Day 18 – Queenstown to Bob’s Cove

The next morning I woke long before the great majority of my holiday park compatriots, had a shower, charged my phone, ate breakfast, and packed up my gear.  Leaving the tent with a thank-you note for the Israeli, I headed off into town to do my errands.  Got some really useful advice on the Motatapu track at the local DoC office, window-shopped the outdoor stores, and called home.  I found that I still didn’t feel properly adjusted to town, and I still had the itch to walk.  Many of my errands were dependant on collecting my packages at the Post Shop which is closed today, and I had three days to wait for my scheduled rendezvous with Roxane.

So I set out walking north, to close up the gap I had skipped yesterday.  Evidently the section I skipped was just getting into an area where there were quite a few tracks I could use to bypass the road.  This was approximately half true.  I still spent quite some time on the road, but also had some really beautiful tracks only a few meters from it, where the trees closed in thick enough you couldn’t hear the traffic.

I passed through Seven Mile Reserve, a branching network of trails through which my path was tightly constrained by signs reading “No entry – Mountain bike trails.”  Came to Twelve Mile Delta, the first camping site available on the road out of Queenstown.  Saw campervans and kept hiking, feeling exquisitely antisocial.  The end of the day brought me to Bob’s Cove and a fork – one leading up to the top of a knob and probably a view, the other leading down to the beach and probably camping.  I really had no choice – I went up.  Soon I found a lovely flat spot, just about five feet eleven inches long by maybe two feet wide.  The weather report called for fine weather the next four days, so I set up to “cowboy camp” for the first time on this trip. Cowboy camping is when you skip the tent and simply roll out your sleeping bag with nothing over your head but the stars and a cloud of sandflies.

As the stars switched on, I realized this was the first time I had watched the stars in New Zealand, and it made me realize for the first time that I am in a place far far away from home.  There was Orion, but instead of dangling from his belt, his sword stuck straight up to poke him in the belly.  There was the Southern Cross, a well-known constellation I had never seen before.  No, that’s not it.  Must be the one next to it.  Wait, there’s that big one that sort of looks like a cross?  I never did figure out any of the southern constellations for sure.

In the middle of the night I woke in minor panic.  The bundle of clothes I had been using a pillow – had it rolled down the hill and into the lake?  I put on my glasses and found, of course, that it had just slipped a little from under my head.  And then I looked up and saw the Milky Way in full glory.  The sky was so clear and dark that I could make out individual stars in the Way.  Even in the high desert of Nevada, I had never seen it as more than a bright smear.  The three-dimensionality of the galaxy stood out dramatically, with larger, brighter stars in the foreground fading to a multitude of distinct but dim background stars.  And the relative emptiness of the sky beyond the galactic plane was quite obvious too.  Staring at the unrecognized and the inverted constellations had made me feel out of place, but the Milky Way brought me right back home.