About an hour ago I was walking from my van to the kitchen here at the campground just outside of Wanaka. A warm gentle breeze gave me a bit of a chill – not the type you get from chilly weather, but the ones you get when all is right.

You see, twenty four hours ago at this time it was a good 12 degrees (22 F) cooler and I got ready to huddle up in my blankets for the coldest evening so far of my stay in New Zealand. Growing up in New England I am used to hearing the phrase “If you don’t like the weather just wait 15 minutes.” I’ve been to many places where the weather can change quickly – I think Washington State comes to mind most. I can remember one day there where it went from rain to sunshine and back to rain about eight times during the day. But I digress. In New Zealand the weather can change quickly as well. As I write this, the wind has picked up considerably. A warning is in effect for tomorrow and they expect winds to reach 140 km (almost 90 mph) What!?! That’s like a category 1 hurricane! Can that be right?

I don’t know why but for some reason I’ve spun my head in circles recently about what I am going to do after all this fun is over. I am starting to feel the weight of my age. I just turned 39 just over a month ago and I feel like I should be in a steady holding pattern by this point and my career should have a clear direction and I should be more settled. Shouldn’t it all be figured out by now? I suppose my father’s recent trip to the hospital – he’s doing much better now – has reminded me how fleeting this all is. Maybe it’s time to stop the playing and get serious.

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The last time I entered a blog post I was about to poise myself once again over my steering wheel heading due South towards Dunedin in the Otago Region. Dunedin (emphasis on the “e” so that you clearly here the word “Eden”) is a charming college town. The place was bustling with students ready to start a new term. The downtown area has its own distinct appearance with an octagon shaped center, around which the city streets spiral. It was too tempting to not want to grab a beer and a bite at one of the establishments within Dunedin’s core. The beer is good in NZ, but the coffee is better. (Both Australia and NZ make great coffee.) So a beer, a bite, and a brew it became. Dunedin also has great museums and I spent the better part of a day exploring the Otago Museum, the Otago Settlers Museum, the NZ Sports Hall of Fame, and Dunedin’s public art gallery, not to mention the historic train station.

After quenching my thirst for culture I headed back out into nature on the next day by doing a lot of beach walks on the Otago Peninsula where I got my first look at sea lions and the fur seals that have slowly returned to the area after being hunted to near extinction in the early 1800s. The European timeline of settlement in the southern part of the South Island can pretty much be summed up like this:

First there were the explorers like Dutchman Abel Tasman and Englishman Captain Cook.

Next there were the sealers.

When the seals had nearly died out the whalers came.

When the whales had nearly died out the gold miners came.

And when the gold was nearly gone the farmers came.

Many of the early European settlers took Maori wives.

Many of today’s South Islanders have Maori blood.

Unlike on the North Island, very few full-blooded Maori remain.

But the Maori language and customs are still very much prevalent.

So there you have it.

All the sea lions and fur seals on the South Island are males. The females live farther south and stay close to their breeding grounds. The males eat about half their body weight each night, and nap on the beach all day. You can stare at them and make noises and they hardly move, but get too close and they are likely to get aggressive. Occasionally they like to “wrastle” with each other in a friendly, but not altogether innocent way. Their behavior is not unlike the boys I have taught at all-boys schools for seven years of my life.

The next day was full of more amazing walks to stunning geological formations along the coast. I had now entered an area called “the Catlins” and besides the jagged coastline, I was privy to an education of the scores of shipwrecks that had occurred over the years. Shipwreck, shipwreck, shipwreck! – and that about sums up the history of the Catlins.

I camped that night at a remote campground in Tawanui and hiked a 24 km loop the next day along a beautiful river, and on logging roads on the return where I saw nor heard another soul.

I hiked to a number of waterfalls the next day and stopped for a late lunch at Slope Point, the southernmost location on the South Island.

The following day I was again amazed by how well the South Islanders have preserved their history when I visited a very good museum in the small town of Riverton. I was able to get a 3-hour hike in on the Kepler Track, one of the nine “Great Walks” in New Zealand. Part of The Lord of the Rings series was filmed here. But then again, part of The Lord of the Rings seems to have been filmed in a lot of the places I have and will visit in NZ. Sometimes I think I recognize a place that was filmed for the trilogy, but then I realize “Nope, that’s just another spectacular NZ view, nothing special, and not actually in any movie.”

After getting a taste of a “Great Walk” I wanted more and was bummed that I didn’t book any of the accommodation along the trail and wouldn’t be able to do the whole thing. But I set out to do part of it again the next day, this time starting before dawn so I could reach the peak of Mt. Luxmore and return before dark, a bit ambitious perhaps, but I could always turn around beforehand at Luxmore Hut if it started to get late.

Well I didn’t turn around at Luxmore Hut. And I didn’t turn around at the top of Mt. Luxmore. To quote from Forrest Gump, “I figured that I had gotten this far, so I might as well keep on going…” I did the entire Kepler Track in one day – 60km (37 miles) and over 1500 meters vertical, starting just before sunrise and walking the last hour in the dark under a perfect Southern Hemisphere sky full of stars (the constellation Orion, albeit upside down, the Southern Cross, and just two stars below the cross: the closest star to our sun – a mere four light years away.) I couldn’t have gotten a better day of weather, particularly for the three-hour exposed section above the tree line.

It was one of the more amazing feelings of accomplishment I have had in my life and I certainly did not intend that morning nor believe that I had it in me to tackle such a feat. Less than halfway through the hike I met a guy going the other way who was also doing the whole thing in one day – I guess that was the moment where I realized I wasn’t so crazy.

Honestly this one day changed the way how I feel about my age. At the first hut, I read newspaper clippings about the annual race that spans the whole track. The second place finisher in the women’s race this year was 45 years old. Hmm… perhaps I have some good years left after all, and there are still many mountains to climb and many paths to be explored.

But I made sure to stretch after I finished the 60km track and felt surprisingly good the next day – even got some more walking in. I booked a cruise for the Milford Sound and stayed the night at a backcountry family-run campground near the Hollyford Track. It started raining in the afternoon and came down at quite a clip for hours on end – two and a half inches in all! (The Milford Sound gets more than twice as much rain per year than the Amazon Rain Forest.) The camp had a wood stove in the common area and sitting in front of it getting warm was probably the highlight of the day.

The next morning I drove through the Homer Tunnel that took twenty years to build, and on to the Milford Sound where I enjoyed my cruise to the mouth of the fiord. The Milford Sound is in fact not a sound at all. Sounds are cut out by rivers. The Milford Sound was shaped by a glacier which makes it a fiord. So there you go.

In the afternoon I hiked part of the Routeburn Track (another of the nine “great walks,”) up to Key Summit with excellent views of the glacially carved valleys and the fast disappearing glaciers at the tops of the surrounding mountains – come to see them now folks, they’ll be gone in a matter of 10 to 20 years.

Last night, as I mentioned, was cold, the campsite forecast posted said it would get down to 2 degrees (36 F). Remember that it is late summer here. Under a heavy weight of blankets, I stayed warm. I have my 0 F sleeping bag that I haven’t needed to pull out yet.

Today I made visits to Queenstown, Arrowtown, and Wanaka.

The wind is whipping around something good tonight. I think I’ll move my car a little further away from the trees to protect myself from any branches that go rogue during the night.

I’ve made some decisions and booked some upcoming treks – The Copland Track and The Abel Tasman Track. My time in New Zealand is half over but more adventure awaits.