Stewart Island

After four days of cycling around the Southlands and a brief paddle in Milford Sound, there’d be no let-up with the next three days lined up for hiking on Stewart Island.

Lying off the south coast of New Zealand’s south island, 90% of Stewart Island is a protected national park, 8% is private Maori land, and 2% is occupied by the island’s only town, Oban.

To reach the island, residents and visitors have two options: a 20-minute flight from Invercargill, or a 30-minute coach ride from Invercargill to Bluff, followed by a 60-minute ferry crossing.  The tour operator for our 3 days on the island had made all of the arrangements, not even mentioning the option to fly, so we found our way from Milford Sound to Invercargill (via a very expensive taxi) and then boarded the coach with half a dozen bored-looking locals.

I had assumed we’d be travelling on a smaller version of the Isle-of-Wight ferry, with room for a few vehicles below, but the Bluff to Oban crossing is actually made on a nippy 80-seater catamaran.  Residents wishing to transport a car – or any other cargo – to or from the island must use a separate, privately-operated barge service.

As we have been learning since our arrival in Queenstown, the weather in New Zealand – and especially the south island – has been terrible this summer, and we again saw evidence of this upon arriving in Bluff where we discovered that the earlier catamaran sailings had been cancelled due to rough seas.  Our sailing would go, but the terminal was bustling with delayed passengers.

To say our sailing was rough would be an understatement!  The service runs with three crew members on board: the captain, and two stewards whose job would usually be to serve drinks to passengers.  But for our crossing, they spent almost the entire hour handing out and collecting sick bags!  Kit and I both felt nauseous just 5 minutes into the crossing, taking only small comfort from the stewards’ comments that the first 15 minutes of our journey would be the worst.  Aside from the staff who were obviously well-practiced, anyone attempting to stand during the crossing was immediately thrown to the ground… or onto another passenger’s lap!

Things did flatten out a bit as we approached the half-way point, though of course we were feeling pretty rough by that point, and it was going to take more than some slightly-less-choppy-seas to ease our stomachs!

After checking into our bnb, we had a few minutes to explore Oban.  Considering that it is the only settlement on the island, there’s not an awful lot to see.  There’s a couple of dozen motels and lodges, a visitors’ centre, a souvenir shop and a tiny museum.  So tourists are well catered for, anyway!  For the locals there’s just one small grocery store, a primary school (all secondary-age school children must attend boarding school on the mainland), a cafe, a takeaway and a church.

Three months ago, when first considering this tour, I had briefly spoken to a lady called Furhana who called me from New Zealand after becoming tired of my endless e-mails!  At the time, I had assumed Furhana was just an employee, but upon arriving at the Ruggedy Range office for our pre-tour “briefing”, it was obvious that she is in fact a one-person owner-operator.

Ruggedy Range offer a number of tours in and around Stewart Island.  As well as the three-day Rakiura Great Walk that was our choice (Rakiura is the Maori name for Stewart Island), there are day tours on the island, and boat trips to surrounding islands, especially Ulva, where kiwi and other rare birds are frequently spotted.

The purpose of the evening “briefing” was to make sure that we and Furhana’s other guests for this tour – Helen and John, a couple from Auckland – had everything we would need for three days out in the wilderness.  Throughout the hour-long briefing, Furhana made no attempt to hide her anxiety about the weather.  Several of her recent tours had been cancelled due to heavy rain and strong winds.  She had come close to cancelling our tour as well, but felt we would be okay provided that we were ready for some very bad weather, especially on the final day.

There are only 20kms of roads on Stewart Island, all around the town of Oban.  The rest of the island is accessible only on foot, or by boat.  When the weather is good, guests on Furhana’s multi-day tours carry just their lunch, plus a few other essentials, in a day bag.  Meanwhile, sleeping bags, extra clothes and all of the gear needed to prepare evening meals are shuttled between the huts that provide overnight accommodation for hikers by boat.  When the winds are too strong, however, it is not safe for boats to approach the huts, and in this case, all of the gear needs to be taken on foot.

So expectations were set by Furhana: one day of easy hiking, with a very good chance that we’d see at least a bit of sun, day two when we’d be likely to get very muddy, and a final-day slog in stormy weather with heavy packs on our backs.  As almost all of our 3-month travels were being spent in tropical and sub-tropical regions, we had decided to take a bit of a gamble and not bring much in the way of bad weather gear.  So perhaps our gamble was about to back-fire… although we weren’t about to admit to Furhana that we were ill-equipped for her tour!

As it turned out, our gamble paid off.  Though we did have a few raindrops during each of our three days out walking, we didn’t even need a rain jacket, and the only time we really got cold was when we stopped for lunch.  Even on the final day, Kevin – Furhana’s boat operator – was able to reach us, and so the threat of walking with heavy packs never materialised.

With Furhana’s intense briefing under our belts, and with most of our luggage safely stashed in Oban, we set off the next morning on the short drive to the start of the Great Raikiura Walk at Lee Bay.

Our first day of hiking would cover just 8km of the 32km walk, skirting around the coast in a generally northerly direction, passing Little River and Maori Bay and ending at the Port William hut.

With nearly five hours until Kevin was due to arrive at the Port William jetty with all of our gear, we were able to assume a very leisurely pace, with very frequent pauses for Furhana to introduce us to a new plant or bird, or sometimes explain a bit about the history of the area.  To be honest… it was quite frustrating at times: we were going so slowly and stopping so frequently it felt more like a visit to an art gallery!

Still… it was, of course, very pretty.

Just a few metres down the trail, we passed beneath a giant chain link sculpture. In Polynesian mythology, Māui was a cultural hero of Māori decent.  It is said that the South Island of New Zealand was his boat (Waka) and that Stewart Island was the anchor stone for this.  Hence, an almost identical sculpture to the one that appears here can be found at the other end of the “chain”, in Bluff, where the Stewart Island ferry departs from.

At Little River, we came across a tree swing.  I’m not sure who put it here, as it felt like we were miles away from anywhere, but we put it to good use!

Prior to our arrival, I had assumed that Stewart Island was predator-free, and had therefore been expecting to see a lot of rare and impressive wild-life.  Unfortunately though, stoats, rats, deer and ferrel cats are all found on the island, so sightings of native wildlife are rare.  We did see native birds – tuis, tomtits, fantails, kākāriki (aka the red-crowned parakeet), and grey warblers.  Though occasionally quite curious, these birds all moved very fast, so it was almost impossible to photograph them.

Along with the birds, we did of course see many native plants and trees, most of which we had never heard of.  I will post photos of a couple of these that we have been able to remember the name of!

Four kilometres down the trail, we reached Maori Beach… and lunch.  Between 1860 and 1930, the principal industry on Stewart Island was logging, and a few metres off the trail here are the remains of one of the saw mills.

Furhana timed our arrival at Port William perfectly!  Kevin pulled alongside the jetty with a boatload of provision for our night in the hut just a few minutes after we completed the day’s walk.  My only advice to anyone considering a visit to this part of the world would be to not be stingy with the insect repellent – hanging around on the beach at Port William for just a few minutes attracted a swarm of sand flies… and these guys have very sharp teeth!

Soon after we’d hauled all our gear over to the hut, the throng descended!  A large group of elderly hikers had arrived at Port William the previous day, but decided to stay for an extra night.  On their “day off”, they had left the Great Raikiura Trail, heading up another, less popular trail and finding themselves knee-deep in mud!  So whilst relaxing with coffee and cake, we were suddenly surrounded by a very loud throng of kiwi retirees attempting to clean and dry clothes in a hut that had no hot water, and no electricity!

Furhana and Helen prepared a delicious evening meal of rice and grilled blue cod.  Sushi aside, this was the best fish I have ever tasted!  Of course, it was caught locally just a day or two ago, and blue cod is a specialty of the island.

There are a total of thirteen huts on Stewart Island.  Each has cold running water and “long drop” toilets (use your imagination!).  There are anything between 10 and 26 beds, each with a mattress, but no bedding.  There is no electricity and no gas, so guests bring their own camping stove, along with everything else they need to prepare and serve food.  There are work surfaces to cook on, and tables for eating, drinking and playing cards.  Outside, there are a couple of picnic tables, and – for anyone who doesn’t want to sleep in a room-full of strangers, or for nights when the hut is fully-booked – space for camping.

A night in the hut costs about £15 per person.  During the peak summer period, Furhana will book several beds before even finding guests for her planned tours, because they do fill up.

For our night at Port William, the hut was full, and I was surprised just what a decent night’s sleep I got, given all the snoring and the fact that we were using clothes for pillows.  As there are no blinds, the hut came to life very soon after sunrise, and anyone wishing to get a lie would have needed some very effective ear-plugs!

After a breakfast of porridge and bananas, we packed up our overnight bags and all of the cooking gear, and hauled it back to the jetty, where Kevin soon appeared.  The weather was good, so he’d have no trouble making the 40-minute sailing around the coast and into the Paterson inlet to our next port-of-call, the North Arm hut.

Whilst our first day of hiking had closely followed the coast, day two was a long slog through the lush, inner island forests.  With such unpredictable weather, even in the summer, there is no chance of bush fires on Stewart Island, and although the island was used for commercial logging prior to 1930, the inhospitable environment meant that little progress was made away from the coast.  So, at times, it felt like we we were in another world – many of the trees are very big and very old, and are often covered in mosses and ferns.  Some have fallen, creating surprising and often spectacular natural sculptures.

Perhaps the most common tree on Stewart Island is the rimu.  This tree has a very clever trick to avoid becoming choked by ferns – beneath its bark, the inner “skin” of the tree grows with a series of concentric ridges.  Over time, these ridges push out against the bark, which eventually peels off, taking with it any ferns that had been growing up the tree.  For a short while, the tree is naked before a new layer of bark begins to grow…

Though it is very lush and often very dark, the forest is certainly not dense, and between the widely-spaced trees lies a carpet of Crown Ferns, and Tree Ferns, which look remarkably like bracken growing out of the trunk of a palm tree!

Though Crown and Tree Ferns were by far the largest and most prevalent, we saw many other types of fern, and other interesting plants, though we’ve not been able to remember the names Furhana gave us for many of these.

Although we’d expected a lot worse, we did get a little muddy during our second day of hiking, especially after lunch when we came across some increasingly steep and very wet sections of trail that required long detours through the bush to avoid sinking into shin-deep mud!

After nearly six hours of hiking, we reached the North Arm hut just as we were all ready for a sit down!

The biggest difference between this hut, and the one at Port William, was the arrangement of beds: at Port William, there were several “single” bunks, whereas Long Arm had four long benches with 6 mattresses on each.  So like it or not, you were going to be sleeping next to someone you didn’t know – male or female, young or old, silent or snorer!

The elderly hikers who had spent the night with us at Port William raced ahead of us on the route to North Arm, and so this hut was almost full by the time we finally arrived.  Of course, all of the best sleeping spots were already taken, and we needed to drag one of the picnic tables in from outside to create enough space for us to comfortably sit down and eat.  It was cosy, but very atmospheric, and everyone seemed to be enjoying the comradery of co-existing in such a primitive space.

Enjoying – that is – until everyone was woken up at 5:37 the next morning by an alarm!  As we later discovered, one of the younger couples in the hut that night had set an alarm in preparation for some early-morning kiwi-spotting.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, they woke an hour before the alarm went off, and disappeared off outside without shutting it off!!!  Needless to say, the owners of the alarm were very inconspicuous the next morning!

We were all rather nervous at the prospect of walking 12km with heavy packs on our bags, so it was with some considerable relief that we woke the following morning to dry weather and only lights winds.  Kevin was able to reach the bay, and – in the absence of a jetty – Kit got his feet wet, wading between the beach and the boat with arm-loads of gear.

The final day of hiking was rather more subdued.  Perhaps because the weather was a little colder and a little more damp, but also because we were quite tired.  The landscape was also fairly similar to what we had seen on the previous day, so there was less cause to stop and admire.

Halfway back to Oban, any lingering thoughts that Furhana had been exaggerating the severity of recent weather were buried.  A whole section of the trail had literally washed away, with a detour quickly cobbled together and just the beginnings of what is going to be a pretty major engineering job to restore the original trail.

After five hours of hiking, we reached the outskirts of Oban just as the heavens opened.  More good luck!  Back in Furhana’s office, we re-organised bags as everyone said their goodbyes.  Furhana’s next clients were all ready for their briefing so we bade a hasty retreat to the ferry terminal, only stopping off briefly to buy some sea-sickness pills at the local store!