Pictures!

Hi everyone! We put some photos of our tramps on the blog. We put the pictures on the corresponding entries so you'll have to scroll back through to see them. Note that all the black spots on Lucas' shirt on the Rees-Dart track pictures are an awful biting fly known as the sandfly. We are convinced that the sandfly is the sole reason why the south island is still so wild and beautiful. I hope you enjoy!



I have never in my whole life experienced mud in this way. Eighty percent of the trail is mud (from ankle deep to over knee deep) and the other twenty percent is gorgeous beaches. Mud became a way of life from talking about it during and after the day's walk to scrubbing it off boots, rinsing out socks, and washing off what we could from our pants and shirts. Lucas and I would usually spend ten minutes in the nearest river getting the big bits off before we would go to the hut to tackle the smaller bits. Lucas' pants are still a new color and my shirt is tie-dyed with brown blotches!



This picture was taken right as the tide was going in on Mason's Bay. A beautiful wild beach...one of the many we walked through.


In many ways, this walk was an incredibly emotional one for me. The mud was hard, the track was exhausting as it had all these sharp hills and so so many roots. The weather was incredibly variable--in less than an hour we had hail and then the sun came out and it turned so hot and then it hailed again. We must have changed clothes at least four times...and then there were moments like these where the beauty of the landscape was unimaginable...To the right of this veiw, you could see the whole sand dune valley and it made the whole day worth it.



Lucas and I couldn't believe the ammount of people that came on this tramp! We thought we would be the only crazy fools that would undertake such a hike! This was our main crew: Three Germans ("team Germany") and two Canadians ("team Canada"). The picture above shows all of us in a four person bunk. We all ended up sleeping together because the hut was over-full. The night before, it was just the seven of us. The Germans made a fire and we all sat around drinking tea and drying out are clothes and boots. The night before that, we were all stuck in a hut with these JERKS for hunters that took over the whole hut and were boated in from the mainland with all their stuff.