From four o’clock in the morning, I am woken up every half hour by the crowing of roosters. There don’t seem to be any clocks in Aguas Buenas. It seems to me as if someone is trying to be louder than his neighbor. There must be twenty of them, joining in the song one after the other like a canon. Almost like dogs that have discovered something in the bushes and then rush off one after the other to bark at it. Apart from the initial barker, no one knows what they are actually barking at.

Apart from my wake-up call, I have also been haunted by strange dreams. Dreams that didn’t really take me anywhere. I had an unsolvable problem to overcome. It is often a path that never ends. I get held up. This time it was technical problems that seemed to get more and more complicated the closer I got to the solution. I don’t remember the exact problem, just that I was frustrated because I couldn’t get to the end.

At some point I got fed up and packed my things. Quietly, so as not to wake my tent neighbors, the French woman and the Belgian man, who were hiking Te Araroa in the opposite direction at the same time as I, from their peaceful sleep. I empty my fluids, shove my toothbrush in my mouth and fill my water bottle. As I’m about to set off, I notice the locked gates, but at the same moment the owners’ daughter rushes to help me.

My destination for the lunch break, to escape the burning sun, is a lagoon with a waterfall. Instead of following the main path, I decide to explore an alternative route. With a bit of map study and a few questions to the locals in Aguas Buenas, I find a path that leads me through open country, overgrown with a few bushes, the prickly ones that you don’t like to walk too close to.

Sometimes they block my path and grab at me. On the other side of the hill, I pass a cherry orchard where I can’t resist a taste. A man I talk to briefly later tells me that most of the cherries go to China and Europe and a few straight into my stomach. At the lagoon, I quickly whistle up a few wraps as the restaurant where I wanted to have breakfast wasn’t open, yet.

I take a quick dip in what feels like ice-cold water for my heated body before catching up on an hour of sleep in the shade. As the GPT is not an official trail but is put together by the community, this time I got stuck at a point that is part of the main section of the trail. Someone had had the audacity to simply plant a cherry orchard there, complete with fence. After half an hour of fruitless wandering around in the bushes away from the plantation, I finally decided to turn back and try the other side, which I managed to do straight away. I managed to get back on the marked trail.

In the early morning, my trail companions caught up with me and found me packing, and the three of us set off on the highest point of the GPT so far. As long as we were still below the tree line, we were able to approach the summit at a brisk pace in the shade of the trees. We talked about all sorts of things from Te Araroa and told each other about our families. Yannick and Nolwenn have also been traveling for over a year and plan to travel together for another year.

They only met in their shared flat six months before their trip. They got on so well straight away that they embarked on the adventure together, which originally only Yannick had planned. In the meantime, they have already hiked all over New Zealand together and worked in hotels there to earn some money for their onward journey to Australia and South America. Now they are together (with me) on the GPT.

That day we covered more than 1700 meters in altitude. Probably one of my altitude records in one day. Arriving at the top of the pass, right next to Cerro Zapallo, we were surprised by lush masses of snow. As we were all very hungry, we filled our stomachs with a few wraps and took a nap before venturing down the snowy descent. Yannick had already scouted out where we could best descend without getting our feet wet.

However, we were not spared them, as we had to fight our way for miles through the snow fields. The snow had thawed slightly. We kept sinking in a little, but only until the snow had compacted into a hard surface. Our map did not show us a clear path. As before, we were on our own in this section.

The trail was to be found wherever we put our feet. Our actual destination for the day was the lagoon that stretched out just behind the saddle. It was covered in a thick layer of ice.

Bathing or sleeping was out of the question. Continue walking. As we had no hope of finding a place to sleep at the second lagoon either, there was no need for us to climb any higher to reach it.

Along the ridge, we alternated between crossing a sea of snow and scree. We sank in again and again. The mountains in the distance adorned the already picturesque landscape with its rugged rocks and green valleys covered in conifers.

Our water bottles soaked by the glacier stream, we decided not to go any further but to spend the night at the top of the ridge. We were rewarded with a valley bathed in magical light in the evening and a sunrise in the morning.

The never-ending green of the deciduous trees accompanied us on the rest of the way out of the valley. The scent of the trees caresses our noses. I love the smell of new cars. Soft ground, partly covered with leaves, leads us back to the river, which meanders ever wider through the valley.

Cliffs force us to change banks again and again. Back and forth, up and down, wet feet a constant companion. Wet pants up to the crotch. Each of us already knows exactly what we want to eat in the town, the small village at the end of this stage. I was tempted by the salmon, which wasn’t available at the end.

The plan was to skip one stage due to too much snow. The satellite provides us with new information. We decide to skip other parts and travel much further south by bus. To where stage 12 ends. Where we will hike it northwards.