Fish Hats, Barbed Wire, Gorillas, Cow Shit, and Glitter: 24 Whacked-Out Hours in the Canterbury Plains (May 10-11)

Picture 500 college students in a grassy field on a beautiful blue-bird autumn day, ringed by snow-covered mountains, stepping off of coach buses into piles of cow shit and milling around. Now picture them all in outrageous costumes, ranging from Hawaiian-tourist inspired fish to multiple groups of clergymen to men bearing entire shower rods and curtains atop their backpacks. Now picture them all running, after being counted down by a man in a suit, into said field, seeking paper plates attached to trees to earn points. Picture them sliding through countless barbed wire fences (except for the genius whose costume included a ladder), getting electrocuted by a few of them, avoiding endless cows, and answering riddles such as “what do these cartoon characters have in common?” (using the characters written on the aforementioned paper plates). Picture them running through the night, headlamps bobbing across mountain ranges. Picture them getting chased by fellow college students dressed up like gorillas, hiding behind trees and storming them, all so they could acquire an extra point by way of a team-name-inscribed banana hidden behind the gorillas. 

Picture this continuing through 24 hours, for five of these twelve-point legs, three meals eaten under huge white medical-looking tents, sleeping in tents while a disembodied voice shouting team names and times all throughout the night like something straight out of the Hunger Games. Now picture them all the next morning, sleep-deprived, glitter smeared across their faces, strategizing their next plays while drinking cold instant coffee. 

Welcome to the insane, hilarious, utterly sincere world of Twalk, a University of Canterbury Tramping Club tradition that dates back to the 1960s. Of all the things people told me and my friends to do in this country, this is the one I was most skeptical of, and the one I am most glad we blindly took faith in. 

The week before Twalk, we had neither team name nor costume. While seated in the kitchen of a holiday park during our bikepacking trip and trying to register for the event, I threw out a few names “Bushbashers… Bushwhackers… Bushwaxers! Hey, that's funny!”. We ran with it, registered as a team of six, and promptly forgot about the other steps we needed to take. By Friday night, the evening before the event began, we had no costumes and no ideas. On our way home from a rainy day adventure to the adorable town of Akaroa, Dylan, Elodie, Frances, and I stopped in at the Kiwi equivalent of a Party City and, frankly, went ham. Thirty minutes later we walked out with enough glitter-colored-microplastics to seriously disrupt a food chain or two, incredible orange fish hats, and color-coordinated hula skirts plus fish-eye sunglasses which delighted me in a way few other objects ever have in my life.

The next morning, we gathered our stuff into two giant duffel bags and set off, joining the other 500 students in the parking lot of UC’s Student Association. We scoped the competition and felt pretty good about our work, had our official team portrait taken, and proceeded to spring to get a spot on a bus. Elodie ended up sitting on my lap, and we kiki-ed the entire way to the start line. 

What is this event, you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you what I knew when I arrived. I knew it was a 24 hour orienteering event. I knew that costumes were mandatory. I knew that there would be a wide range of how seriously invested people were in the competition (including within my own team). I thought I knew that the event would be a total party, and that after the first leg, where we were to travel from an undisclosed location to the “Hash House”, aka the large tent where they would serve us food plus the field where we could pitch our tents, we could just hang out and party at the Hash House all night. I had no idea what our goal was. I had no idea what we were looking for. I had no idea who had our compass, or even if we had a compass. I was there for a good time. 

After making our friend Theo–dressed as a very dapper chef as a member of the team “Full Bush”--explain to us the point of this event, we joined the throng of people, and even had a bishop bless us with holy water, who turned out to be one of our field camp professors! New Zealand is a very small place. At around 1pm they let us loose, and people started running across the fields, consulting their maps and gunning for speed and precision. Instantly the seams of our group began to show, with Lucca and Elodie game to run ahead and search for the first “control”, a paper plate with the word “Shrek” on it tied to a tree, while me, Dylan, Frances, and Lily hung back. We flounced around in our skirts. We overheated. We quickly realized we were not that good at looking for clues ourselves, but were very good at dissecting the social signals of other groups to lead us to the controls. We created code words (“shark” or any other predator fish meaning a clue had been found, with the finder shouting “shark in the water!” and the others shouting “we need a lifeguard!” or something to that effect), and we made many jokes about the Hunger Games. 

Before long we were at the very back of the pack, taking our shirts off and slugging water. We were weak. We were slow. Our shoes were covered in mud and poop and glitter, but our spirits were high. We were twalking the twalk. About halfway through leg one, made up of 12 controls, the group split in half, with the fast and spry among us heading up a slope for three clues, and the rest of us heading downvalley to investigate a pine tree stand. I found my first clue, sprinting through the trees screaming “shark!!!!” at the top of my lungs, and eventually we met back up. Our barbed wire fence technique became a well-oiled machine, with one person holding the wires apart while the other chucked their backpack and held their hula skirt in one hand while clambering through. 

We met back up for the final few clues of leg 1, and rolled into the Hash House blasting music, triumphant, already famous for our awesome costumes and dogged determination to wear them all night. Each team had to take a mandatory half-hour off between legs, which for us was more like two hours. During this time we pitched tents, ate dinner, and strategized our plan for leg 2, which involved some serious elevation gains and losses and a lot of planning consideration. We, in classic form, followed none of the plans we made. 

We set out around 7pm into the already-dark and effervescently-moonlit evening, climbing up our first hill to find clue 1. Elodie, who has a famously weak stomach, had a wee episode at this juncture, which of course turned into us mercilessly laughing at her discomfort as she in turn burped and spit up her chili dinner. With that out of the way, we tramped upwards for clue 2, running into the same groups again and again as we leap-frogged around them. 

This portion of the night was both hilarious and extremely beautiful. The second leg basically took the shape of a horseshoe, with the Hash House in the bottom left corner and the “Gorilla Zone” in the bottom right (more on that later). As we worked our way up the left side of the horseshoe, we could see groups ahead of us as they zigzagged their way up the rest of the peaks, and watching those headlamps, like little determined lightning bugs up and down those gorgeous hills, under a glorious full moon, was a sight to behold. Beyond anything else, it was this sight that made me feel part of something much bigger than myself, something both holy and ridiculous, sacred and hilarious, made for people who like to live big and push themselves in the wildest ways possible. I felt honored to be among them, however slow and complaining I was. 

After finding clue 2, and evading other teams about its location, we reached a pivot point, where we would either wind up a very chill-looking road to clue 4, which was located on another peak, or a scrambling route down and then up a gorge to look for clue 3 on the way to 4. After a near-unanimous vote to take the road, we somehow still ended up unnecessarily contouring around a hill above the gorge, jamming our feet in sideways into the tall grass so as not to tumble down a very steep hill. During one of our now-normal backpacking-throwing-over-fence moments, Elodie’s backpack started tumbling down the incredibly steep hill, disappearing into the darkness below. Her beloved Nalgenes, her years of sticker work, her very identity evaporated into the night! It was inconceivable. 

Dylan bravely ran down the slope to start searching, and Elodie and Lucca joined him, hunting in the tufty grass while Lily, Frances, and I struggled to catch our breath from laughing so hard. After a number of valiant minutes of searching, they had found the backpack and both loose Nalgenes. With much rejoicing we continued on, eventually finding the road and each other. At this point, it was around 10pm and we had found exactly two clues in three hours. Our original, lofty goal of making it all the way around the horseshoe, going for all but the craziest peak-bound clues was quickly looking unlikely, and a subset of us decided that clue 4 would be our last for the night. We wound up and up the road, eventually reaching the clue 4 turnoff, which was a straight up climb through sharp, thorny bushes, our hula skirts snagging every other step. I didn’t even make it all the way to the clue, being stuck behind a group of Jandles, before Dylan shouted “shark” and we descended to where Frances and Lily waited. 

At this moment, the fish parted ways, with only the bravest of the brave, strongest of the strong Elodie and Lucca continuing on. The rest of us started our chipper way back to the Hash House, emboldened by the idea of a muffin and a normal night of sleep. We sped our way back down, checked in, snacked, and crawled into our sleeping bags at 1am, faces still covered in glitter, noses cold from the frosty air. 

We woke up at 7, unsure when the gals had returned from their nighttime journey. Dylan turned over and shouted “Dukes? Lodie?” Hearing nothing, we turned over and went back to sleep until 8. At 8, we all started to stir, and caught up in the entryway of our tents, having brought three 2-3 person tents to share among the six of us, rather than our usual 4-person and 3-person set up due to some high winds on the Central Otago Rail Trail. We poked our heads out– fish hats on– and were regaled by the events of the evening, which included a miles-long detour in the wrong direction, demented cows, zero controls found, and a terrifying run-in with the gorillas, who terrorized them both repeatedly, eventually acquiescing so they could secure their one-point banana. Their footage of the event was already famous, and they had made it big with the race organizers for their endless screaming. They’d come back around 5:30, and were remarkably chipper given their circumstances. 

Eventually we packed up and went to eat breakfast, planning our morning based on the chatter we heard around us about Leg 3 being very hard and long, and Leg 4 being comparatively easier. After more dilly-dallying and glitter-applying, including an interlude for now-celebrity Elodie to ride on the back of the ATV being used by the race organizers to patrol the course, we set out with only three hours to spare before the end of the 24 hour timeframe, going for some easy clues along the road we had walked during Leg 1. After some dead cow shenanigans we successfully found controls 1 and 2, then parted ways yet again, for some to run up a hill (the same hill that precipitated a split the day before, in fact) and the others to get back to base. Elodie, Lily, and I practically skipped back to base, blasting music and carrying our friends’ packs for them. Another big moment of gratitude in the sun for how silly and awesome our lives are.

Elodie Grace Griffin-Schmidt: The People's Princess

We made it back around 12:30, with a half hour to spare, and set to packing up camp so we wouldn’t have to sprint to get spots on a bus again. Our valiant warriors returned well within the time limit, and we cheered as the disembodied voice said our team name for the last time. 

At 1:30 or so, after packing up, we sat down for lunch and the awards ceremony, which had been the topic of much discussion given our status as fish, Americans, and, thanks to Elodie and Lucca, in possession of the funniest video of a gorilla interaction plus most scared reaction to said gorillas. With baited breath, we waited while Elodie’s buddy Finn got up to give awards. 

“And this first award goes to the group who was most scared of the gorillas… and who had never had Weet-Bix until this morning… the fish? The bushwhackers? The bushwaxers!”. The crowd went wild. Just kidding, they were silent, but we all started cheering and screaming in a circle, jumping up and down as if we’d won the whole thing. It is something I will miss immensely about this group, our capacity for loud, obnoxious, unbridled joy. After being handed the prize, a gigantic box of Weet-Bix (which I am still staring at sitting on my desk weeks later), still in costume of course, we sat down and listened to the rest of the awards, completely elated. All told, we found 18/60 controls, a far cry from the winners, who had found 57/60 and looked like they had been to the seventh circle and back. 

The aftermath

Shortly after, we hopped onto a bus, all getting to sit together this time, and made our way back to campus. On the way, Tucker called me with news from his engagement party, which really made me reflect on the direction of my life right now, as I sat in my fish costume surrounded by 500 exhausted, overjoyed college students on a bus bouncing across New Zealand farmland, my shoes ratty and disgusting, my legs scratched from fences and thorns, my face covered in glitter and a huge smile. 

Upon our return, Elodie immediately fell deathly ill and the rest of us went about putting our school lives back together the way we do every Sunday evening/Monday morning. Within 24 hours of the end of the race, Lily had created the masterpiece attached below, which really is worth several million words. How grateful I am to be able to relive that wacky weekend forever through Lily’s eyes. Thank you Twalk, thank you fish, thank you New Zealand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWDT4Tt_Em8