Monday, November 12

At lunch time, we were visited by a couple of beggars

With a full and satisfying buffet breakfast behind (or in!) us, we left for the day’s walk, not in Nicky’s bus but in a lettle rattly red van, for a drive through farmland, over cattle-grates and through shallow fording-places, to a parking lot at the head of the Rob Roy Track.

A not-too-long walk over extremely windy open farm terrain (pictured at right: large image, small) led into the bush, where we now were protected from the wind, and soon we were going over another swing bridge. Not as scary as most of the previous ones, since the walkway was real planking. (pictured at left, slightly down: large image, small)

From there on, it was a steady climb. Never extremely steep, but just a continual upward slope, with relatively few level stretches, and notably fewer drops. The trail was narrow and root-covered in places, and consequently fairly hard to negotiate, but in other stretches broad, flat, and easy to walk on, even if still steadily rising. This was the result of recent and current trail improvements: we even passed a bunch of small grading machines and a couple of the workers on the associated crew.

Nicky explained that the reason she listed this walk as moderate to challenging in the prospectus was that she was not aware of the number and extent of the improvements that were being made. I found it a tough climb, but by no means as difficult as many of the others we’ve done in the past.

At any rate, we soon started catching glimpses of the glacier: the next picture at the left (large image, small) shows the view, and can give a notion of why the Rob Roy is not the kind of glacier you want to walk on, especially if you’re the kind of hikers we are.

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As we walked, Nicky and I caught sight of an ice-fall, ice from the glacier tumbling down the cliff: she was very pleased to see one. I believe that none of the other walkers were in a position to see the event. Naturally I didn’t get chance to snap it with my camera. Too bad.

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Something that there was no difficulty in seeing was the wonderful waterfall across the Rob Roy Creek Valley: Nicky declared it to be “New Zealand’s only uphill waterfall”. And this was no exaggeration: the wind caught the falling water surprisingly often, to carry the spray upward, well beyond the level at which the water emerged from the edge of the cliff across the way. This waterfall shows in almost all the pictures I took during the rest of the day.

And so we continued, up and up. Much of the time we were walking beside, or at least parallel to, the Rob Roy Stream. But finally we got above the tree line, and the environment got somewhat cooler. We finally stopped at a scenic lookout with some informative signs, a popular-enough stopping spot that there were usually a handful of other folks there pausing to eat, as we did, or just to take in the view. It seemed to me that a significant portion of the others there were young German hikers.

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And then there were the keas. Not long after we sat down to eat, one flew up and gave us the eye, as you see at the top of this page. These birds are smart, curious, and very ingratiating. People do feed them, but under Nicky’s watchful eye, we refrained. The point is that by feeding them you’re not doing them any kind of favor. They're not just that dark brown that you mostly notice in the pictures: the undersides of the feathers seem to be a much brighter orange, which you can see a hint of in the last two pictures. For some reason, I spent most of the time that the keas were there eating my own lunch, rather than taking lots of snapshots of them. I think Mark has many more pictures than I do.

For the walk down, which I knew would be harder and trickier than the climb, I put my camera away, and just concentrated on placing my feet and my walking stick in the right spots. The weather was worsening, and the wind was picking up as we descended, so that when we got to the swing bridge that had presented no difficulty whatever on the way up, we saw that it was behaving much differently. It really was swinging either way, and bucking as well, and the protective netting at the sides was bowing out, acting as a sail, as the wind whipped downstream. Mark was the last over the bridge, and it clearly gave him some difficulty.

As we approached the bus, the rain got closer and actually caught up with us, but didn’t last long and didn’t get us very wet.

Dinner this evening was at the Edgewater Resort, our hotel, and was very elegant. I had venison, three short stacks of meat, each on a potato terrine that consisted of vertically arranged slices of potato, fried top and bottom to display the layering in a very attractive way. Have I said that Mark ate no venison in all our time in New Zealand? He missed wonderful meals, but in light of his experience in Ronda, I think I can understand. There was an interesting dessert, too, very highly chocolated, with a large slab of cayenne ice cream. Good and unusual!

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