Nicky & Cookie

Generally I’m not a fan of flip-floppin’ around on trails, I like to walk in one direction from start to finish, it makes doing my animated maps of the route much easier that way ;) But we have two friends coming out to walk with us for 2 weeks and we want to make sure those weeks are impressive ones so we’ve decided to break our continuous walk south. It’s not like it’s been un-broken so far, we did much shifting around in the North Island to take in or avoid bits of New Zealand we did or didn’t want to see along the official trail.

So the plan is to get a bus from Greymouth all the way down the west coast and over the main divide to meet Ollie & Nico in Queenstown. After steak eating and supermarket shopping we’ll get the bus back part of the way to Makarora, where we’ll throw the boys straight into the deep end by hiking the Gillespie Pass track and then Rabbit Pass track together, resupply at Wanaka via Rasberry Creek bus, then continue on over the Cascade Saddle to Glenorchy. If we have any days spare there’s another route I’d like to do on our way back to Queenstown called the Five Passes, but we’ll see how we get on!

I’m slightly concerned about getting Nicky over Rabbit Pass, the ‘Waterfall Face’ sounds exactly like the sort of thing she wouldn’t like, but I’m hoping the added peer pressure will spear her on, either that or we’ll drug her A-Team stylie and carry her up ;) Only joking, we do have Plan B’s, C’s and D’s if needed.