Day 11 – Princhester Hut to Mararoa River
In the morning, caught a ride from the hunters down into Te Anau. Originally I had planned to make it to Queenstown in seven days from the Aparima River, but I had skipped a section in my planning so I was three days short of food. I intended this to be a quick in-and-out mission, resupply and get back on the trail with enough time to make some more progress. But a raincloud was rolling through, and I figured I might as well camp out in an Internet cafe until it passed.
Once the rain was done, I hoofed it to the edge of town and started thumbing. My luck has improved. Within half an hour, a Czech businessman picked me up. He had spent seventeen years building a business that made schwag (small logoed gifts given freely as advertisement) and sold it. Now he was traveling and learning English in Christchurch.
Once I arrived on the trail, my notes and map indicated that the flats of the nearby Mararoa River would make an easy hike. There was an angler’s access giving me passage through a field, so I headed down it to reach the river. I soon came to a crossing with a tributary stream. Reveling in my newfound nonchalance about water crossings, I thought “I’ll just tromp along in the water here till it hits the main river.” Sensible enough, but this tributary started taking me further and further downstream, when I was meant to be going upstream. One shortcut later, I had found the river proper, but found its banks covered with waist-high tussock, ankle-deep mud, and the odd gorse patch. There were nice shale patches in the bed of the river, but this would have required constant recrossings to keep up with the fluvial wiggles, and it was just deep enough that I wasn’t comfortable. I struggled along the banks for a while before giving up and heading back up towards the farm land – maybe there was a clearer way through there. Another bout of gorse fighting led me back up onto dry grass… twenty meters from where I’d started.
By then I was knackered, and I found a gorgeous tree whose multiple trunks spread so wide there was just the right amount of room in the center to hang my camping hammock. Otherwise the area was open, with views to the river. It felt like the perfect campsite.
During my exploits down at the river, I had my first encounter with didymo. Also known as ‘rock snot’, it’s a foreign alga that’s been choking New Zealand’s rivers and turning DoC red in the face. I’d seen any number of pamphlets and warnings about how not to spread it from one river to the next, so it was interesting to see it in person. Unlike many invasive species, which seem harmless to the uneducated eye, this stuff is visually repulsive. It forms a green mat of goobers across the river bottom, and in places where it’s been stranded above water, it looks exactly like dried-up sewage. Consider me convinced – I’ll certainly do my best not to spread it.
For what it’s worth, the hunters I met last night blame DoC for indecision. Evidently it was first discovered in a single river, and they could have stopped it there by dumping in a truckload of salt, killing everything. The theory goes that the native ecosystem would have regenerated over time, but the invasion of didymo would have been stopped. It’s obvious why DoC would have hesitated to implement such a drastic solution, but it does seem like their current efforts at containment are doomed to fail, since it requires less than a drop of water to spread the infection from one river to the next.