Superlatives struggle as hard as the walkers on the Milford Track, writes Liz Breslin.
It doesn't book out quite as fast as some high-profile concerts, but the Milford Track has long been considered the rock star of any New Zealand hiking itinerary.
Fourteen-thousand people walk it every year at 40 people a night, in each of the three huts, every night of the season. If you want to get a booking in the short-term, good luck. Before the track opened for the season this year, the independent walker spots were almost fully booked, Christmas and New Year dates among the first to go.
As well as popular holidays, there are natural considerations to be taken into account: when are the alpine daisies likely to be at their finest? Mid-Decemberish, mostly. Apparently. The sandflies in recession? Never. The weather? Oh, just prepare for rain.
We prepare for rain with black plastic sacks inside our packs and an investment in those highly rippable PVC ponchos that retail for a lot less than not-really-waterproof-anyway waterproofs. Other people in our hut group come with different approaches: the backpackers with full Eurocool-tech gear and walking poles, the couple with gumboots and an umbrella to share, the group who just get totally soaked, backpacks and sleeping bags, through and through. But that's on the third night and two days of sunshine is above the expected odds here.
The first day's hike isn't even really that. Five kilometres of clear bush track after a very pleasant boat trip across from Te Anau, with free cups of tea and commentary enough to keep us rushing, cameras out, from one view to the next story and so on across the lake.
The boat trip is shared with the guided walkers, which gives the 11-year-olds among us time to check out their specialness, an obsession that lasts the full length of the track. Walking past the posh hut on the way to ours brings up more speculation.
Still, they're pretty happy with their own lot, on reaching Clinton Hut, having been mostly subjected, in their tramping experiences, to small backcountry huts out of season. So much gas! So much water! So much space! Plumbing-pipe hula hoops to play with on the deck. And the toilets are even OK.
Day two, an upward schlep. Parts of the track are no-dawdle zones, thanks to avalanche issues still in play. But mostly our eyes spur our feet along the way: look, this water, check out that vista, is that a whio?
To describe any of the landforms or the riverscape properly, there would have to be multiple new words for green, pure, clear and epic. Even Blanche Edith Baughan, who called herself a poet, could only come up with ''the finest walk in the world'' as her Spectator article descriptor in 1908, and that only just begins to cover it.
And Blanche is only one of hundreds of thousands that have gone before. And we are in their footsteps, sharing the journey. So our ranger at Mintaro Hut tells us. She says it better, though how, my tired mind can't recall. We've walked 16.5km and our calves know all about the words ''gradual climb''. Our eyes relax into the hues. We dip in the river, laze on the beach and watch as an avalanche winds down the cliff face ahead.
Day three: 14km, steep up, hard over, down in the rain. We don't stick around at Mackinnon's pass, briefly marvel at the joining of the two ways, deny ourselves a tarn swim. The weather is swirling in and we'd like to beat it, quick-time. A diversion down the staff track puts paid to this idea. Less track, more boulder for a mile at least. We know this because we've been stopping to take a photo at every historic mile marker and number 18 is missing from the records. Not even the rainiest of rains could stop us diverting, though, for the fifth-largest waterfall in the world.
We're allowed to leave our backpacks at the posh people's hut, although the water for the tea they've promised us is tepid. But whatever! We're exploring! We lope, we leap and it's so cool when the sign tells us that if the Sutherland Falls were horizontal, this'd be where they start and then the track goes on and on and on and there they are!Adrenalin can only get you so far and it's a long hour after the falls to Dumpling Hut. We hang up wet gear, store our shoes high away from noisy kea. Weka all over the place, too, and eels in the swimming hole, though I only hear about them from the ranger post-dip. He also tells us horror stories about broken ankles and flooded rivers. Keas cry and an 11-year-old rustles all night. We have a deadline for the two o'clock boat the next day. It is not a peaceful sleep.
Day four is watermarked: more rain, more falls, one named after Mackay. So the story goes, he and Sutherland found it out exploring. Mackay won the coin toss for naming rights but the deal was Sutherland got dibs on the next one they found. Next to Mackay's namesake is the craziest rock I've ever seen, it's coolness belied by its name. You can stand inside Bell Rock as if inside a cathedral bell. One of those natural phenomena that feels like ''how can that be?''. A feeling that we're getting used to here.
But there's also evidence of massive human effort. We walk over bags of gravel flown in for track-laying. We see the way cut out, the maintenance, the care. And it rains and rains. We press on, strain to make the boat, looking at watches for the first time in four days. Strange feelings on the final stretch of prison-gang-laid track. Rushing towards and away.
We make it to the 33.5 mile marker with 10 minutes to spare. An 18km day topped off with a boat trip across the sound in the same vessel the Queen graced in the 1950s. She takes us back through mist, sandflied-ankles and royally awesome waters. Back to buses, takeaway coffees. Back to life. But rested and rinsed by this rock star of walks.
