Te Araroa Day 89, Lake Tekapo Village to Twizel

Starting km: 2423
Finishing km: 2477
km covered today: 54

As common with many of my long walking days, this one wasn't planned. I set out at 7:15 for The Pines campground, 47km distant. But after a bit of easy walking along the Tekapo Canal I realized that it was 47km from the very farthest end of Tekapo and that I was about 5km closer. That made the walk to Twizel 5km more manageable, so I thought "what the heck," and phoned to reserve a room at a backpackers there.

Other than the scenery and the heat the walk was positively North Island-esque. It was mostly road walking of a sort, though much of this was along the Tekapo Canal and was closed to vehicle traffic (there was a big salmon farm in the canal, which was also a popular fishing spot, presumably for some of the escapees, such as the 50cm fellow I saw jump out of the water.)

The whole day was filled with views of Mount Cook over turquoise bodies of water. It's an impressive mountain and I was certainly familiar with it from every angle.

One of the less positive point of the day was that it was quite hot with few places to get water except for down the long and/or steep lake or canal banks.  This made the apple trees I spotted along the trail even better. Objectively they weren't great eating apples. Quite tart, a big dry and rather tannin-y (they'd probably make good cider) but I thought they were divine and ate eight of them.

Speaking of eating, when I finished my day's stroll through the hot, dry McKenzie basin I arrived in Twizel and cooked myself another monster dinner. 1kg of veggies, 300g of corn chips, and a huge bowl of ice cream that was leftover from the girls' school rowing team staying at the same place (I'm actually a bit surprised by that... If there's anyone who can compete in the eating game with long distance hikers, surely it's growing rowers?)

Anyhow, it's all good fuel for the coming days walks. Doing some extra km today has got me thinking of pushing a bit harder in coming days too and maybe getting to Wanaka a day early.