I was delivered here by mail truck.

“Well I don’t know any sheep farmers but I do have a few friends who run dairies. Would you want to work on a dairy?”, Asked Kent the courier as I mused over the idea of doing volunteer work exchange for accommodation on a sheep farm. We soon reached a cellphone coverage area after passing through another rural town or two (including one that sells “Pete’s Famous Possum Pies”), dropping off mail and packages along Kent’s ~200km west coast mail route. Immediately, he began making calls on my behalf to try to land me a job.

We stopped in at his family home to pick up cans of petrol that needed to be returned to his cousin. He reveled in the unlikely silence of being home; none of his four children were there for the moment. He used a paper phone book from his kitchen counter to grab a few more numbers for me. Unfortunately, no one could be reached since they were all out on their respective farms working. 

His cousin’s whole family was home when we arrived with the petrol and pretty soon, they too were making calls on my behalf to onion farmers and kiwi packers in the north. Nothing quite panned out, at least not immediately.

I was on Kent’s mail truck because earlier that day, I’d been by the Inn at Fox Glacier looking helpless, having missed the bus (and there would not be another for a few days). The Inn manager seemed to be the type who enjoys rescuing the damsel in distress and without trying too hard, I played the part well. He told me we’d grab a coffee and then he’d get me on one of the passing trucks that would surely come through at lunch. He sent me to the store to buy ingredients for apricot-cream cheese muffins and we got to work in the Inn’s pub kitchen baking the paper-lined delights. As we mixed and chopped, he told me stories of crazy Inn guests, including a (Dutch?) guy who punched him in the stomach for supposedly no good reason. We nibbled the muffins over coffees with his band a of Swedish volunteer staff. Mid-bite, he jumped up and sprinted across to the petrol garage to intersect the mail courier who had stopped there. Sure enough, he’d secured me a ride on the mail truck. I waited quietly in the carpark as Kent tagged off packages to another courier from the East who was also carrying a backpacking passenger.

When we reached the town I was to stay in, Kent the courier delivered me (not unlike his other cargo) to the doorstep of a backpacker’s (youth hostel). After frolicking around on the driftwood art-strewn Hokitika beach and making my own small contribution to their gallery-like beach with a poorly constructed driftwood teepee, I discovered that Hokitika has easy access to more hut tramps (overnight hikes where you sleep in a hut). However, the weather was finicky alternating between sunburn territory and sideways rain. So I bought a bus ticket to Nelson on the north tip of the island. For some reason, I promptly felt disappointed to have stepped out of the current that was already taking me in the direction I was going. So I nervously made the decision to miss the bus.

At the tourist information center counter, the lady helpfully explained that while there was a guy who ran shuttles to the trail head area, he was sort of not very friendly, overpriced, and required a minimum of four people per shuttle anyways, but if I would stay in town another night, she’d be happy to listen for people heading that way and give me a call. This was not the news I’d hoped for, and having missed the bus, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I nervously futzed around pretending to look at the map. Fortunately, I soon overheard a lady ask the information gal about Kanaire Lake walks, and this is where I needed to go! I asked the woman if she could please give me a ride. Thankfully, she and her husband obliged. I quickly ran off to the bakery to buy them thank you treats and hopped in their car. Generously, they dropped me all the way down the 5km dirt road to my trailhead, which was a little out of their way and of course they refused petrol money. These people are somebody's grandparents and they weren’t going to leave me alone so far from the trailhead. In fact, they are the grandparents of a three-and-a-half year old girl who recently broke her arm falling from her mommy’s bouncing lap (in case you wanted to know). I bet that mom died of guilt a few times over!

So there I was, in the wilderness at the start of the track. Unlike the other 900 or so hut tramps in New Zealand, this one was created and is maintained by volunteers in the community rather than by the Department of Conservation. As such, the track basically just went straight up the side of the rainforest-covered mountain until a little ways passed the tree line. The track featured near vertical sections of slushy, muddy tree root climbs, which handily required enough concentration to keep my mind off of worrying about what I was doing going into the wilderness by myself.

At the end of the day, the community-run hut was marvelous and I sat there with my toasty fire that I build myself, enjoying my hot chocolate which I heated over my fire and pondered over the question of where I would go if I could go anywhere? Apparently, if I could go anywhere, I would make a series of choices and stumble across a string of lucky breaks that would land me in a little hut on top of a little mountain writing by candleight in my journal about how I got there, having in fact gotten here on foot via somebody’s grandparents, via somebody’s mail truck.

If I could go anywhere in the world, it turns out I’d end up right here. 

And when it would be time to leave, apparently, I would wait out the howling winds that awoke me throughout the night, hike down the trail with my remaining segment of audio book as company and hitch a ride to town in a hippy van, crouching on the floor next to the bed in the back driven by a couple (or maybe it was an “open” relationship?) in their 70’s with hearing aids and hokey, but reassuring wisdom about life being “like a river where you just have to flow with the current” Followed by “You are really doing a good job of staying in that current”. And “I was much older than you when I figured out to live in the current”. Furthermore, I should not pass up the opportunity to mention that the man driving would look the way Dumbledore would look if he were to become a holistic medicine man/dairy farmer with a mullet.