Heading north, Haast Pass and the Gillespie Track

So with a heavy heart it was time to depart this stunning part of the South Island. After collecting Jaryn from his cruise where he delighted me with stories of all the great food he has eaten while I continued to, shall we say, 'struggle to digest subtley' the Backcountry mountain food which is so popular here. Trust me the Norwegians do it so much better and the stuff in Go Outdoors is much better and much less gas provoking as well! Anyhow...

We drove north through Queenstown (which we liked), put in 40 dollars worth of petrol and claimed our AA smart fuel points (up to 38 cents now, check us out!) and decided an appropriate place to stop was  the town of Wanaka which we liked very much when we passed by before and Jaryn was very keen to have another ice cream from the great ice creamery there! The weather was distinctly windier and more overcast than when we came before so the town was a all together different place - but is certainly our favourite town in NZ so far.

We had arranged to meet up with Karen, a delightful lass from San Francisco that we met on the Routeburn Track and a great guy called Tony from a small town in California which has a road called Kitchen Dick Road which at one point intersects with another road called Wood Cock road. This provided me with enough juvenile humour to keep me giggling to myself for some time. We met them in a totally and utterly random place called Manakora which was on the road towards an even more random place called Haast (more on this later!) which for some reason reminded me of that comedic pub next to the campsite on the Isle of Skye with the ball pit. Weather was pretty bad that night so we stayed in an A frame cabin and planned our next move.

The Gillespie Track is a much less used track than any of the others I have been on here. It weaves along thIck bush and through high hanging valleys towards the high Gillespie Pass. We decided it would be fun to walk to the first hut (Youngs Hut) and figured how epic could it possibly be? Well it was pretty darn epic and lots of fun getting up there but was a fun couple of days and by the time we had finished I was done with walking for a few days at least! We had lots of fun banter and there was a pleasant group of people in the hut, but not quite who we were hoping for...the group of hot Norwegian  girls I was imagining sadly never arrived, I hope they didn't get lost?! 

Karen and I left Tony to go and travel on to Wanaka and get ice cream and we had planned to meet Jaryn in Haast that evening. We easily managed to catch a lift with a brilliant Norwegian guy called Peter who worked in the hotel in Haast with his girlfriend Gill. I can only assume they are only there for the money because Haast is a very strange place, more a collection of shacks spread out over a large aa than a town. The weather was still pretty rubbish so Jaryn had continued on to the next stop so we hunkered down for the night at Peter's hotel and enjoyed a 'Roaring Billy' burger and some beers!