Hike: 21km

We had a great nights sleep in our Ruru (morepork) room and had a hot breakfast to warm our cockles as it was pretty chilly outside. The lake view from Ruru was stunning as the sun rose. We packed up our bags and bikes before boarding the minibus to the start of the Routeburn track. One of the Kinloch Lodge golden retrievers, Samson, rode with us and only gave me half of the three seats. It was just like sharing the back seat with Loki!

At the start of the walk we met Guy and Gilli, two Israelis we'd met on the Otago rail trail. Guy and Gilli had given us the idea of doing the Routeburn Track in half the time and making a loop with the Greenstone or Capels tracks back to the start, rather than just doing the A to B Routheburn and spending a fortune on a 350km transfer. We didn't know whether we'd do the Grrenstone or Capels as the choice was weather dependent (i.e. it depended on how low the clouds were!).

The tramp began by climbing through moss carpeted forest with glimpses of bright blue river water and roack pools below. We crossed over swing bridges and gained enough height to view the tussock covered Routeburn Valley below. We pushed on up and through a higher plain to the source of the Route Burn, Lake Harris, and although the scenerey was enveloped in cloud for much of our passage we could tell that the steep sided cliffs dropping into the lake was spectalular. We mananged to get a few photos although by now the camera was living in the bag to keep it dry! We had lunch in the Harris shelter at 1225m altitude and met up again with Guy and Gilli!

After lunch we turned south-west and there were enough breaks in the weather that we could enjoy and marvel at the mountains around us and the Fjordland scenery. We could see rain sweeping through the vally below but somehow it didn't quite touch us! We met with Guy and Gilli again and descended down through more pretty green, mossy forest to Lake McKenzie and its collection of huts and, for us, an area to pitch the tent. The campsite had pit toilets, a cooking shelter taps and was positioned 10 minutes from the DOC hut with flushing toilets so as to discourage us from making the journey to use the flushers! We got the tent up on the perfectly flat, gravel pitches DOC had created and topped with astro-turf. We cooked at dusk and were just losing light as we ate our dinner. We chatted to Josh from Colorado who was covering very short distances each day but carried an ice axe (!) and then Matt from Brsibane who arrived in the dark on day 8 of his mega-hike from Wanaka to the coast! He was basically making his way across the bush, not always on trails and much more hard core than us! He had a big beard adn was very skinny.

After an awesome day we settled down to a chilly night and the threat of a "low" from everyone we spoke to. Hopefully the forecast would be wrong again....