Sandflies and Sleepless Nights

We left Schoolhouse Bay in light rain, the kind of soft, persistent drizzle that the Marlborough Sounds seem to produce as a default setting, the bush dripping steadily from every leaf and branch, the trail already wet beneath our feet. The Queen Charlotte Track was a different beast to anything we had walked in the Canterbury high country. Where the tussock and scree of the previous weeks had been open and exposed, this was enclosed, intimate, the trail winding through dense coastal bush along ridgelines that dropped steeply to the sound on both sides, the water visible in glimpses through the canopy, grey-green and restless beneath the low cloud.

The track was well formed and well maintained, a marked contrast to the rough, unformed routes we had been picking through south of Arthur's Pass. There were no hidden creeks beneath the tussock here, no scree fields, no sixty river crossings. Just a clear, graded path through beautiful bush, the kind of walking that lets the mind relax and the eyes wander and the legs remember what it feels like to move without constantly scanning for the next obstacle. It was, after the punishment of the high country, something close to a gift.

We decided to stop in at Furneaux Lodge for lunch. The historic lodge sits at the head of Endeavour Inlet, one of the long, narrow arms of Queen Charlotte Sound, and it offered something that DOC campsites and backcountry huts do not. A restaurant. A bar. Food that someone else had cooked and would serve on an actual plate. We sat down and ate with the quiet pleasure of hikers who had earned every calorie through weeks of trail food and supermarket resupply, and watched the rain through the windows while the warmth of the lodge settled around us like a blanket.

And then the rain set in properly. Not the light drizzle of the morning but heavy, sustained rain that hammered the roof of the lodge and turned the world outside the windows into a streaming, grey curtain of water. We sat and waited, nursing drinks and watching the downpour, hoping it would ease before we had to shoulder our packs and walk back into it. The timing, for once, was kind. Just as we left the lodge, the rain backed off, dropping from heavy to moderate to something manageable, the kind of wet that soaks you slowly rather than all at once.

But the delay had cost us daylight. The long lunch and the wait for the rain to ease had eaten into the afternoon, and the kilometres still remaining to Camp Bay now had to be covered in a shrinking window of light. We pushed on through bush that was streaming with water, every surface running, every gully a small torrent. The streams along the track were raging, the small, polite waterways that in normal conditions trickle across the trail now running fast and brown and swollen with the rainfall that the bush above was funnelling down every drainage line into the sound below. Water ran across the track itself in sheets, turning sections of the well-formed path into shallow streams that we waded through with the resigned familiarity of hikers for whom wet feet had long since ceased to be an event worth noting.

We arrived at Camp Bay campsite right on dark, the last of the daylight draining from the sky as we walked into the clearing, the head torches coming out of our packs for the first time only once we had arrived and needed to set up. Another few minutes on the trail and we would have been walking blind. The campsite had a cooking shelter, a basic roofed structure with open sides that offered protection from the rain if not much else, and we made a decision born of tiredness and the desire to avoid pitching a wet tent in the dark. We would cowboy camp in the shelter, rolling out our sleeping mats and bags on the hard floor beneath the roof and sleeping without the tent's thin walls between us and the night.

It was a decision that the sandflies and mosquitoes of the Marlborough Sounds celebrated with enthusiasm. Torrin barely slept. The open sides of the shelter that kept the rain off did nothing to keep the insects out, and the warm, wet conditions of the Sounds are precisely the climate in which sandflies and mosquitoes thrive. They came in clouds, invisible in the dark but audible in that high, thin whine that is among the most maddening sounds the natural world produces, finding every inch of exposed skin and making sleep an exercise in futility. Torrin lay in his sleeping bag and fought them for hours, the kind of night where consciousness never fully releases its grip because the body is under constant, low-level assault from creatures too small to see and too numerous to defeat.

We checked the forecast in the morning. Rain. For the entire remaining duration of our hike through the Sounds. Every day, more rain, the weather system that had settled over the top of the South Island showing no inclination to move on. The Queen Charlotte Track would be walked in the wet. It was not what we had hoped for, but hope and weather operate on entirely separate systems, and we had learned by now which one to trust.Read more