A great walk around the Kepler Track

I present to you....

My most recent tramping trip on the Kepler Track!

Day one: Walk to Luxmore Hut from the control gates.

Side trip to Luxmore Cave.

Each visitor needs two sources of light... head torches and iPhones don't exactly cut it!

Day two: BEAUTIFUL weather as we set off on the walk to Iris Burn hut.

On top of the world...can you spot the trampers?

Hello, Lake Te Anau!  View from Mt Luxmore.

The road ahead....

Glorious, glorious mountains.

I love feeling so small when tramping... 

The world is big and beautiful and I'm lucky to see these little corners of it.

Lakes + mountains = awesomeness, like whoa

Once upon a time, I sat with my dad on the top of a mountain in the Adirondacks crying because being up so high scared me.   Imagine all that I would have missed out on if he didn't teach me how to harden up?! Thank you, Dad! I've been hiking around New Zealand's south island for nearly two years and I always wish that he could be here to experience this with me. 

A friend yells, "Come on in, the water's fine!"

Hands down my favorite part of the track.

FIRST KEA SIGHTING!

It looks cute, but it is capable of stealing and/or destroying belongings!

Yes, this is part of the same track!

The sandflies were a little outrageous at Iris Burn hut, so no pictures of the hut... just the valley it sits in.

Passed Moturau hut on day three as we walked from Irish Burn back to the car (30k).  

It's got one helluva view of the lake!  

Kepler was a GREAT track to walk on, but Routeburn is still my fav.  I'll get a chance to tramp up on the north island next week. Yahoooooo!

Kepler Track Part I: Dropping my camera in a bottomless pit of poo

If you were anywhere in Te Anau this past weekend, you probably heard a very loud Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!! being screamed from a long drop on the Kepler Track.  

A friend from the States was visiting New Zealand and we reunited to hike across one of New Zealand's Great Walks.  Mirjam and I met a few years ago through triathlon and crossed the finish line at the same Ironman Lake Placid race.  Clearly, we are two tough chicks and, clearly, we can take on anything. Right?

Our party of four began its first day of a three-day tramping trip.  After a short walk through the bush it was time to take a break, so we stopped at the first shelter for a snack and to use the "bathroom".   But, the sandflies in the toilet were so bad that other people refused to use it.  Wimps.  I wasn't about to let a few tiny bloodsucking insects stop me from doing my business.

So, I walked over to the long drop and opened the door, saw the the flies, and took a step in.  

Now, there wouldn't be a story if I had taken a moment to check my pockets before I walked in.  See, for some reason I thought it was a great idea to put my camera and a muesli bar in the front pocket of my jacket and not pull up the zipper.  But, since checking my pockets isn't part of my usual bathroom protocol I didn't think anything of it.

As I leaned over to inspect the condition of the toilet seat (hey, I have no problem sharing tight quarters with sandflies, but I refused to put my butt on a wet toilet seat) both items on my pocket slid out and bounced off the toilet seat.  One item landed on the floor and the other landed in a pit of poo. 

WHY DIDN'T THE MUESLI BAR LAND IN THE POO?!!!

After I screamed, I tried to think quickly and rationally about the situation.  That's when I emerged from the loo, grabbed the closest long stick and returned to the scene without a word to three other people standing there in utter confusion. 

I shoved a stick roughly the size of the length of my arm into the brown muck and fished around for my camera.  I wasn't too sure how I'd get my camera out with the stick and I wasn't sure what I would do after I got the camera out with the stick...maybe get it to the lake, drop it in the water and rinse it off??  

Truth be told, I was kind of relieved that I couldn't find the camera (the stick didn't reach the bottom of the pit, boy it's deep!); and, I was kind of relieved that the camera didn't float because, in all honesty, it was probably going to require help getting it out and there wasn't much space for two adults to fit in there with at least four arm's length sticks.

I emailed the Department of Conservation in Te Anau when I got back to civilization to let them know what happened (I worried that rubbish would clog something up, mess with bacteria breaking the "matter" down, etc).

Sara: 

Hi, I just wanted to let someone know that I dropped my camera in the toilet at Brod Bay this past weekend... I tried to fish it out with a stick, but... I couldn't find it. 

DOC: 

Hello, thank you for your email. I am very sorry that happened! Thank you for letting us know. The toilets usually only get emptied once a season so I fear your camera may be lost. 

I made sure to reply that I did not want it back!  

Thankfully, I had a backup camera.  I'll post pictures from the other camera later soon!  

The Americans are coming!

I'm just a couple months shy of celebrating two years of living in New Zealand! Time has flown by and there's a lot of work left to do for my PhD.  Lately, I've been prepping to run focus groups with Maori and Pacific Island women, writing a bit here and there in my thesis chapters and gearing up for our website development so that I can run a feasibility study later in 2014.  On the side, I'm revising a manuscript that didn't hack it for a public health journal and working as a research assistant on two projects (measuring length/weight for babies in our Baby Lead Introduction to Solids Study and getting survey materials mailed out for a study on economic shock and resiliency of small New Zealand towns).

It's beautiful days like the one that we had today that make it soooo hard to stay inside and do all the work, though.  I'm hopeful that the weather continues to stay this nice as I'm having my first visitor from the U.S. coming for a visit!!  We'll be tramping on the Kepler track and I could just burst from excitement!

Since it's just about summer time in Dunedin, I'm also hoping for more frequent tramping adventures, which means I'll update the blog a little more regularly.  I'm pretty sure folks would find that more interesting than reading about my recent experience running focus groups with mid-age New Zealand women to get their opinions on our intervention or my days spent stuffing hundreds of survey packets to mail to residents of some small towns in New Zealand. =)