As my mom likes to tell me, inertia is the most powerful force in the universe, and unsurprisingly it took a bit longer than originally planned for me to finally leave Sydney. This was in no small part because I was having a really good time, so no complaints! The van’s mechanical issues turned out to be minor, which was a huge relief. I spent an extra few weeks hanging out with friends diving, hiking, relaxing, and generally avoiding doing anything at all to get ready to leave.

There were a couple of things that needed to be done to the inside of the van and my roommate was incredibly kind and generous with his time, even the morning of his flight to Singapore, to help me with them. Which is great, because simple as they were, they otherwise likely just would not have gotten done (who knew it was so hard to drive screws into metal…? apparently not someone like me who’s never done a real day’s work in his life). He got my sink hooked up to a gray water tank, which turned it from a useless hole in the counter to an actual sink, and he also helped me put a couple of extra d-rings on the wall so that I could hang my surfboard. As you’ll see in the pictures, it looks sweet, even if I never go surfing.

It’s currently the season for giant australian cuttlefish, so I got to dust off my SCUBA skills and go look for them at Shelly Beach. And man, what a spectacle. There was one in particular that my friend, an australian wildlife photographer, said was probably the biggest he’d ever seen. It was pretty impressive watching it cruise around and occasionally flare its tentacles in a display of… something. Crazy that you can have wildlife encounters like that right offshore, right in Sydney!

Speaking of, it’s also whale season right now. They’re migrating from somewhere to somewhere else, and if you stop anywhere with a view of the ocean for more than 5 minutes you’re basically guaranteed to see them. They pass quite close to shore, and when I finally remembered to use my handy binoculars I could get a great view of them breathing, slapping their tails or fins, and diving deep. To cap off the spectacle, one of the days that I was checking out the whales with a friend in Bondi Beach we also saw the biggest pod of dolphins I’ve ever seen, surfing the waves and generally jumping around. What a world!

I also got to do a couple of hikes, and I really enjoyed getting back out strolling in the forest. In retrospect this was very dumb, but I had imagined Australia as basically just a coastline that transitioned immediately to barren desert. As it turns out, there are lots of mountains (or hills) and forests a bit inland, before the desert gradually takes over. A friend and I went for a really nice stroll in the Royal National Park, just to the south of Sydney, and later for a couple of hikes in the Blue Mountains. I had gotten somewhat mixed reviews of the Blue Mountains — they were consistently recommended to me as the best nature thing to do just outside of Sydney, but I was also cautioned a few times that they weren’t really big mountains (especially compared to New Zealand, where I’d just come from) and to temper expectations. Which was great, because I was pleasantly surprised! They’re not, in fact, big mountains, but they’re really beautiful rock formations and river valleys, with lots of lovely forest to walk through.

I eventually did have to leave town though, laziness be damned. My good friends Daniel and Jennifer are coming out on vacation, so I’m meeting them in Brisbane on the 25th. It’s roughly a 10 hour drive from Sydney to Brisbane, so I ended up giving myself about a week and a half to meander up there. The first stop was a place called Seal Rocks, a couple hours north of Sydney, that everyone had recommended for diving. Luckily my friend Matt was going diving up there, so we met up for a dive and good lord it was spectacular. The conditions were impeccable and the area was just stunning — lots of beautiful kelp and seagrass, huge schools of fish, more wobbegong (google them they’re rad) than you could shake a stick at, 5 or 6 turtles cruising around at dusk munching away, and a couple of grey nurse sharks checking us out. And probably lots more I’m forgetting! If you’re getting tired of videos of marine wildlife, well, I’ve got bad news for you buddy…

The camping situation here in Australia is going to take a bit of getting used to. In New Zealand, they have an official self-contained certification that vans can get, and there are officially designated free camping areas in many places for self-contained vans. That system is a bit in flux, but it’s still something. Here, on the other hand, free camping seems to be prohibited pretty much everywhere, so everyone just… does it anyway. Enforcement is quite patchy, and everyone seems to agree that stealth camping is fine as long as you’re respectful. I’m choosing to view this as a positive development — it will be good for my between-the-lines, following-the-rules, navigating-by-apps brain to have to get outside its comfort zone a bit and take things a bit more as they come. But it won’t necessarily be comfortable. A few nights in I haven’t gotten fined yet, so that’s good.

Finally, life in the van. What a dream! It’s been a real steady upgrade from a hatchback and tent, to a small van, to this absolutely palatial Sprinter. The previous owner had converted the van to a camper but hadn’t really lived in it full time, so the building work was done but there were plenty of things to buy and set up, in particular around organizing storage and filling out the kitchen. It’s been fun getting those things sorted over the past few days and feeling like I’m starting to really settle in. The first day or two everything was just all over the place, with no real rhyme or reason, but now everything is all over the place according to a chaotic organizational system that only makes sense in my head. Progress! I even get to have fun with extremely complex DIY projects like taping pieces of non-slip matting to the bottoms of the baskets so I can have some accessible storage that’s not flying all over the place whenever I drive around.

So that’s pretty much where we’re at! I’m trying to keep reasonably active this week – I hiked this morning, am planning to surf tomorrow morning, and then have what’s supposed to be an extremely cool dive through a cave/tunnel thing to a huge fishbowl area full of sharks scheduled for the following day. After that I think I’ll just pick a couple of random spots to spend the remaining two nights, and then it’ll be rendezvous at the Brisbane airport before I know it!

You can check out videos for this post here. There are a ton of them! Apologies for the often crappy quality, I haven’t really figured out how to take good videos on the gopro. But I’ve been looking at a lot of really cool marine animals and I want to share!

P.S. Well, it took a few days from drafting this post to finally getting the photos and videos uploaded and publishing it. I’m currently parked somewhere in Brisbane, in front of one of the many payphones with free (but somewhat slow, though obviously I can’t really complain) WiFi, having just finished uploading photos and still working on the videos. I’m going to try my first night of real stealth camping tonight, finding some quiet residential area and just parking up for the night. In a lot of ways I feel more comfortable about that than the camping I was doing before, blatantly parking overnight in places where it’s prohibited and just counting on the council rangers, as they’re called here, not coming by. Still adjusting…

Surfing the other day was fun, though it’s going to take a while to get in shape and really comfortable in a lineup again. The dive was very cool as well—I was feeling a bit off, having not slept or eaten enough, but the sharks were big, the cave was very fun to go through and covered in beautiful coral and who-knows-what, and it was fun to do a bit more SCUBA again. Now the alarm is set and I’ll be picking up Daniel and Jennifer early tomorrow morning!

It’s been long enough that I wouldn’t expect anyone to remember the closing note of the last post, so I’ll refresh your memory. It ends with a quick paragraph about how I was starting to fall into my usual habits when I live in a place, hanging around the house, not getting out and taking advantage, etc… The closing sentiment is a hopeful one, that I’ll manage to curb those tendencies a bit, get ahead of the process, force myself to get out of the house and exercise and find fun things to do. That did not happen!

It was a very quiet month after that last post. I did the exact opposite of what I’d hoped and settled deeply into the couch, withdrew a bit from the outside world, and felt sorry for myself for not having friends here while consciously being unwilling or unable to do the things I needed to make friends. It wasn’t the best month! But like a phoenix from the ashes, at the end of April… I got COVID. It wasn’t too bad but certainly worse than the first time I’d had it, and I was knocked out for about a week. This was extra frustrating because the internet in our apartment was out, and also because I’d just turned up the van search and had scheduled some test drives, and then had to put that whole process on pause.

But like a phoenix from the ashes… I eventually returned to society. And the past few weeks have been really good. I bought a van! I spent a weekend diving with seals and getting lots of positive social interaction! I went on a couple of dates! (Family – do not ask me about the dates. There’s nothing to tell. No one’s on the path to marriage over here.) I started up therapy again! The van needs a couple of things worked on so I’m taking it in to a mechanic early next week, and in the meantime I’m scrambling to get things lined up before my suddenly-coming-up-quite-soon departure from Sydney. The rough plan is to leave right around the end of May, though things are extremely flexible. Top priority right now is to buy a friggin surfboard!

So, that’s pretty much it. I’m feeling much better than I was last month, and depending how things shake out with freedive classes I’d be happy to stick around Sydney another couple of weeks. Otherwise I’m excited to hit the road, live in my palatial van (I’ll put up some photos eventually, but not today folks), surf a ton, and just… drift. I haven’t been doing much, and therefore haven’t taken many photos, but here’s a random dump of the trip with Sam, the seal weekend, and what I currently look like. Feel free to tell me how incredibly good my choice of head and facial hair is! Videos for this post can be found here. I recommend checking them out this week, there’s some good seal action.

P.S. A quick administrative note: the more astute among you may have noticed that the URL for this page is now aphilabroad.com, and not aphilabroad.wordpress.com. Wow! This is because I finally caved and upgraded to a paid plan so that I had enough storage to continue uploading my astonishing photos for you all. This means a few things. First, if you were seeing ads before, I think you now shouldn’t be? Second, if this somehow screws up your emails or you’re having trouble seeing the blog or something, please let me know so I can personally spend the time to painstakingly problem solve with you on the phone. Third, keep an eye out for my upcoming multi level marketing scheme that I’ll use to pay for this incredibly expensive venture 🙂

It has, somehow, already been a month since I got to Australia. Hard to understand where the time has gone, especially since my days are very unstructured here, but at the same time I have been somewhat busy and kept things moving.

The first major development is that the Moss outpost in Syndey has a set of hair clippers and thus enabled me to continue to pursue a lifetime of bad decisions, in this case shaving my head completely bald. Mike’s woeful comments about how nice my hair is couldn’t stop me, and we ended up doing it family bonding style, with each of Aaron, Ben, and Emily taking a turn to help shear me. Mike, as always, documented the process. Opinions will vary but I have to say, I’m not as disappointed with the results as I perhaps expected to be!

Now that we’ve got the important stuff out of the way we can move on to ancillary issues. I’m all set up as an assistant freediving instructor! So far I’ve helped out with two courses, each with a different school. The experience has been just as exciting and satisfying as I’d hoped. Getting in the water is always nice, but the crux of teaching is the students’ experience. It’s just an unbelievable feeling to see students’ faces lighting up when they achieve something they never thought possible. Even when they’re blocked because of nervousness or sticky ears or something else, they’re grateful for whatever extra attention, listening, or tips you can give them, and so far every student has left with a smile on their face, whether they completeled the certification requirements or not. And as an instructor, that feels amazing! Furthermore, it’s just not a feeling you can get sitting behind a computer. So we’re only two weekends in, but I’m feeling great about this new direction in life. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention that all of the instructors I’ve worked with on the courses have been amazing – supporting me, giving positive feedback, organizing and directing the courses smoothly, etc… I am stoked!

The other big news is that, after a full month of mooching, I finally just moved in to my own apartment (with a roommate). I’m living in a neighborhood called Coogee, in an apartment above a smoothie shop that is a literal stone’s throw from the beach. Pretty much the dream! I’m still settling in, picking up a few essentials, and in fact am writing this post from the laundromat where I’m washing the brand new sheets I just bought. There are one or two minor downsides, in particular that there’s no surf at this beach, but overall I really can’t complain. The Moss clan took excellent care of me but it was a bit tough to settle in feeling that the situation was temporary (more temporary, I suppose, since my entire lifestyle is largely temporary), and also tougher to get out and about from the suburbs. The good news is I didn’t quite wear out my welcome so I’ll still be over to see them all the time, in particular for Sunday dinners, where each week Mike smokes some different meat to perfection. I suppose people would probably like to see pictures of the apartment but frankly I don’t think it’s that interesting and I’m too lazy, so, sorry. Here, at least, is the view from our living room balcony. If you look behind the tangled mess of telephone pole, that’s the beach!

Beyond that I’ve been slowly working to find activities and settle in more. There’s a beach volleyball club that plays directly in front of my apartment, so I’m considering spending the couple of hundred Australian dollars to join and just live the Beach Volleyball Lifestyle. I was able to jump in a game the other day when I picked up the apartment keys and that was quite fun. I also played pickup soccer last week and am playing again tonight, which I’m excited about. That game may be in jeopardy because daylight savings here is this weekend and it may start getting dark too early, but we’ll see what happens. I’ve also played padel a couple more times and my skills are growing in leaps and bounds. It’s quite expensive to book courts, so I’m on the fence about throwing myself fully into the Padel Lifestyle, but it’s certainly tempting.

This weekend I’ll be taking a vacation from my permanent vacation lifestyle and flying up to Cairns to meet up with my friend Sam. We’re going to start our romantic week together with a 3 day, 2 night liveaboard on the great barrier reef, where you sleep on the boat and SCUBA dive 3 times a day, with 2 night dives as well. That should be an incredible experience, especially since the liveaboards have the time to go to some less-visited spots on the outer reef. After that we’ll be heading up to Port Douglas to do some hiking in the Daintree, apparently the oldest rainforest in the world, and maybe more diving. It should be an amazing trip, and it’ll be really good to spend some time with a good friend from home (that’s a not-so-subtle hint to the rest of youse).

So that’s pretty much where things are at. I’m already on the freediving schedule for basically every weekend through the beginning of May at least, and hoping to get in more classes after that. My next moves are going to be looking to buy a surfboard, maybe a bicycle, and a vehicle, likely but not necessarily in that order. Sydney public transit works… well enough, but it’s a large, spread out, and odd-shaped enough city that it’s never fast to get around on the bus. That on top of the fact that I’m often traveling with dive gear gives me some incentive to look for a vehicle sooner rather than later, but in the meantime I may see if a bike helps me get around well enough.

It’s been an interesting and occasionally challenging transition to this phase of the journey. In New Zealand it was very easy to stay busy, basically just picking a long hike to do every single day, and then really savoring the lazy days off. Here, even though I’ve made some considerable progress in setting up my life, I’ve also had a lot of time sitting around without anything specific to do, and struggling to get motivated to do useful or fun or interesting things, as is my wont. That struggle is a big part of what got me to leave a permanent address behind in the first place, but I’m hoping to find a better balance with it here in Sydney, especially since I’ve got lots of time to put into activities and since I know the situation is temporary. Further reports to follow!

31 years in and at least I’ve gotten to understand myself a tiny bit—it’s good I didn’t promise another update from New Zealand, because I’m in Australia now! We’ll get to that at the end of the post, but first I’ll wrap up the end of my time in New Zealand.

I ended up staying a few days around Mt Cook and did two very cool hikes. I also made a friend! Good for me! We ended up hanging out and traveling together for the rest of my time in New Zealand, so that was lovely. After Mt Cook we headed to Arthur’s Pass, just west of Christchurch, for another few hikes, and then spent a few days hanging around Christchurch and the beautiful Banks Peninsula to get everything lined up to sell my van and head to Australia.

And now, everyone’s favorite part: hike descriptions! Videos for this post are here.

Mueller Hut

This is one of the most popular hikes in all of New Zealand, a steep, medium length ascent to a hut with incredible views of Mt Cook (the tallest mountain in New Zealand) and the surrounding mountains. On the way up I ran into two shockingly under-equipped Brazilian brothers, so I got to practice Portuguese on the climb and then gave them some water when we got to the top. It was fairly overcast when we got there, but lingering for a while turned out to be the right move, as the clouds moved off and the views got clearer and clearer.

Ball Hut

After Mueller Hut, my new friend Becca and I hiked to Ball hut. I didn’t have very high expectations for this hike—rather than ascending to a summit, this trail just goes up the valley a few over from the Mt Cook campsite, and I figured the views wouldn’t really be any better. Boy was I wrong!

The beginning of the trail is just on an old logging road, next to a glacier-fed lake. After about 4km things get more interesting. In 2019 a landslide took out a huge chunk of the road, so you have to make your way several hundred meters up the side of the valley and then scramble through a hastily carved trail around the huge gash created by the landslide. From there you cross several more big rock/scree fields from other landslides. Eventually you reach the end of the lake and are walking right along the glacier (but one or two hundred meters above it), and can hear it “working”—cracking and groaning and just doing what glaciers do. The views from this point are tremendous, since this valley has an angle on several huge snow-capped peaks. The hut is a tiny, adorable structure with just 3 beds at the end of the valley. From there you can scramble up to the ridge and get an unbelievable view of the mountains on the other side, and of the 3 glacier-filled valleys that funnel down into the glacier you’ve been walking alongside all day. It’s a really tremendous hike!

Our day at Ball hut turned out to be quite a bit longer and more tiring than expected, so the following day we had a rest, ate some underwhelming but still satisfying food from the cafe, and took a much needed shower. I was debating doing some other hikes around Mt Cook but decided to move on, so we set course for Arthur’s Pass. The drive there was tremendous, going along the bright blue glacier-fed Lake Pukaki and Lake Tekapo. I stopped for a refreshing swim and snapped a handful of photos.

Avalanche Peak

Avalanche peak is, you guessed it, the most popular hike at Arthur’s Pass National Park. It’s a steep climb that ends up with panoramic views, but for whatever reason it didn’t quite grab me (which just goes to show how bonkers all the landscapes in New Zealand are). On the way back to the campground we detoured to Devil’s Punchbowl, a gorgeous 131m (!!!) waterfall on the other side of the valley. Arthur’s Pass is also known for having a fair few resident Kea, the mountain parrot that is only found in New Zealand. They’re beautiful, curious, intelligent, and love tearing up people’s stuff, so I snapped some pictures of them doing their thing on the roof of the hostel while waiting to take a shower.

Bealey Spur

With rain in the weather forecast we decided to move our second hike a bit farther to the dry side of the island. New Zealand’s weather comes from the west, and with a spine of mountains running down the middle of the south island, the general pattern is that the west side is wet and the east side is dry. Arthur’s Pass is right in the center, and the delineation was very clear, with dark clouds to the west and blue skies to the east. The Bealey Spur track was a lovely climb situated a bit east of Arthur’s Pass, and ended up giving us beautiful views on a lovely, clear day, without requiring a herculean effort.

At this point it was time to head to Christchurch to rendezvous with my van’s buyer for him to look it over and make his final decision. That all went well, so then I had a few days to just hang out, clean the van, pack my bags, and get ready to go. We spent a couple of nights around Christchurch before heading out to the Banks peninsula, which was just gorgeous. It’s an oval peninsula with a winding coastline and one huge inlet through the middle, so there are tons of bays everywhere with beautiful clear water and hills rising in between. We went for a lovely hike to Stoney Bay Peak and then spent the night at a gorgeous beach campsite on the more remote northern side of the island. I also ate an absolutely inadvisable amount of fried seafood that night, notably some huge mussels and New Zealand’s rightfully famous blue cod.

And suddenly that was that for New Zealand! My 3 months really flew by and I had just a tremendous time. I was ready to be a bit disappointed in New Zealand, since everyone I’ve ever met had sung its praises, and expectations are a tricky thing. But I’m here to add my voice to that chorus—it’s incredible! The people are friendly, the culture is relaxed, the tourism industry is well developed (for both high end and low end tourism), and the nature is just out of this world. In particular, I found the density of different landscapes just incredible. New Zealand is a very small place (especially if you’ve recently road-tripped around the US), and basically anywhere on the south island two hours of driving can take you through probably three totally different, absolutely magical landscapes. The coasts, the mountains, the glaciers, the TREE FERNS, the flightless birds, the fjords, it just goes on and on. I can’t recommend it highly enough, I really see why people visit and end up staying, and I can’t wait to go back.

But now I’m on to the next adventure, and I am tremendously excited about it! I’m currently doing what I do best and abusing good people’s hospitality, in this case the Moss clan outpost here in Sydney. I remember Mike and Cathy visiting us in Paris almost 25 years ago, and it’s been awesome to get to know them and their whole family here as an adult. They’ve been taking unbelievably good care of me, and it feels great to be surrounded by family (plus some delightfully friendly pets). Mike’s already taken me to a couple of beaches, including a great snorkel spot, and also let me tag along to try playing padel with his Wednesday night group (I’m hooked). I’m stoked to explore the city and to have Josh, Aaron, Ben, and Emily show me what the fun things are for younger people to do as well. Mike’s an inveterate host and an expert documentarian—all these photos are credit to him.

Things are still up in the air, as they always are, but my rough idea is to hang around Sydney for a couple of months to kick off the year here. I should mention that I’m on a working holiday visa, which means I’m allowed to stay in the country for a year, and am authorized to work (though I don’t have to—truly my ideal setup). I’m excited to get back to some ocean activities here and am planning to do a ton of freediving and surfing. I’ve got a couple of connections to freediving instructors here, so the hope is to assistant teach freediving around Sydney for a couple of months, and maybe also eventually get my instructor certification and start teaching courses myself. During that time I’ll familiarize myself with life here and find a vehicle to live in and tour around the country (just can’t get enough!). From there the plan is to buy a surfboard and drive up the coast, camping and surfing along the miles and miles and miles of Aussie coastline, diving the reefs, learning to spearfish, and maybe stopping to tend bar or wait tables someplace if it strikes my fancy. Needless to say, this is a lifestyle I am overwhelmingly excited about.

Alrighty, two weeks later and we’re back, right on time. I’ve covered some ground since the last update – I did a couple more hikes around Glenorchy and Queenstown, then went down to Fiordland for about a week, and now I’m up around Aoraki/Mt Cook, the tallest mountain in New Zealand. Since I know you all come exclusively for the hike descriptions, let’s get into it! Videos for this post can be found here.

McIntosh Loop

The McIntosh Loop is a pretty hefty hike that leaves right outside of Glenorchy. It goes past two huts, one of which was delightfully old and tiny, in stark contrast to the huts on the Routeburn. It starts steeply along a farmer’s fence with hundreds of bleating, spooking sheep, and then loops through alpine meadow to a river crossing and return to the track. As I sweated up the very steep initial section I could see clouds chasing me across the lake. Luckily I made it most of the way to the hut before it started raining, and hung out there for a bit to rest and warm up. Even more luckily, the weather quickly turned, and the rest of the hike was lovely and dry.

Lake Alta & Double Cone

The Lake Alta hike leaves from the Remarkables (the actual name of the mountain range outside of Queenstown, which really is quite dramatic and beautiful) ski area. It’s an easy stroll up to a nice alpine lake. From there, if you’re feeling frisky, you can hit the rocky trail up to a saddle, and then just rock hop up along a ridge to the summit of Double Cone. From there you get views of Queenstown and the lake, as well as a beautiful valley down the other side. The last bit to the summit is a serious semi-rock-climbing scramble, so that got the blood pumping.

At this point it was time to get myself down to Fiordland, which I’d heard so much about. Fiordland is the very southwestern part of the south island, known for, you guessed it, fjords. Fjords are inlets carved by glaciers, so they’re generally narrow with very steep sides and other glacial features (hanging valleys! waterfalls!), and they’re filled with water. They’re beautiful! Another distinguishing characteristic of the Fiordland area is that much of it is covered by temperate rain forest, since the wind blows in off the sea with lots of moisture that dumps on the park as it hits the mountains. Unsurprisingly it looks a lot like the other temperate rain forest I’ve visited on the Olympic peninsula, close to Seattle.

Unfortunately I didn’t get very lucky with the weather in Fiordland. What with it being a rain forest and all, it did rain the first couple of days I was there, and one hike in particular just didn’t really afford the views it otherwise would have. After that it was just way too cold for my current lifestyle, with a couple days of a high around 10 degrees and a low around 3 (that’s 50/36 Fahrenheit). At the height of summer! It was especially galling since the hike reports I’d been reading from the week before all talked about how hot and sunny it was. Speaking of, on to the hikes!

Key Summit & Greenstone Track to McKarrel Pass

This. Hike. Was. Awesome. As I mention in the video I took that day (the one that starts as a selfie), maybe it was just because I slept til 10am and was feeling great, but I had an absolute blast on this hike. The first portion is on the Routeburn track, which avid readers will remember I checked out in Glenorchy. The Routeburn crosses from outside Glenorchy down to Fiordand, so I hiked a bit of each side. One funny thing about that is that the Routeburn track itself is only about 32km long from end to end, but driving from one end to the other is about 300km. Geography! Anyway, after a short stretch on the Routeburn and a climb to the clouded-in viewpoint at Key Summit, I turned off the super highway and onto the Greenstone track.

Suddenly I went from a huge, flat, crowded gravel trail to a single file, occasionally flooded forest walk right along a lake where I didn’t see another soul. I walked along the lake for an hour or two before the trail crossed the huge valley I was in, through marsh and high grass, and then started to climb through the forest on the opposite side. Once I got up to the saddle it was a completely different feel. The whole saddle, and the winding valley down the other side, was a big wetland. The trail was a boardwalk through the marsh that wound its way gently down towards the other side, and it was just gorgeous. It’s hard to describe (or even really understand) why I was so struck by this landscape, but I found it just absolutely enchanting.

Lake Marian

This was the hike that suffered the most from the cloudy and rainy weather. The track is a relatively short, steep climb up to a hanging valley which contains the eponymous lake. Hanging valleys are valleys formed when two glaciers back up to each other (I think). If you imagine a big valley with mountains on either side, and then if you took an ice cream scoop and, about halfway up one of the sides of the valley, you scooped out a big bowl in the mountains, that’s basically what a hanging valley looks like. Search for a picture! I find them just beautiful – the walls of the hanging valley are usually extremely steep, the curvature is beautiful, the striations in the rock from the glaciers are often very prominent, and there’s usually a lake and/or waterfall involved. What’s not to like! In this case, what was not to like was that, after the hike started with relatively good weather, the entire hanging valley contained its own private cloud, which was determinedly raining down… well, rain. So what would’ve been lovely pictures and a slow lunch turned into a quick look around and heading back down. So it goes.

Gertrude Saddle

This was a very cool hike up to a saddle with beautiful views of Milford Sound and the surrounding mountains. It’s a really good viewpoint to see the snaking glacier trail. It also features several sections on steep slabs of rock, and accompanying stark warnings about how if you attempt it in the rain you will surely die. Luckily I did my research and scheduled this for a dry day, and am therefore still alive. There’s even a picture of me in there to prove it.

Piopiotahi / Milford Sound

Milford Sound is one of the biggest attractions in New Zealand. It is, in fact, a fjord and not a sound, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, between the forest and the mountains and the general topology, the fjords are all quite inaccessible. Milford Sound is the only one you can get to by car, on a long drive up the mountains and down the other side which includes the 1.2km long Homer Tunnel. The thing that struck me about the tunnel was that the roof and sides weren’t smooth – they just kind of left them looking like they had after being blasted, I assume. Anyway, I took a 2 hour boat cruise on the sound to see the various peaks, waterfalls, and other beautiful natural features. It was lovely, though obviously very crowded and touristy.

Boyd Creek Tops

The last hike I did in Fiordland was to Boyd Creek Tops. This was a lovely, uncrowded stroll through boggy, mossy forest up to a boggy plateau. It was a gorgeous day and I had a really nice time soaking up some sun, looking at all the different shades of green, and pissing off tiny birds (once again, you can see this in the videos).

So that’s almost all the hiking I’ve done since the last update. I spent a couple of days doing administrative stuff, including lining up a buyer for my van, buying a plane ticket to Australia, getting in touch with family in Australia whose hospitality I’m going to abuse, and swinging back through Wanaka to abuse Victoria and George’s hospitality again (that one’s not administrative, just nice). Today I got to the campsite at Mount Cook Village and went for a nice quick stroll on the Hooker Valley track to Hooker Lake. It’s kind of a hike but really not, and I didn’t get any especially interesting pictures, so it doesn’t make the cut, because I make the rules on this blog! But I’ve got a couple of hikes planned for the next few days that are supposed to be tremendous, so I’m excited about those.

What’s it like living in a van?

I’ve thought about doing a “what’s it been like living in a van” post, talking a bit more about how I spend my days, what I eat, showers/laundry, how it smells in the van, etc… But I just haven’t gotten around to it, and now my van life time is rapidly coming to a close. The summary is that van tourism is a *huge* thing in New Zealand, so there’s a fair bit of infrastructure for it. Many towns have places where you can pay a couple of bucks for a shower, there are free or cheap campsites all over the place, lots of laundromats, etc… Since New Zealand is a country that invests in the public good you can pretty much always find a public toilet and go to a library for WiFi. There are public dump stations for your dirty water and lots of places to fill up on clean drinking water. So it’s really quite easy!

With all the hiking I’ve been doing, I’m generally a big hungry boy. I’ve got a two burner stove in the van (*such* an upgrade from one burner), and most of my meals are a starch in one pot and a big mishmash of veggies and beans in my big pan. So many beans. And lentils. Couscous is a lifesaver because it’s so quick and easy to make, and recently I’ve been treating myself to brown rice, a true luxury time-wise. While that’s cooking I’ll saute up an onion, then add some lentils, then when those are soft I’ll throw in, say, two or three of eggplant, cauliflower, green beans, or zucchini. Finally, once everything’s mostly cooked, I’ll dump in a can of curry or spicy chili bean mix. The whole thing makes what should be about 5 servings, aka 2.5 Phil meals. I’m also eating what friends recently informed me is a dangerous amount of canned tuna, so I’m now transitioning to canned sardines and salmon and mackerel.

That’s one positive aspect of van life – in trying to live cheaply, and with no reliable refrigeration, I’ve mostly been buying fresh vegetables, which keep just fine for a few days sitting in the van. So I’m cooking almost vegan (besides the canned fish and, I dunno, some milk in the canned curry or something) and eating out much less, and between that and the radical uptick in exercise, I feel really good.

There are, of course, some downsides to van life. One is that cooking and, especially, doing the dishes in my tiny (so, so tiny) sink, takes quite a long time. Hence slow blogs! I always think I’ll do one or two things in the evening, and then by the time I’ve made and eaten and cleaned up dinner, it’s already time for bed. It also does, in fact, get quite lonely sometimes. There are plenty of chances for a quick head nod or what’s up to other van travelers at a campsite, but more meaningful interactions are a bit harder to come by, at least if you’re a bit introverted like I am. That’s not to say I’ve been cripplingly lonely this whole time, just that there is also that part of the experience. Otherwise, besides worrying that my friggin wall panels are going to shake loose on a gravel road, I really can’t think of a whole lot of other downsides. It’s great! I’ve really been loving van life, and am excited to try it in a slightly different form again when I get to Australia.

So there you have it, in classic Phil fashion my “summary” of van life turned into more or less a full explanation, and now it’s past my bedtime. I’d promise another update before I leave New Zealand, but I’m not here to lie to you. We’ll just have to see how we go. I’m putting another small collection of miscellaneous photos I like below because, again, I make the rules on this blog, and if I want to post boring photos then that’s how it’s going to be. Videos for this post can be found here.

This past week and a half has been a bit of a “where has the time gone” type of stretch. I spent another couple of days in Wanaka – the bike ride was beautiful, I took a day to rest, did more laundry, and looked into what to do next. Somewhere in there I hiked the Rob Roy glacier track. I’ll be honest, maybe the hikes are just coming too thick and fast these days, but I don’t remember it that well! The pictures I’m now looking through, a bit bewildered, are nice though.

After Wanaka I crossed the Crown Range to Queenstown, a gorgeous (if very slow in my van) drive through the mountains. Queenstown felt very much like a slightly bigger Wanaka. Still a very small resort/vacation town (population 16,000!) set on a beautiful lake with striking mountains all around. Very touristy, full of people visiting, with lots of activities to do. I spent a couple of days doing some restocking and hiked the Ben Lomond trail, which leaves right out of town. My hike was… just ok. I was tired and it was a cloudy, rainy day, so that certainly didn’t help. But the first part of the trail is through an adventure eco-park type thing where you’re walking under ziplines and then are eventually routed through the massive restaurant/gift shop/tram complex. On top of that, the whole thing was very much under construction, which was both ugly and loud. Once you’re past that monstrosity it’s a much more peaceful and beautiful hike, but unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate. I went past the saddle and a bit of the ways up to the summit, but the rain was getting stronger and I was literally walking into a cloud, so I decided that was enough for the day and headed back down. I don’t think I took a single photo. You win some, you lose some.

Next I lined up some hikes in the Glenorchy area. Glenorchy is a village about an hour northwest of Queenstown along Lake Wakatipu. There’s very little here, it mostly just serves as a staging area to get into the wilderness beyond. One of the Great Walks, the Routeburn Track, starts close to here, and it’s a very heavily trafficked area. My first day after getting over here I hiked a portion of the Routeburn, about 15km in to Harris Saddle and Conical Hill (which didn’t seem especially conical to me). It was nice, but for whatever reason I didn’t find the scenery especially striking. I did get to see a top of the line example of one of New Zealand’s famous “wilderness huts”, which are really more like full on hostels if you ask me. This one accommodated 50 people, had flush toilets and gas stoves, and generally seemed pretty deluxe. And that was the “roughing it” option, since there’s also a private company that takes tours of 20+ people along the Routeburn, staying in their lodges with catered meals, showers, alcohol sales, and who knows what else. Deluxe!

Since my Routeburn hike was a solid 9 hours, I had a few smaller hikes planned to break things up a bit before going for the equally hefty Earnslaw Burn track. But the forecast showed rain coming in the next few days and the reviews said Earnslaw Burn was a tricky trail, so I decided to try to seize the good weather and just did back to back 9 hour days of hiking. Earnslaw Burn did in fact turn out to be quite a difficult hike, with the trail in medium shape and lots of short, steep up and down sections. Unlike the Routeburn, though, I found the scenery absolutely stunning. The trail is basically just a straight line out and back through a huge valley, with the payoff being a single mountain covered in a massive glacier, feeding waterfalls that cascade down all over the place. I don’t know if it was the difficulty of the trail, how many fewer people there were, the sheer, overhanging sides of the valley, or the mountain/glacier/waterfall triumvirate, but I enjoyed this hike much more than the Routeburn. It was really stunning.

I was pretty beat after those two long days so I took yesterday and today to just rest up and hang around Glenorchy. I think I’ll go for another long hike in this area tomorrow on the McIntosh Loop, and then the day after likely restock in Queenstown before starting to head around Lake Wakatipu towards Fiorldand and Milford Sound. I’ve also been having fun playing with my new toy and taking some Attempted Artsy Photographs (the clouds are for you Michelle!), so I’ll include some of those below. Videos for this post are here.

Time for another long overdue update. The perils of being too comfortable have struck again, but we’ll get to that. I’ve done so many amazing hikes since the last post that this update will be more of a photo dump with light descriptions, rather than the lovingly crafted hike descriptions of posts past. I’m sure my readership won’t be disappointed by that, as describing every twist and turn of every hike is certainly only interesting to me. Videos for this post (usually one or two per hike) are here.

Alex Knob

The first major attraction I visited after the last post was the Franz Joseph glacier, where there are a few solid hikes to climb up and get a view of the glacier. This was my first taste of a more truly touristy area, with lots of tour buses coming through, and many people taking helicopter rides up to the glacier. Anyway, the first hike I did was Alex Knob, which is a solid climb, but not advised in poor weather, since it climbs up to where the clouds are. Needless to say…

Robert’s Point

I was all ready to just cut my losses after my cloudy Alex Knob experience, but a friend had strongly recommended Robert’s Point so I finally figured I’d give it a try. It was a great recommendation! This was a really cool trail with several swingbridges (including a very long one and a couple quite high ones), cool rocks, and an awesome view.

Fox Glacier

In the next valley over from Franz Joseph glacier is Fox Glacier. Besides the ubiquitous helicopter rides there aren’t so many vertical hikes, but there’s a lake where you can take a lovely walk and get great views of the glacier. I took the opportunity to play around with my new camera, and that night ended up at a beautiful campsite by a river where I took some more photos.

Brewster Glacier and Mount Armstrong

This was one of the absolute best hikes I’ve ever done. It starts with 2 hours of very steep climbing up to one of New Zealand’s famous huts (kind of a similar climb to the ole Mailbox Peak hike, for anyone in Seattle). From there you can take an informal but well-traveled trail that winds around the base of the mountain and leads you to the very foot of the Brewster Glacier, with blue lakes, a sequence of cascading waterfalls, and really cool rocks. You can walk right up to the glacier! You can touch it! You can climb on it! And the whole scene is just stunning.

There’s another trail, also informal but much less well-traveled, which leads from the hut up to the summit of Mount Armstrong. Calling it a trail is, frankly, misleading though. It’s actually just that you can see the summit of Mount Armstrong from the hut, and you just…. walk straight up to it. Calling it walking is, frankly, misleading though. Mount Armstrong is basically just a gigantic rock pile, so it’s more that you freeform scramble your way up these massive rocks to the summit.

I had planned to get to the hut, have a snack, then summit Mount Armstrong, and then come down and see the glacier. Somehow I started toward the summit, followed the cairns that mark the trail, and…. ended up at the glacier. This was no punishment, and after a bit of debate I decided to still head up to the top of the mountain. The only bummer was that it had been perfectly clear all day, but I didn’t get up on top of Mount Armstrong until about 5pm, by which point things were starting to cloud over. The views were still astonishing, but the 360 degree panorama was obscured on and off in various places. Rough life.

Mount Shrimpton

Despite the great name, this is pretty much the only hike I’ve done so far that I wouldn’t recommend. It’s similar to Mount Armstrong in that it’s a very steep official trail up to a point, and then just almost no trail at all where you scramble up to the top. But this scramble was over either long, slippery grass or small, slippery rocks and scree, and there were several different places where it was steep enough that if you started sliding it wasn’t clear that you would stop (before the valley floor, at least). So I spent a bit of this hike fairly scared, and ultimately the view at the top wasn’t quite as spectacular as Armstrong. Though I was also still sore and tired from Armstrong a couple days before, and maybe I’m just getting spoiled.

Wanaka

After all that hiking it was time for a bit of a break, and as luck would have it there was a soft landing spot waiting for me in the hip lake and mountain town of Wanaka. When I resurrected this blog, somewhere in the absolute avalanche of positive messages (HA!) was an email from my uncle George saying that he had some friends in Wanaka and I should look them up when I got there. Inveterate mooch that I am, I opened up lines of communication immediately. And that’s how I find myself kicking back and watching the Australian Open here in George (not my uncle, his friend is also named George) and Victoria’s beautiful house in Wanaka. As my uncle George pointed out, that didn’t take long!

Though I’d never met George and Victoria before they’ve taken me in like an old friend and shown incredible hospitality. These few days have been just the ticket after a month of van life, from the practical (laundry and a shower) to the spiritual (warm and friendly company, interesting conversation, incredible food). Last night I crashed a dinner they hosted for their friends Jane and Charlie, where they made an astonishingly tasty spread (and I don’t just say that because 30% of my recent diet has been canned beans) and Jane gave me tons of recommendations for my next hikes. Today Victoria brought me along to the social tennis meetup at their club where I accidentally played for 4 hours and had an absolute blast. I may not be able to lift my arm tomorrow, but it’ll have been worth it.

Upcoming plans are a bit hazy. I think we’ll all go for a bike ride tomorrow, and then I may start getting back to the hiking life the following day. There are a couple of day hikes around here I’m keen to check out, and then many more sights to see: Queenstown, Glenorchy, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Fiordland, the list goes on and on. I (of course) don’t have much of an itinerary planned out so we’ll just see how we go.

You can see the videos for this post (one or two per hike, usually) here.

Alright, we’re settling back into the familiar rhythm of sitting around not doing a whole lot, but still being too lazy to write a blog post. Truly, this is my sweet spot.

Picking up where we left off, I fled my surfing failure in Westport and spent a couple of nights in the tiny town (more of an intersection, really, I say with nothing but love in my heart) of Karamea, farther north up the coast, on the west side of Kahurangi National Park. The hotel/bar/gathering place in town lets you park your van for the night for $7.00, which, considering you get access to a clean bathroom and a complimentary, unlimited hot shower, is a steal. I had a nice lazy day filled with flat whites, meat pies, and reading, and got ready for a nice hike the next day.

The plan was to check out the Fenian cave loop, then walk the Oparara Valley track up to the Oparara and Moria arches. The walk to the caves was quick and easy, and the caves themselves were pretty neat. I had them almost entirely to myself, and spent a while stooping and scrambling into every crevice I could find. I turned off my headlamp at points to soak in the total darkness, keeping eyes open to feel them straining and straining and failing to pick up a single stray photon. Then closing them, opening them, and truly not being able to tell the difference. A cool feeling! I also stumbled across some more glow worms, which are always delightful.

After the caves I headed north on the Oparara Valley track. This section was a couple of hours of bliss, just a lovely mostly flat walk through gorgeous, deep green forest full of mosses and ferns, where I didn’t cross a single soul.

After a leisurely lunch at the trailhead on the Oparara side I set off to see what there was to see. It turns out the attraction there are the huge limestone arches over the Oparara river, and they are in fact stunning. I spent a while scrambling around the rocks, going up and down the river, getting different views of the arch, and eventually met a group of friendly Kiwis who offered to give me a ride back to my car. So instead of a 4 hour walk back I had a nice swim with them and drove over to check out another cave, which turned out to be the coolest one! It was much larger than the Fenian ones and had one passage in particular that you could explore quite deep. There were signs at the entrance talking about cave spiders, but I was skeptical we’d see any, since the signs said they were reclusive. But lo and behold, keeping an eye out paid dividends, and after I spotted the first one the floodgates opened and we must have ended up coming across 5 or 6. They were definitely pretty creepy! Quite large, lit up in the strange light of our headlamps, invariably staying completely still and often with bright bubbles of condensation on their legs and bodies. I really wish I had some pictures to upload here and creep everyone out, but I was tired at the end of the day and figured this would be a short scramble with nothing worth photographing. Lesson learned!

The next day I went back down to Westport, determined to give surfing another try. Lo and behold, I went out three more times and had a blast! I went to a different spot which is a bay where there’s a perfect riptide that goes up one side, so all you have to do is go over there and it pushes you out to the break. You don’t even have to paddle! My kind of surfing… I had fun playing around with the board I rented, which was shorter than what I’ve used in the past, and even managed to just start getting a little bit of the feeling of how to make quick turns.

So that’s where we’re at. Yesterday I made it down to the (relatively) large metropolis of Greymouth, and today I’m headed for a free camp near Whataroa, where I’ll be close to the hikes I want to do the next few days. I’ll close with a collection of miscellaneous local flavor and a selfie so you know I’m still alive and still ruggedly handsome. Also, I’m going to start including links to google photos albums where you can see the videos I took for the relevant post, since I’d have to pay to upload videos to this site, and I’m not about that life. They’re not necessarily good, but as with everything else on here, enter at the risk of your own boredom. Here are the videos for this post.

All the hiking I’ve done so far has been fun in its own right, but I’ve also specifically been trying to keep up a solid pace to build up fitness for huge day hikes. I got into these kinds of hikes when I was road tripping around the states in my lovely hatchback during the summer of 2019. The first taste I had was the incredible 19 mile Dawson/Pitamakan loop in Glacier National Park, and the crowning achievement was the Cactus to Clouds hike in Palm Springs, with Mount Whitney and an easy stroll up Half Dome also on the list (yes, I’m bragging). For whatever reason I seem to prefer these big day hikes to backpacking, probably because I get a bigger sense of achievement from them while also getting to sleep more comfortably and carry a lighter pack up the mountain.

Mount Owen was my first go at getting back to huge hikes. It’s typically summited as an overnight where you stay in one of New Zealand’s famous backcountry huts, but ain’t nobody got time for that. It’s a big day – my watch clocked it at 17 miles and 7,345 feet of elevation, and it took me 11.5 hours. On top of that it’s a pretty funky trail. Rather than just steadily climbing towards the summit, it starts off extremely steep uphill, then plunges extremely steep downhill, and then levels off for a long ways before getting extremely steep again up to the summit. So you have very steep uphill and downhill in both directions, which really gets the heart rate going. All the hiking beforehand did its job though, and I felt reasonably strong throughout.

The trail itself is absolutely magical, with maybe the most variety I’ve ever come across on a single trail. Passing through different ecotones as you gain elevation is always a cool part of hiking, and this trail did not disappoint. It started with a steep, difficult, bushwhacking ascent up a ridge, which then flattened out into a bit of a meadow. I started at 6:30am so everything was totally socked in and I was just walking through fog.

Very soon after that I got into a beautiful forest, and then quickly hit the steep downhill section. On the way down I passed a couple with big backpacking packs coming “down” from the hut, taking frequent breaks as they sweated up this steep section. If I hadn’t already been glad to have a small pack that certainly would have made me appreciate it. After this forested section things began to flatten out and open up a bit, right as the sun started burning off the clouds. I started to catch glimpses of the limestone peaks all around that I’d eventually be climbing.

Now the really cool sections of the trail began. First was a transition to what kind of felt like an oasis, with more tropical plants on either side and lots of yellow wildflowers everywhere. The ground was covered in the dead leaves of these plants that look so unusual to me, emphasizing how different this section looked. And then suddenly I was just hopping rock to rock, going up a dry riverbed. This continued for a while before things opened up into alpine meadows and I reached the hut. All the while I was getting more and more views of the limestone mountains all around.

From this point it was like a completely different hike. I was above the treeline cruising through alpine meadows with lovely tarns, including one that had an adorable little island in it. The whole time I was looking up at all the peaks around me, wondering which one I was going to end up climbing, and how. The how turned out to be quite the thing – it’s hard to capture in pictures, but the rocks were amazing, glacier-carved limestone that really looked like flowing water. The trail went from a well maintained path to a series of rock cairns where you pretty much had to just pick your way through the rocks, climbing around and hopping over several quite deep crevasses.

Eventually the rock-hopping stopped and it became a very, very steep scramble up to the summit. And man was it worth it! The top was a mostly flat slab of limestone, and it afforded 360 degree views of mountains in every direction. The sun was out, lunch was on, and man, I felt great.

On the way back I immediately took a wrong turn and spent about 20 minutes scrambling around rocks off track. So that was a good start. I eventually got myself reoriented and managed not to lose the trail again. I really enjoyed how things look different when you’re moving in the opposite direction, and took the chance to snap a few more photos. I also took an alternative route for the very last section, which consisted of a very steep, muddy, tree-crossed, poorly formed trail down along a stream through beautiful forest, and then a flat stroll to the end. I was glad to have done that section on the way down rather than up.

So that was Mount Owen, a hell of day. After that I finally made it over to the west coast and spent a couple of nights in Westport. I bought a camera from a store up in Auckland and am waiting for them to ship it to a hostel in Westport, so I figured I’d spend a few days there surfing to mix things up and give my legs a break. Yesterday I went and rented a board and headed out for a disastrous surf session – I couldn’t get out past the break! I knew I was going to be out of shape, but that was enough of a bummer that it put me off a bit. And as it happens a huge swell was coming in today, so I decided to switch the plan up again and head north up the coast, to the other side of Kahurangi National Park. I’m planning on hiking the next two days and then heading back down to Westport once the swell is more manageable, where I’ll get past the break or die trying!

Greetings from Motueka, New Zealand, on this new year’s day 2023. I wanted to write something witty and poignant to mark the resurrection of this blog after a brief six and a half year hiatus, but I’ve felt no real urgency or inspiration (truly the story of my life), and finally decided just getting something down was better than continuing to put it off. I’d say it was a new year’s resolution or some such, but I’m not here to lie to you.

Anyway, I’m back abroad! Right now I’m about a month into a three month stay in New Zealand, living in a van and hiking as much as I can. It’s great. I bought my van, Milly the Mazda, up around Auckland, and then raced down for a lovely ferry ride to the south island. I did a little bit of hiking around the lakes and mountains of Nelson Lakes National Park and then along the beaches of Abel Tasman National Park, mostly sleeping in a parking lot here in Motueka in between. Yesterday I went for my first hike in the mountains of Kahurangi National Park, the Mount Arthur summit. It was a magnificent hike, all clouded in the whole way up, then opening up above the clouds at the summit, and finally sunny all the way down so I could see all the scenery I’d missed during the climb. Everyone on the trail was in a great mood, mostly getting ready to camp out for the new year, and I stopped for a fair few cheerful chats. Scrambling down the beautiful rock outcroppings from the summit I finally felt the giddy, overwhelming feeling of joy and beauty that I’m liable to feel on a really good hike, and that I’ve been hoping to run into in New Zealand. For whatever reason beach hiking doesn’t really do it for me, but from here on out the mountains should only get more dramatic, so I’m looking forward to that.