The Routeburn Track in a single day

The Routeburn is one of New Zealand's Great Walks, a 32-kilometre alpine crossing most people take two or three days to complete, sleeping in huts along the way. We did it in one. Thirty-three kilometres, 1.4 vertical kilometres of climbing, ten hours, one very long day.

The track does not loop, so we used a car-relocation service: hand over your keys at one end, and the car is waiting at the other when you finish. We set off at 6:30am in the cold and committed properly, because once you are out there is no reception and no easy way to turn back.

The reward is that the scenery never sits still. Beech forest gives way to a hut perched by a waterfall, then mountain lakes, then high open saddles with panoramas in every direction, then down to a glacier-fed lake where I could not resist a freezing, very brief plunge. By the time the second hut appeared at lunchtime we were ahead of schedule and unreasonably pleased with ourselves.

It is not the right way to do the Routeburn. The right way is to slow down and sleep in the huts. But if you are fit, short on days and a little stubborn, walking it end to end in daylight is a genuinely special thing: you watch a whole mountain range change character around you between breakfast and dinner.

We reached the far car park at 4:30pm, wrecked and grinning. Ten hours of our honeymoon spent walking until our legs gave out, and I would do it again tomorrow.