Here Comes The Sun (do do do do)

Originally published January 2018.

After our rainy wet and cold experience in Mt. Cook, we decided to go ahead and head to the renowned town of Queenstown, 3 hours south.

Danielle and Lucas got a room in a quaint little bed and breakfast (yanno, married couple things) and Kelly and I found the most beautiful free place to camp along Lake Hayes. I went to sleep after watching my first NZ sunset at 10pm (because all of the other ones I have either been asleep for or it has been raining),

and woke up early to sunny skies at last.

It was already warm enough to ditch our jackets, and it was only 7am. The best sign after you have spent the past couple days wet and cold..

We sipped tea while we peeled apart our sopping wet ball of tent from our torrential downpour escapade in Mt. Cook National Park and spread it as well as our four pairs of sopping wet boots out in the growing patch of sun next to Beep-Boop (our eccentric van, for those of you who haven’t been following along the whole time) to start the drying out process.

Kelly and I did a 2.5 hour walk around Lake Hayes, filled with amazing mountain views, the perfect mixture of silence and good conversation,

and the cutest ropeswing that had us laughing and quite soaked again, but it didn’t matter.

We stopped here and there to pick wild plums, which most of the time are yellow here, and wild cherries, though the cherries were too tart to enjoy. Then we made it back to make lunch, plan a tentative itinerary for the next couple days, and then hit the road to head to another campsite for the night.

We chose the Twelve Mile Delta campsite on Lake Wakatipu which had zero shade, but is a stone’s throw from the lake shore, with a straight shot view of the Remarkables, the famous mountain range in this area.

We lathered up with suncreen, again, and headed out to our second hike of the day, a walk up through the bush along a river gorge, filled with birds chirping and a tropical feel.

There was a 30 ft. face of rock and soil that led to a rock outcropping that would let you see the entire valley, and from below it looked like it would be fairly easy to scale…..so I mean I had to try. It was pretty sketchy, but I hadn’t climbed anything in a while and it looked like a challenge that I could attempt without too much danger, so up I went. I got to the last ten feet after clinging to rock and using the occasional stump sticking out of the rock to help me up, but my better judgement said it was a little too risky to try to get to the top, since these last ten feet would be a free-scale vertical climb, and a slip would mean tumbling down the 20 feet I had already climbed up. So, I turned around, and then realized that going down was going to be a lot harder than coming up, as it always is.

Yikes.

Traction was bad and my brain did that fear thing where primal instinct kicks in, in attempt to preserve life, and I could not make my brain get over the fact that this one part in my climb down was really scary. So I had to sit there for a moment, coaxing myself, and coaxing myself. Just do it, you’ll be fine. It’s not as bad as it looks.

One, two, three. Nope. Okay. One, two, three…………..ugh nope. Come on Em you either go and get down, or you sit here on this steep incline in the middle of the New Zealand bush and feel sorry for yourself because you got over-ambitious and climbed something you shouldn’t have climbed.

Okay fine.

And I went and it was fine. I made it down with only a few scratches, and we went on our way.

Fear is a funny thing; it can be so irrationally paralyzing, and pushing your body through it is definitely not a natural thing, but I think it’s healthy to feel it every once in a while, just to remind you that you quite literally could die at any moment. Keep mortality close, yanno?

We got back covered in sweat and dust, me especially because of my climbing escapade.

Kelly and I threw our swimsuits on and got excited about a quick swim in the lake, which ended up being more of a wade and quick dip because glacier-fed lakes aren’t the warmest.

But it was so refreshing, and getting all of that dust and sunscreen, and being able to scrub our pits is always a great bonus.

We dried off and made the yummiest dinner, red curry with zucchini, or courgettes, as Kiwis call them, and onion, greens, and carrots, topped with dry roasted edamame for protein.

It was so yum.

I mean who says camping food is limited to hot dogs? So many people think you have to ditch nutritious food while traveling on a budget but even in New Zealand, this was under $5 a person and It literally took 15 minutes to throw together on our little camping stove with pre-cooked rice and a bag of curry sauce… so much flavor to satisfy our pallettes cheaply after a long day walking in the sun.

Speaking of that sun that we have been praying and praying for, now that it is here, it has no mercy for our fragile skin that has only recently emerged from our Northern Hemisphere winter.

It is full force from 9am to 9pm, unapologetically scorching your skin with its intensity, leaving you pretty dang crispy by the time you go to bed. We had to crouch down in this tiny spot of shade next to our van just to eat our dinner, and as we assessed our bodies out of the blinding sun,  I think I might have somehow avoided sunburn with the exception of my nose and scalp, but only time will tell.

My eyes have that heavy feeling you get only after a full day spent in the sun, the kind of heavy that makes you want to go to bed at 8:30pm. Which, we did not do, because the sky was fairly clear and we wanted to see if we could stay up late enough to see the Southern Hemisphere stars for the first time, which was ambitious considering it doesn’t get fully dark until around 11:30pm here.

However, the Europeans blasting bass-heavy house music a couple vans down from us didn’t make it too hard to stay up.

I did my nightly stretches as a blazing sun set to our left, emanating colors that looked like fire with pink paint brush whisps dancing their way through it.

And then we waited, and waited, slowly watching the stars come out, each one introducing itself to us for the first time with a humble curtsey, and we soaked up every new addition until they were coming out with such speed and intensity that I couldn’t keep up anymore,  and then my eyes danced excitedly around this new map above me, following the lines and clusters of light over and over again, until I could no longer keep them open, and at some point, they closed and I drifted off into a quiet, peaceful, sun-soaked and star-stricken sleep.

Cheers to the Journey, and may your Spirit always reside in a state of wonder.