “They’ve even got one named after me,” Ross said proudly. “He’s got long legs.”

By this point our table was exasperated to the point of mutiny, a classic example of group-think: The whittling Israeli had established that Ross was boring; a few smiles and laughter had followed; no one dared contradict the group’s perceived opinion; they instead reinforced it at every turn; spiral spiral spiral, into blackness.

Fortunately for them, Ross was nearly finished. “Are there any questions?” he asked hopefully. A thick palm shot up, belonging to the gruffest looking man of our 42-person group. His head was shaved, his voice, deep, and his body, thick; he reminded me of Stone Cold Steve Austin, a WWF (or WWE) wrestler. He described his party of three as “bushwalkers”, and said:

“We found some Old Man’s Beard today on one of the trees. Ripped the bloody thing right out and left it right in the middle of the track for you. It’ll take over the whole bloody forest if you let it.”

At this my face went hot. Halfway through the trek I’d found two hunks of moss in the middle of the track, picked them up, and said to Antje, “Look, all we need is some moss glue!” A little while later I tossed them back in the forest.

Ranger Ross asked a few questions about the moss, but otherwise didn’t seem to concerned about Old Man’s beard. He did want to verify where the bushwalkers had left it, though, so that he, or another ranger, could take a look. I almost raised my hand, but didn’t.

At that he finished–to the general applause he deserved.

Afterwards I asked him about a pair of tracks Antje and I had seen in a nearby bog. “Those are Kiwi,” he explained. “Can tell by the hole in the ground. They stick their beak in there, sniff around.” We were thrilled to have discovered Kiwi tracks on our own.

Next, and full of dread, I went to the bushwalker and asked about Old Man’s Beard. His description didn’t match my moss at all, a huge relief. The bushwalker was annoyed, though. “Bloody rangers only care about the birds.”

At that it was time for cleanup, and our second surprise of the day:

No garbage cans!

It made sense, of course. It makes perfect sense. On the 3-mile walk to Clinton Hut I’d been wondering how, logistically, they dealt with all that garbage. Helicopters? The answer was, they didn’t. WE did. Whatever we packed in, we packed out. Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. Somewhere we’d missed a manual of sorts. But also, I was mad.

The evening before, Antje had mentioned to our excitable hostel-owner, Bob, that we were thinking of bringing a bottle of wine on the trek, a little something to celebrate. “Of course!” he said. “You gotta bring a bottle of wine, everyone brings a bottle of wine for their first night!” It was only three miles, after all, that first day, an easy haul. And thus we brought our half-finished bottle of Pinot Noir.

And now? Now we had a large, empty, heavy glass bottle, one that couldn’t be tossed out.

Which meant we’d be carrying that heavy glass bottle for the next 30.5 miles, up and over a mountain.

Oh bother.

Oh, Bob.

In that same paper, tucked into a corner on page four or something, was a list of the Youtube videos most watched by Kiwis in 2011. Number 1 was Rebecca Black’s “Friday” with something like 78 million views in New Zealand. That’s pretty impressive when you remember that 4 1/2 million people live here.

The rest I recognized–except number 2. It was called “Nek Minnet”, and was :09 seconds long. It had nearly 60 million views. Just before New Year’s Even some New Zealand teenagers had told me, “You HAVE to watch it, it’s like, all of New Zealand in 9 seconds. ” When I asked what Nek Minnet meant, they explained, “Next minute,” as in, “I was walking down the street, next minute my friend came up.”

That’s certainly Kiwi English, but regardless, the expression “Nek Minnet” has now taken on the same sort of in-the-know, wink-wink currency in NZ that “Double Rainbow” has in the US. T-shirts have popped up, all cheaply printed, with variations of “Nek Minnet” or “Nek Minute” printed on them.

So, without further ado – New Zealand in 9 seconds:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq36Y-IN6fE