ive just realised that yr off to navigate thorugh prime matagouri country

Prophetic words from my wonderful friend Aroha. She was half right – it was matagouri (think gorse but with longer spikes) country.. but I left the navigation up to Clare as I wanted to get round the course within the time limit – rather than 3 weeks late. Great to see Graham&Myra along too :)

So the Mountain Marathon started off as a UK event – but basically it’s just an orienteering event set in the hills (carrying all your gear). I was woken up at 3am ish by hailstones battering down on my roof, and I pulled my duvet a little closer and wished 06:30 would just pass me by.

It didn’t. Thankfully. I suppose ;) So off to the square where we met everyone and got our funky tags for the event…

These are quite sneaky things really.. the checkpoints have a weird pen like device (no pic sorry) that you hold your magnety thing up to .. it then encodes onto it that you’ve passed that point.. so at the end of the race you can immediately see how many points you’ve got – how quick you were etc..

Anyway.. it was a pretty long day on the Sat. Must scan in the map sometime. No team (and there were some fit ones) finished on time. We were an hour and a half over time.. which wasn’t too bad really – and actually put us in second place (out of 10)..

We did at least have lovely clear skies. Mind you, clear skies at night tend to lead to cold too. In fact my shoes were *kinda* frozen in the morning.. The billy didn’t really work that well..

Clare’s feet were a little smaller than mine and she kindly put hers in and warmed them up to the point I could get mine in (still cold though!). Warmed up pretty quickly once we got moving though :)

Sunday was a lot shorter.. and hardly anyone did the optional extra checkpoints… Everyone was pretty much knackered after Saturdays effort.

So yes, good fun all told. There are a few more events coming up TWALK which I will probably miss this year – and another called the Heights of Winter.. which I will try to get on.

And now – a reward for reading this far… Some Donald Rumsfeld quotes on the
BBC Site. Well well worth a listen to :)

So I’ve always wanted to get to Mueller Hut. It’s a pretty old (well, the first one was built a long time ago – it’s now the 5th Mueller hut) alpine hut situated high above the valley floor with excellent views of Mt. Cook.

The weather was supposed to be pretty dodgy this weekend so initially it was called off – but Warrick had a second look and thought things looked good – so we headed off on Friday evening. Stopping for obligatory fish & chips in Geraldine. Cool chipper.. I even got to write on the walls.

Camped by the shores of Lake Tekapo on Friday night.. and enjoyed a nice bottle of white down by the shore. See tramping doesn’t have to be awful ;)

–Saturday–

Slightly cloudy start to the day – which was perfect really as it’s quite a steep hike up the hill – and you’d fry if the sun was out. Beautiful views out over towards cook and over the Hooker Glacier

Warrick found some time to go swimming in the Sealy Tarns (1300m).. and to admire the view..

Once we got to the hut – we left our bags there and continued up to Mt. Oliver which was Ed Hillarys first major climb. Mind you, we had steps quite a bit of the way and no snow whatsoever, so we may have had an easier time of it. Maybe.

I think one of the things I really love about NZ – and especially about getting out into the hills – is seeing the stars at night. I could be wrong (happens occasionally) but in the Southern Hemisphere we look *into* the plane of the Milky Way – whereas on the Northern Hemisphere (losers ;) you look *out* of it. So we get to see lots more stars and you don’t. So there. Yet another good reason to move down here.

Postcard for the first person to correctly identify the pointers, southern cross and where the south celestial pole is in the picture above)

So yes – thanks to Warrick & Hannah for a really great weekend.

So I’ve really enjoyed this years rogaine series with Steve & Michelle (guest starring, Anna, Amy, Thor and Mike) – really looking forward to next years now… but will definitely make a huge bright head torch first!!

Ummm… so thanks to all the people who sent me good wishes for coming back to Europe… but – it wasn’t exactly true.. It was April 1st.. I’m still quite happy here so no plans at the moment.

If you look carefully (nice one Marcel) at the last post some of the letters are italicised ;)

So, I think I’ve finally decided that it’s time to head back to Europe.. it’s a pretty tough decision after 4 1/2 years in the land of the long white cloud, but I think it’s the right one to make finally. I guess now that I have permanent residence that it doesn’t make toooooo much difference anyway.