Last Boat to the Sounds

The alarm went off early and we were out the door of Urbanz before the hostel had properly woken up, packs on our backs and the city still quiet around us as we made our way to the InterCity bus stop. Five hours to Picton. Five hours of watching the South Island scroll past the windows, the flat Canterbury farmland giving way to the rolling hills of Marlborough, the landscape shifting from the broad, open plains we had been walking through to the greener, more intimate country of the northern South Island. We stopped a couple of times, the brief, functional pauses of a long-distance bus where passengers stretch their legs and buy coffee and stare at nothing in particular before climbing back on board. Neither of us slept. There was too much to watch, too much country passing by, and the quiet anticipation of what lay ahead kept the mind turning over even as the body sat still.

Picton arrived in the early afternoon, the small port town sitting at the head of Queen Charlotte Sound, its marina crowded with ferries and water taxis and the various craft that serve a community whose roads are as much water as tarmac. We had less than twenty minutes. The InterCity bus had delivered us with the kind of tight margin that turns a walk to the marina into something closer to a controlled jog, two hikers with full packs weaving through the streets of Picton with the focused urgency of people who knew that missing the last water taxi of the day meant a night in town rather than a night on the trail.

We made it. Just. The water taxi was still at the marina and we managed to book our passage to Ship Cove, the traditional starting point of the Queen Charlotte Track, where Captain Cook had anchored in 1770 and where most hikers begin their journey south through the Marlborough Sounds. But the weather had other ideas. The sound was rough, the wind pushing whitecaps across the water and making the boat pitch and roll as it headed out from the shelter of the marina into the open channel. The skipper assessed the conditions and made the call. Too rough to make it all the way to Ship Cove. He could take us as far as Schoolhouse Bay at Resolution Bay, five kilometres south of the official trailhead, and that would have to do.

It would do. Torrin had already walked the entire Queen Charlotte Track during his North Island and top-of-the-South thru-hike, and Anth was not concerned about missing the first five kilometres. After the sections they had skipped further south, after Deception Gorge and the snow-closed passes and the pivot from southbound to northbound, five kilometres of coastal track was not the kind of gap that troubled the conscience. The water taxi dropped us at the bay and pulled away into the chop, and we stood on the shore with our packs and looked at the bush rising steeply from the water's edge and the track disappearing into it, and felt the familiar, welcome sensation of being back on trail.

Schoolhouse Bay campsite was empty. Just us, the trees, and the sound of the wind in the canopy and the water on the shore. We pitched the tent on the flat ground above the beach, the fly pulled taut against the gusts that found their way through the bush from the open sound beyond. The Marlborough Sounds. A landscape utterly unlike anything we had walked through in the Canterbury high country, the drowned river valleys filled with sea, the ridgelines plunging steeply to the water on both sides, the bush dense and green and lush with the moisture that the sound carried in every breeze. After the tussock and scree and frozen tents of the last week, it felt like arriving in a different country entirely.

And then the wekas appeared. Those bold, brown, flightless birds that patrol New Zealand's backcountry campsites like small, feathered opportunists, utterly without fear and possessed of a curiosity that borders on criminal intent. We had encountered them before, earlier on the trail, and knew what they were capable of. But knowing and preventing are different things. One of them made a direct and purposeful run at Torrin's Birkenstock slides, the camp shoes he wore around the tent when his hiking boots were off, and before he could react the bird had seized one in its beak and was dragging it away across the campsite with the determined waddle of a thief who has committed to the act and sees no reason to hurry. Torrin gave chase, retrieved his footwear from the indignant weka, and placed both slides inside the tent where they could not be stolen by wildlife. The bird watched from a distance, unrepentant, already calculating its next move.

The weather was wet and windy, the rain coming in squalls that swept across the sound and rattled the fly and turned the bush into a dripping, streaming world of green. But standing in the rain at sea level in the Marlborough Sounds, with the tent up and the food hung and the trail stretching south through some of the most beautiful coastal bush in New Zealand, the weather felt like nothing more than weather. We could walk in this. We could camp in this. Unlike the snow that had closed the mountains to the south and ended our southbound journey, this was rain that would make the trail muddy and the views misty and the sleeping bags a little harder to keep dry, but it would not stop us. The Queen Charlotte Track was waiting, and tomorrow we would walk it.Read more