12th hiking day (16.2.)
All three of us – Selma, Timo and me – left the Aparima Hut at about 10am. Pretty late start but only 16 km to hike today ?. So we were looking forward to have an easy day today but it turned out that it took forever to cross the open meadows with grass growing almost as tall as me… Selma and me put our rain pants on at one point since the grass was really hurting our legs ?. Timo decided to keep on walking without his rain pants as he was sure his legs resist the grass more than his light weight rain pants.
As it was really windy today, we actually were glad that most of the trail didn’t go through the forest. We found it unbelievable that the most likely death of an hiker in New Zealand is supposed to be caused by flooded rivers (and the stupidity to try to cross them!) and not by dead trees falling down in bad weather ???.
Nevertheless, the last part of the trail was in the forest. It was really muddy there and it started raining; so we were all glad when we finally reached the Lower Princestor Hut! The hut had 6 beds and so far only 2 Australians were there. This ment plenty of space for us ?.
The 2 Australians drove to the hut which raised our hopes for an easy hike for the next day on a non-muddy, quite straight 4×4 road.
Later, another German hiker joined us. And in the middle of the night, two drunks came all of the sudden in hut, waking everybody up… We had no clue what they wanted and we all were glad when they left again with their car.