Milford – Did we crank the Hobbit score, tracks 22 to 27, when driving a winding mountain road through wet forests in fog so thick you couldn’t see the tops of the mountains? Damn right we did. Day trip to Milford Sound today, which took us out of “regular New Zealand” and into “crazy Jurassic Park New Zealand” so fast that, had our station wagon been harried by a flock of pterodactyls, none of us would have raised an eyebrow. In Milford we took a long, leisurely boat cruise around the sound, past towering mountains garlanded with permanent waterfalls and rainwater spouts; past fur seals who roll in the water to aid their digestion; and – at one notable point – straight into a freshwater fall, whose power and intensity I might have SLIGHTLY underestimated. In this regard, my TELUS jacket, surprisingly waterproof, became the second reason that going back to my job there remains the best decision I’ve made in the past five years.
On our way back from Milford Sound we stopped to hike to Key Summit, beginning in a thick pea soup fog and adventuring into a wilderland of myths and symbols so dense that emerging, four hours later, was uncannily like waking from a dream or crossing into an alternative reality – and I’m not entirely convinced I’m not still there.
The deathwater – emboldened by my earlier experiences and carrying nowhere near enough water for the hike, I filled my bottle from a rainwater spout, which Dave and Demetre were convinced would lead to my death; they may have been right, but I don’t particularly want to live in a world where one cannot trust a spring as beautiful as that.
The throne of blood – after slogging uphill through spongy rainforest for over an hour we popped over the crest of the trees into a wide, dry scrubland, deathly quiet, raked by ghostly mist.
The wood between the worlds – upon reaching the summit Demetre found that the path lead even further on, away from the last of the other hikers and into a forest of strange shapes and preternatural stillness, ringed by small mirror-bright pools of water. I followed the path as far as sense dictated before giving up and turning around; this will haunt me for the rest of my life. When we emerged from the forest again, I could not be entirely sure I’d come back to the same world.
The Godzilla mountain – tantalizingly glimpsed through the pearlescent cloud which clung to the top of the mountain was a huge, huge, UNBELIEVABLY HUGE mountain behind the one we had climbed; although we saw it only in hints and fragments it looked like the grey, scaly back of some large, horrible beast, all the more frightening for the degree to which it could not be fully made out.
The God mountain – and then the cloud was blown clear of our perch, and a mountain so enormous that it dwarfed anything any of us had seen so far stared down at us from the opposite side of the peak, ringed by tiny fluffy clouds, and crowned by the platinum stare of the afternoon sun. The entire valley opened out below us, fading from saturated viridian to cobalt blue through a dozen shades of turquoise in between… and there, ever dominant, the mountain.
Normally when you hike a track where you have to take the same path down that you took up, it’s a disappointment, but the world of our climb and the world of our descent – one a dripping rainforest wrapped in a white blanket; the other a glittering forest at play in the sun – were as apart from one another as a dream is to waking.
Meat pie count, trip thus far: 5
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