Day 38 – Ahuriri River to Queenstown

I was certain I’d find an easy ride to the highway this morning, but as I trucked along the road, I was passed by only a single car: a pair of women who gave me a half-smiling wave as their van rumbled by.  Hitchhiking, I see that wave a lot and have come to interpret it as “terribly sorry, but there’s no way on earth I would give you a ride.”

I was enjoying the walk though, and as often with terrain one has seen before, it passed more quickly the second time.  By lunchtime I spied the highway atop a rise.

I was a bit concerned I would have trouble getting a ride, because despite the high traffic volume, the cars were zipping by at high speed with no convenient place to stop.  But as I approached the road, a tattered but sporty looking black car was rounding the corner.  Not even on the asphalt yet, I raised a half-hearted thumb towards the driver.

To my surprise, he started decelerating hard.  Even so, he was thirty meters past me before the car was completely stopped.  He executed a daring u-turn and pretty soon I was speeding along in a low-slung seat with a fellow wilderness fanatic, on holiday from school in Australia.  We spent the ride chatting about past adventures had.  He spent a couple summers as a surveyor for New Zealand’s national geographic authority, taking spot hikes for peaks in Fiordland.  This is one of New Zealand’s most inaccessible and most beautiful pieces of land, with nearly zero roads and hardly any tramping tracks.  So his job involved being dropped by helicopter on some ridge, taking measurements and walking its length for a few days, then getting picked up and dropped on another ridge.  I was drooling liters hearing him describe it.

He dropped me at a popular hitching spot in Wanaka.  It was rather too popular, with one couple waiting at the first corner, another fellow up the road, and – as the couple told me – another one further beyond him.

I went for lunch, and by the time I came back the road was all mine.  It didn’t take long to get to Queenstown.  There I finally thought to check my email, and good thing – Blair had changed our rendezvous to the YHA in Queenstown instead of Glenorchy.  We met up, and set out to do our shopping for the trail: tucker, fuel, and books.