Hike: 21km

We awoke fairly early having slept fantastically. No sand flies, no cold, no wind. Brilliant!

After bringing the fire back to life we had a leisurely breakfast. We were in no hurry to get back to Te Anau - it's not too far and we had all day. We were last to leave and were looking forward to a walk along the river Waiau for most of the day. This was used for part of the river journey in The Fellowship of the Ring.

Unfortunately the walk didn't really go close enough to the river for it to be a feature of the day. Beech forest was the main feature of the day. All day. We got really, really bored and played every single mind game we could think of to keep us entertained. Walking through the same view for about 6 hours is not exactly brilliant fun. By the time we reached the Lake Te Anau flow control gates we were a bit delerious with joy. We sat down and ate our lunch safe in the knowledge that we only had an hours walk back to town.

We were both pretty exhausted by the time we finally reached our hostel. We agreed to have a day off and recover. In hindsight we should have paid the money to get a lift to the control gates and back from Rainbow Reach which would have cut a significant amount of boring walk from the route. Still, we had an amazing time tramping and camping in the snow! The most surprising thing was that I thought my knee would complete give up. It had more or less recovered from the pain after the Routeburn/Greenstone tramps but I thought this would make it worse. Luckily the opposite happened and after considerable pain on the first day my knee seemed to get better if anything!

After a long, overdue shower and a cruise round town checking out the restaurants we went out for a pizza and a bottle of red.