The Kepler Track: Trouble on Day 0

The worst possible prelude to a 4-day trek

Blissful in Bali > Hospitalized in Sydney

Christmas Eve, 2013, and I’m boarding an airplane that will take me and my boyfriend from Bali back home to Sydney. The good news is that the plane had barely 20 people on it, so we’d have plenty of room to sleep on the overnight flight. The bad news is that the cabin was the temperature of a walk-in freezer, the Santa-hat-wearing flight attendants (in a power move designed to punish us for booking a flight on a holiday) disappeared after takeoff and weren’t seen again until landing and I wasn’t feeling well, digestively speaking.

We were halfway through what we jokingly-not-jokingly named the YOLO vacation. My boyfriend (someday husband) and I had been living in Sydney for a year in order to spend time with his mum, who had been given a terminal cancer diagnosis. Life was heavy, though we were all pretty much pretending that it wasn’t.

Because we were living and working in Sydney, we got a lot of vacation time, and a big, ambitious holiday vacation sounded like just the ticket. The term YOLO (You Only Live Once) was trending, and we laughingly decided to use it to justify booking two international trips that would take us in opposite directions during the Christmas break. First, to Bali (specifically, Ubud) for five days, then back to Sydney for Christmas Day, then off to New Zealand on Boxing Day, specifically complete the Kepler Track, a 60km circular hiking track in New Zealand’s south island that takes between 3-4 days to complete.

Everything about this vacation excited me—the ambition of it, the contrast between what would be a relaxing and hot week in Ubud up against the physical exertion in the cool, rugged New Zealand terrain. I told everyone about it and preened under everyone’s admiration—how adventurous we were! Here was something we could be unabashedly excited about. Here was something we could control.

There was really only one thread to our big plans: my stomach. There’s a big gap between what I want to eat in this life and what my stomach can handle. She is weak. She is fragile. I’d been to Indonesia two times before and had gotten gastro, as Australians like to call it, as if it’s a cute pet or a fun board game, both times. But I’m nothing if not determined, and this time I decided as long as I didn’t buy a milky green drink from a man in a train station who was ladling it out of a bucket, or order a room-temperature bowl of bakso from a lean-to on the street, I’d be just fine.

I got close to making it. As each day of our Bali vacation passed, and I didn’t get sick, I got more and more confident. But then, on the way to the airport, our driver insisted on bringing us to a tourist spot that sold kopi luwak, the famous coffee made from coffee beans excreted from a marsupial. Out of sheer curiosity, we relented. Out of sheer exasperation, we caved to the pressure of a salesperson who insisted we try a coffee flight. I remember sipping the coffee and thinking hmm, this is not very warm.

I made it back to Sydney, and partway through Christmas lunch before my stomach pain became so great that I had to head to the emergency room. To my intense embarrassment, my mother-in-law insisted on coming. Our relationship was like this: she was mostly polite to me, and I was mostly afraid of her. Having her with me when I was at my most vulnerable (and yes, disgusting—gastro isn’t pretty) was horrifying to me, but who was I to protest? I’d ruined her carefully planned Christmas lunch, after all.

After I vomited on the floor at the front desk, I was immediately shown to a room, where I had an IV of pain meds and hydrating fluids going within seconds. The staff, much like the flight attendants on the Christmas Eve flight, were an intriguing mix of annoyed and convivial—the emergency department was empty and while I sensed no one was happy to be working on Christmas, they were also bored, and so we formed a little merry band. The drugs did what they were supposed to, and before long I was taking little ambles with my IV pole out to the lobby to watch TV. As soon as I was able I began apologizing over and over to my mother-in-law, who, to my surprise, wouldn’t hear it. She seemed almost happy to be there, in the hospital with me, making fun of the bad TV and giving me foot rubs and mothering me in a way I hadn’t known from her. I began to feel glad that I was in the hospital, to wish that we could just stay like this. That we could go back to her house and that her warmth toward me, the camaraderie we’d built, would be preserved. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted that from her, how deeply I’d been missing my own mother, who was half a world away.

They discharged me after 6 hours or so, and we drove back to Paddington, armed with a generous bundle of both pain and anti-nausea meds, which had been prescribed by our doctor when she heard we were supposed to be hiking in New Zealand in two day’s time. I was quietly hoping she’d advise against it, but she just gave me more medicine and wished us luck, which struck me as deeply Aussie.

Back at the house, I watched my boyfriend empty out our bathing suits and yoga gear and replace it with camping gear. We hadn’t managed to reserve beds in huts for this hike, so we’d be packing everything in—tent, sleeping bags, food, clothes. My boyfriend took as much weight as he could in his pack (50lbs) but mine still felt impossibly heavy at 25lbs. Was I really going to be able to do this? The pain I had felt earlier was still so real to me—what if I felt that pain again, on the airplane? In a tent? I comforted myself that the pain was going to come back. It’d be there in the morning, and instead of leaving we’d sit in the sunroom before it got too hot and sip cups of very good tea and listen to the cockatoos in the garden.

But I woke up the next morning and the pain was still missing. I mostly felt a combination of hungry and scared (and scared of being hungry), but fear did not seem to me to be a valid excuse for canceling our long-anticipated trip. Down in the kitchen, my mother-in-law was back to being matter-of-fact. We’d better leave, she said. We didn’t want to miss our flight.

What choice did we have? We were the idiots who’d named our vacation YOLO, after all. We said our goodbyes and boarded the plane to Auckland, our packs on our backs.

---

Thank you for reading! I’m taking a short break from writing about farm life to tell you the multi-part story of hiking the Kepler Track, which was one of the most difficult, beautiful, and absurd trips of my life. Next time: Day 1 on the trail, in which I get cold feet and try to escape.