;)
One of the many stunning views along the QCTOur three days walking the Queen Charlotte Track were both a wonderful gift and an exercise in masochism. As far as the latter goes, I don’t think we really considered the distances we’d be walking each day or how our legs would respond to those distances after two months of virtually no exercise. (The shocking answer? Not well!) We also never bothered to check an elevation map for the track, and thus had no idea how hilly the hike would be – particularly on Day 2, which conveniently was also the longest day in terms of mileage (16 miles). In the end, we hiked approximately 36 miles over three days: 7 the first, 16 the second, and 13 the last. We started at sea level every day, and hiked up to 1,500 feet (and down and up and down again) numerous times the second and third days. When we finished walking on Day 2, my quads were so cramped that I could barely walk. We were eaten alive by sand flies and mosquitoes. We stayed at budget lodging with creaky twin beds and had to schlep our bags up what felt like the steepest hill in the southern hemisphere. We had our first fight of the trip.
And yet somehow, I think for both of us, it was also three of the best days of our trip so far.
I’m not sure why I loved the QCT so much given all of the challenges it presented. Admittedly, we were blessed with picture-perfect weather and absolutely stunning scenery all three days, which definitely helped. We were also both really ready for a break from the Stray bus shenanigans, something our three days on the track provided at a most opportune time. But more than any of that, I just really loved the walk itself. It was definitely a slog at times, but there was something so refreshing about waking up each day and knowing that our only job that day was to walk. One foot in front of the other. Up hills and down hills. In the searing sun and the cool shade. Just walk.
Most of the time as we walked, we were surrounded by an overwhelming wall of sound. The cicadas, who had recently emerged from their seven-year underground slumber, were almost deafening in some places, while in others, they provided a kind of lulling background hum as we walked along the trail. There were giant fern forests and amazing vistas of the myriad fingers and bays of the Marlborough Sound as we walked. There were brightly colored mushrooms and a beautiful palette of wildflowers. Occasionally there were eccentric signs from the landowners who contributed a portion of their property to the track. And then there was Noeline.
One of the wonderful features of the QCT, unlike the other “Great Walks” in New Zealand, is that there is a range of lodging options along the track. This means that there is no need to make insanely advanced reservations to hike and camp in a track “hut” (unlike the Milford Sound Track, for example, whose limited number of camping huts book up as much as a year in advance). Even better, the boat taxi that dropped us at the northern end of the QCT on Day 1 would then drop our bags at our lodging for the first night, pick them up the next morning, and then drop them at our lodging for the second night and bring them back to Picton for us on the third day. It is by far the most civilized kind of backpacking I’ve ever done.
;)
Noeline and Tuppence on their front deckI had booked a room for our first night at a place called “Noeline’s Homestay.” I didn’t quite realize that the “homestay” part of the name was literal – we were actually staying in someone’s home. That someone turned out to be Noeline, a 79-year-old spitfire who has lived in her house perched high above Punga Cove for 24 years. Noeline and her husband bought the home in 1988, but when he died unexpectedly 18 years ago, she was at a loss about what to do next. She didn’t want to leave their home, but she didn’t know how she could afford to stay. She had long felt that the Marlborough Sound needed a budget backpacker alternative to the fancy resorts that existed at the time, but she wasn’t quite sure she could open up her home to strangers. It took her 18 months to get the courage up to open Noeline’s Homestay,and she’s been open ever since.
Noeline hosts up to 800 guests a year in her home, nine months out of the year. Her guests stay in one of three bedrooms, all with twin beds and family pictures lining the walls. When she’s got a “sell out” night (as she did when we stayed there), she inflates an air mattress and sleeps in her living room. She hardly ever leaves her house during the 9 month homestay season – she does all her bookings by phone and doesn’t want to leave it unattended for fear of missing a booking. When she does go out, she walks down the steep hill to the water, where she gets picked up by the local resort boat taxi, who then drops her at the resort’s car shuttle, which drives her up the hill to the dirt road where her car is parked. She then drives two hours to the nearest town and buys groceries for six to eight weeks at a time. The kids who work at the resort carry her groceries back up the hill to her house for her. (The same hill, incidentally, that Dustin and I had to lug our bags up after collecting them at the jetty where the boat taxi left them.)
Every June, Noeline’s Homestay officially closes three months for the winter season. And what does this 79-year-old widow do then? Stay inside and watch her British soaps? (She loves ‘Coronation Street.’) No, Noeline leaves her little home in the Marlborough Sound and goes out to see the world. She picks a country she hasn’t been to before, buys a Lonely Planet and plane ticket, and just shows up there. No lodging booked. No idea how she’ll get around. She just shows up and lets adventure find her for the next three months. Her last trip took her to Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the year before that, she travelled around Mexico and Cuba, despite losing her bags on the first day of the trip and not getting them back until two months later. (“I just bought a pair of trousers, one blouse, a pair of skivvies, and washed them every day. What else could I do?”)
But despite all of this international adventure and the many interesting guests she hosts in her home every year, it became clear to us as we chatted with Noeline that she’d give it all up in an instant to have her husband back. There were pictures of him all over her home, and I noticed that she still had her wedding ring on, 18 years after losing him.
The morning we left her place, as we were packing up, Dustin and I had our first argument of our trip. It wasn’t a big deal – we just disagreed about what time we needed to leave in order to get our bags down to the jetty in time for the boat taxi pick-up. I don’t think Noeline was even nearby when it happened, and more than likely, she didn’t hear any of our argument at all. But maybe she sensed the tension between us as we were giving her a hug good-bye because her parting words to us, as we were walking down her steep, steep hill to the water, could not have been more prescient. “Be good to each other,” she called to us from her porch, “It’s very precious.” Noeline had not only given two trail-weary travelers a roof over their head for the night, she had shared her life story and some hard-won wisdom with two newlyweds who kind of needed it right then.
That’s why I loved the QCT.