Australia Entry #23 - December 25th, 2025 - January 11th, 2026

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New Zealand: A Triumphant Return

To truly appreciate my trip over Christmas to New Zealand, I need to rewind back time to the summer (New Zealand winter) of 2019. Back in 2019 I had the amazing opportunity, expensive as it was, to do an unpaid internship in New Zealand working for KiwiRail. I spent three months in the beautiful country, but didn’t have much time outside of weekends to explroe and appreciate all the natural beauty that the country had to offer. For the last week of the internship, my sister actually flew in and I took time off from the internship to go down to the south island and have a fun trip to see the Milford Sound and Wanaka. One of the things that I really wanted to do, though, was a partial walk of the Routeburn track, one of the few deemed “Great Walks” in New Zealand. Unfortunately, back then I was strapped for money as a college student, couldn’t yet drive, and was in New Zealand during the winter which was peak season for avalanches in the area but not exactly friendly for hiking the section of track that I wanted to.

I didn’t end up hiking the Routeburn Track in 2019, but I vowed that the next time I returned to New Zealand it would be for that hike. Fast forward to December 2025, and I see that there is an extended 4 day weekend over Christmas because Christmas landed on Thursday and I decided to get everything ready for a solo overnight hiking adventure. This hike was definitely the first time I questioned in my hiking experiences whether I was biting off more than I could chew. While I had done overnight camping back at the Three Capes in April, this was the first time I was committed to arry 10 kg on my back to set up a tent out in the wilderness, closer to the glacier at the end of Earnslaw Burn. To add onto that, it rained all day for two days straight (3 days total) of my four day trip, but I moved some things around and tried to make it work from a logistics perspective. I wasn’t going to let weather change my big plans, and so thought it could have been a smoother trip, it was one of fun and adventure and one where I pushed past my own limits. Please enjoy the pictures from the best few days of hiking I have ever been on in my life. I can’t wait to see which future hike ends up topping this one. The $2 santa hat was definitely worth the added fun, so don’t forget to bring some whimsy into your life when you can!

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