Some of Maggie's friends came up from Dunedin, and so we all got rather merry, and I ended up in bed at around 4am. Luckily I checked my emails just before getting to sleep and found that my tutor wanted to see me at 9.30 in the morning. Awesome.
Being a tad worse for wear, I had an hour long tutorial, followed by trying to get computer stuff sorted as the uni has decided to be as awkward as possible with my uni account, and it still hasn't sorted itself out. After that some us headed into town for a curry, and after Jon and I wandered for a while, and found a second hand clothes store. I bought some office grey trousers and a yellow shirt, good times.
That evening we went out for a bit, but I had to get up early the next day, so no big night out. This must seem pretty boring to anyone reading this, its just my life in chronological order...
Anyhoo, Saturday was the day of tramping. After meeting at 8.30 and leaving around 9.15 we arrived at our destination around 11.30. We then got a choice; either go the river route, the normal route, or the extreme route. Being the hardcore people that we are, Teddy (one of the guys I went with) and I decided to go extreme with around 15 others and 3 of the committee members who would guide us. Totally worth it. It started out with around 400m climb through forest, emerging to see some incredible views (last pic, they imported the wrong way round for some reason). There was sun to our left and rain to our right, and sadly we were going into it.
Donning coats and making our bags waterproof we continued. After a fair while we reached our first peak, around 600m above where we started. We all decided to head up the following three along the ridge before heading down to meet the others. It was interesting to note here how inexperienced/unfit some of the others were. Teddy and I had been in the front group of people the whole time, made up of about 8 or so, and we found ourselves having to wait for the others a number of times.
So, we continued some more (see third pic), and then some more. Then a rainbow came out (see second pic). Very prettyful. Our last two peaks looked fairly easy until we realised that there was no ridges between them, and getting up them meant descending around 150m and climbing another 200m. We were also not following paths, so a lot of this is simply scrambling up scree slopes, and cautiously going down wet, steep mountain sides. All with a big pack on your back.
What felt like a long, long time laster we got to the top of our final mountain. My calves were on fire, and I'm pretty sure most other peoples were too! By this point several people had left the group with an experienced hiker to get off the mountain earlier as they couldn't complete the hike. This had taked us five hours. The next two hours involved an 800m descent through dense forest. As there were no paths, this literally meant finding our way down, and was flipping awkward!
Eventually we arrived at the river that everyone else had walked up, and in half an hour we met everyone else (around 90 more of the tramping club) at the arranged place to camp. The tramp took seven and a half hours total, and was well worth it. Some cous cous and a sandwich later, I was pretty much ready for bet.
After a fairly unrestful nights sleep in a two person tent with three people in it we woke up early and hung around for a while. I'd had to cross the river the day before and my shoes were soaked, and I really wasn't looking forwards to getting into them. Teddy, Brady, Emily and I decided to take the river route back to the coaches which would take us back. This literally meant walking in the river for three hours, so it didn't particularily matter that my shoes were already soaked! A great thing here is that you can drink the water straight from the river as its so pure and clean, saves carrying a load of water at any rate.
The river walk was lovely, and took three hours at a leisurely place with a lot of breaks for sitting and enjoying our surroundings. We arrived back at the coach stop and took the minibus to the main river where we were told that we were going to learn how to cross rivers properly. Before this happened any clothes/electronics had to be remvoed from the pack. After a brief explanation, 5 of us linked arms and forged a fast flowing river which came up to my shoulders. Definitely a very interesting experience! I'm surprised we made it across so quickly, and then back again. Our return journey wasn't quite as graceful as out first with me getting dragged downstream and making our line more of a curve, but make it we did!
After an exhausting trip we got on the bus, and after a few minutes I promptly fell asleep, but not before taking some more pics (see first one). A thoroughly awesome weekend, I can't wait to get away this coming weekend!
Hope you're all well at home,
Rob x
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