This warning sign in Te Anau is spot on; keas really are delinquents
The little town of Te Anau is home to the Kepler Track and Fiordland National Park headquarters, and stocking up for the Kepler was pretty easy, as it's one of the more mollycoddled walks in the country, with huge, luxurious huts, gas cookers, plenty of beds and a very high standard of track. I was going to take four days over the walk – about as long as you can take, but I wasn't in a hurry – so I sorted out all my tramping gear, bought what I needed, and, after exploring Te Anau and its various points of interest, I headed up the road to the first DOC campsite I came to – Ten Mile Bush – and camped. I never really got to see Ten Mile Bush because it was dark when I arrived, but when I woke up and saw that it was little more than a normal rest area, I popped up to the next one, Henry Creek, and spent Saturday 28th unwinding and packing in preparation for the walk.
Henry Creek was a divine stop. Te Anau town is on the southernmost tip of Lake Te Anau, and up the eastern side of the lake are quite a few DOC campsites, all primitive, but all situated in beautiful scenery. Crashing out on the lakeside, sunbathing and swimming, reading and sleeping... it's a hard life, and the perfect preparation for a long walk.
Across the lake is Te Anau, the pretty Fiordland town where the round trip of the Kepler Track starts and finishes
The weather was excellent, which surprised me as Fiordland is renowned for its serious rain (Milford Sound, for example, gets between 7m and 9m of rain per year, depending on which book you read, but whatever the figure, that's a hell of a lot of rain), and by the time I had to leave early on Sunday morning for Te Anau, I was about as ready for the tramp as I was going to get.
I'd chosen the 67km Kepler Track as a gentle introduction to real tramping; the Mueller Hut and Ball Shelter were both 'real' tramps, but neither required carrying serious provisions (although we managed to pack a fair bit in for Christmas, of course). The Kepler is one of the eight Great Walks, which are slightly more expensive than other walks (or much more expensive in the case of the Milford and Routeburn) but which are reckoned to be the classic Kiwi walks. Of course, all this is marketing claptrap, and it's a way of focussing tourists on those tracks that DOC has put money into maintaining, but they're all well worth doing in some way.
