We heard the glaciers before we saw them.

We’d taken the Mueller Track to see the glaciers and as we sat in the sun enjoying our lunch, we’d stopped talking. Not because anyone asked us to, just because we were enjoying hearing the cracking and booming of the glaciers in the distance as the ice breaks and falls away. We looked at each other. Nobody had a word for it.

Then the cloud lifted.

Seven days of cloud cover, we’d been told by other hikers we met. Seven days and no one had seen the mountain. We’d arrived the evening before into cold rain, trusting it was there somewhere behind all that grey. And now, on the ledge, lunch half-eaten, the clouds peeled back and there it was in front of us, 3,724 metres of mountain filling the sky, white and enormous and completely indifferent to how long we’d been waiting.

That moment is the one we’ll be telling people about. But it wasn’t the only one.

There was the birthday morning – cake and coffee at the first stop, the kind of start that sets a tone. There was Mt Somers, our first summit, climbing through beech forest to a ridge with an aqua lake below that didn’t look real. There was the long climb up the North Temple Trail at Lake Ohau, woods, then water features, then scree slopes, then suddenly open sky and views in every direction, followed by a spa and lake views and a hot shower that felt genuinely earned.

And then there was Aspiring Hut.

Packs loaded with sleeping bags and shared food, we hiked into the valley with steep snow-covered Alps all around and a cold clear river running alongside us and many waterfalls from the melting snow. We passed hikers returning from the hut, carrying not only their backpacks, but skis as well, which reminded us exactly where we were and exactly how far from home.

We arrived at the hut in the late afternoon. Boots off, lined up by the door to dry from the river crossings. Beds set up. A fire. Dinner cooked by our guide while the light faded outside. When the sun went down we went to bed – not because we had to but because there was nothing left to want. We were exactly where we were supposed to be.

Wanaka the next day gave us fish and chips in the sun, then ice cream, then the Crown Range road down into Queenstown. New Zealand delivers its pleasures in layers.

What stays with you from an adventure like this isn’t the list of things we did – though the list is good. The glaciers. The aqua lakes. The overnight hut. The mountain changing from white to pale pink in the evening light. No snakes. It’s something underneath the list that’s hard to pinpoint: the specific feeling of a hard day followed by a warm room, of being cold enough to notice the warmth, of standing somewhere genuinely remote with women who started the trip as strangers.

New Zealand is only across the ditch from home for most of us. It is completely another world. Come and find out for yourself.

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