Hiking the Routeburn Track

Eating foam

We’re here, the entrance to the Routeburn Track! In true Great Walk-style it is well serviced by toilets, shelters and information boards. We get ourselves prepared with extra rain jackets and a bottle of water provided by the Guided Walks New Zealand team, then we get this thing started!

As we’re walking, Huw casually bites off part of a foam mat packed in his bag. We start to worry that he didn’t bring the lunch that was meant to be provided on this trip… He rubs the foam on his watch, making a squeaking bird noise. Clever!!

Flapping ping pong balls

It takes time, patience and persistence, but further along the track we are greeted by a curious robin – much different from its red-breasted European counterparts with black feathers, a white breast and long gangly legs that it uses to hop around us. This bird is not scared whatsoever!

That’s not the only wildlife that Huw calls or spies with his little eye a couple of black and white tomtits and the tiniest little birds called Rifleman. They bounce around the branches like little flapping ping pong balls. So cute!

ML is waiting for ages to spot a fantail – a bird with bitchin’ eyebrows and a fan-shaped tail – so she can tell its Maori legend. Being from a Maori family herself, she knows a few stories that have been passed down from New Zealand’s very first settlers!

Just to show you how much is going on the Routeburn forest…

We’ll never look at a tree the same way

All birds aside, we said we were doing this Great Walk in a different way to mindlessly walking through the pretty forest. That becomes evident instantly. Huw and ML point out trees and ferns with their properties, showing us leaves that are as strong as rope, the Hounds Tongue that grows spores like a tongue’s taste buds, some leaves that smell like fart (yum!), and so on. We don’t think we’ll ever look at a tree the same way again!

We know we say this every time we do a forest hike in New Zealand, but, man, this forest looks very different from any forest we have seen so far! The Routeburn Track is nestled in beech forest – large trees that drop tiny red, orange and yellow leaves that appear to cover the track in a constant state of autumn. What’s more, the forest is in a much higher alpine environment than what you find along the coasts, so the track weaves its way over previous rockfalls and alongside jagged mountainsides.

Fresh water and the clearing of all clearings

An alpine environment means fresh rivers! We get plenty of opportunity to cross them along various swingbridges, get to the riverside and fill our water bottles, and gaze at the power of the river carving smooth potholes in the rocks.

After a couple of hours walking in the mossy and luxuriant beech forest that we now know a hell of a lot more about, the forest opens up to reveal the view of all epic views. An open plain with a shallow meandering river passing right through the middle stretches to the base of some mighty forested mountains. Behind lay more mountains covered in snow! This place is unbelievable.