She glares at me. “Don’t you dare. My uncle is a good man.”
“The best men I know like to jerk it to porn,” Nick says, and for once I find myself laughing with him, not at him.
The trail starts out easy enough and I find myself relaxing when I see families and old people passing us by, coming from the other way. If they can do it, I can do it.
We cross a swing bridge, then meander beside the Routeburn River for some time, a slice of rushing water that is so unbelievably clear and blue it looks like the waters of Tahiti, a striking contrast against the moss-covered rocks it winds around. The trees are beech and some other weird New Zealand kinds that harbor tiny yellow birds and colorful pigeons. The air is filled with bird-song.
“This is so pretty,” Amber whispers from in front of me. “It makes me want to puke.”
The beauty does make you a little sick. It’s too much and it gets worse the higher we climb. Soon we move through tall beeches flanked with bright green lichen and waist-high ferns, the sunlight dappling through the branches at all the right moments. I take picture after picture, hoping they’ll help me to draw the route later on. I was never one to draw or paint landscapes, but now that I’m here it’s all I can do.
After we make our way past streaming waterfalls and gorges, the climb evens out and we find ourselves in a high valley. Here the river widens, soaking into the tussock plains and stretching out until it hits the surrounding mountains. The sky has turned gray and the mountaintops disappear into the mist, only to reappear minutes later.
Gemma, who is at the front, stops to get water out of her pack and then points to the distance, where the valley and river seem to converge with the mountains.
“See that lip,” she says after a drink of water. “We’ll be staying up there tonight. I booked us a room at the hut.”
Damn. That lip, that little area high between the mountains, is way the fuck up there. We’ve already been walking for hours, or at least it feels that way.
But this is an adventure and there’s no turning back on an adventure. My muscles are not sore yet, so that’s a good sign. We bring out some energy bars and almonds and drink more water before heading forward.
In another couple of hours we’re rewarded with the most epic views over the valley. We’re up even higher than I thought and we can see the river below us, meandering through the tan grass for kilometers and kilometers. Little colored dots slowly move along the river, hikers going to and fro.
Further up, the Routeburn waterfall spills down the mossy banks of the mountains, spraying us in fine mist every time the breeze picks up, and there’s a massive wooden building jutting out of the trees. This is apparently the Routeburn Falls hut, but it’s nothing short of a hotel. There’s a wide deck with people leaning against the railing, steaming mugs in hand, waving at us and admiring the view that won’t stop taking their breath away.
The four of us nearly collapse once we reach it—even Gemma and Nick are sweaty and red-faced. We stagger into the hut and haul our bags through the giant mess hall and over to the bunk beds. It’s just row upon row upon row of bunks, but at least they’re divided into groups of four and have the illusion of privacy, even though there are no doors.
The first thing I want to do is take a shower, but even though there are toilets and running water, there are no showers. I have to make do with my sweat. Tired and “buggered,” as Gemma would say, we decide to cook up our favorite staples—hot dogs—on the stoves in the communal kitchen and break out the bottle of whiskey that I decided to buy before we came. You can’t exactly carry a bunch of beer or wine with you.
We do a few shots, play an old board game, and then it’s time for bed. Even though I’m starting to get sore and I can barely keep my eyes open, I stay up sketching for a couple of hours, hoping to capture all the passing moments before they fade forever.
The last thing I draw is a picture of Gemma as she sleeps in the bottom bunk across from me. While drawing Gemma from memory back in Vancouver felt slightly intrusive (okay, so it didn’t help that she was naked), drawing her asleep with her eyes closed, her face open and vulnerable is . . . necessary. I hope that by the end of the trip I can give her the whole sketchbook, so she knows just what kind of effect she’s had on me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to let her know otherwise.
I’m still too afraid to fall.
Chapter Eleven
GEMMA
If you ask most people from New Zealand what’s on their bucket list, they’ll usually start listing places and activities far, far away from their home country. I mean, driving through the American Southwest in a pale blue convertible was always high on my list, and I finally did it (though the car ended up being more navy than powder blue). But there have been a few other places on my list that are in New Zealand itself.